Dennett was important because his work signalled a sea change in the concerns and methods employed by philosophers of mind. In the years BD (‘before Dennett’), philosophers assumed that their job was to chart the contours of our ordinary thought and talk about the mind. - Aeon
The cultural ideas (what was originally meant by ‘memes’) that are most suited to global dominance crowd out cultural ideas that developed locally and have deep meaning to the communities that created them. - Psyche
Detractors of year-end lists argue that they too frequently reward work that has already been heavily promoted and acclaimed, especially in a category like books, in which an individual can’t evaluate everything released in a year; another common argument is that they privilege known voices and forms over bold experiments. - The Atlantic
"In the early days of GenAI tools, I would share these bullet-point lists of ideas with my team, and it would be met with a similar reaction: Wow! And nothing would happen because the next step is a big and difficult one." - Fast Company
A report this year, from nearly 200 philanthropic leaders, noted that as 20 million households dropped out of giving, from 2010 to 2016, the organizations that have suffered most are community-based groups whose existence depends on small-dollar donors rather than on mega-philanthropists, and those that “provide the backbone of civic life.” - The New York Times
“Everything about the modern Christmas movie is so relentlessly familiar. Even the stars I don’t recognize look somehow inherently recognizable, as if they are all fitted with squinting approximations of famous faces. I’ve found myself charmed by their commitment to the bit.” - The New York Times
“Grande and Erivo have been praised for their performances onscreen, but they have also been performing in a parallel show, making viral magic on the press tour.” - The New York Times
Why? Because the reasoning era is here. The basic difference: “Language models learn a grammar, perhaps even something about the world, while reasoning models aim to use that grammar.” - The Atlantic
Consider The Amazing Digital Circus, which used to be a satirical indie web series - and is now, thanks to legions of fans churning out absolute mountains of content, a Netflix show. (Then there’s the Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef.) - NPR
Brain rot is marked by a “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” - The Atlantic
Play is something that predates humans. It’s fundamental to how animals engage in and understand the world. It’s how we test and figure out the rules of our environment, how social relationships work. - LA Review of Books
As a child, I felt lucky to be born in 1960. I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my life in the magical new century. By the time I was a teenager, however, the spell had broken. The once-enticing future morphed into a place of pollution, overcrowding, and ugliness. - Works in Progress
Background music for commercials, once the domain of human composers, can now be generated by AI in minutes, meeting technical and emotional requirements at a fraction of the cost. Why would a business pay a premium for human creators if AI can deliver similar or better metrics? - Shelly Palmer
With a crazed sense of humor and geysers of gore, these works demand recognition of simple and obvious facts: that looks aren’t everything and that everyone is going to die. Some will even be lucky enough to grow old. Why keep torturing ourselves to deny the truth? - Washington Post (MSN)
Today that anger has festered to the point that we are losing sight of the real enemies of human vitality and imagination. Instead of satire, which aims at improvement, we have snark, derived from the old Low German word snarky, meaning bad-tempered. - Hedgehog Review
