To create a new story, your child would begin by speaking, “Alexa, make a story,” and then following several prompts. The AI then generates an illustrated five-to-ten-line narrative — including animations, sound effects and music — built around their answers. - Engadget
“Most of the interesting things in the human experience need friction,” Honoré explained, and they benefit from a slower approach: cooking, creativity, thoughtful work, meaningful conversations, relationships. “Digital optimization just leads to a superficial way of being.” - The Walrus
During the past two centuries, educators, psychologists, toy companies and parents like us have acted, implicitly or otherwise, as if the purpose of play is to optimise children for adulthood. - The Guardian
The mystique of the too-quiet room, if construed by outsiders, has perhaps been bolstered by the company’s website, which advertises an experience called “The Orfield Challenge,” whereby, for $600 an hour, a person can attempt to set a new “record” for time spent in the chamber. - The New York Times
The company says it plans to invest $1 billion a year in movies to be released in theatres - that's 12-15 theatrical releases a year, far outstripping Netflix's plans for cinemas. - Seattle Times (Bloomberg)
Gmail keeps asking for money, and you start deleting ... everything. "I felt a sudden sense of mourning that I still have not gotten over. And yet, to my surprise, I felt something else alongside it: a conflicting sense of relief and even levity." - The Atlantic
It’s not impossible to make your argument stick. And there’s been some good scientific work on this. Here are two strategies that, based on the evidence, seem promising. - Vox
As one gets older and realizes that most of life’s good stuff is contained between two ledger entries, one sees that if it weren’t for dreams, for stories and for art, for inventing personas and writing books through their hands and eyes, life would be insufferable. - 3 Quarks Daily
Yotta (24 zeroes) was the largest prefix in the metric system before the new additions. Now, the Earth's mass can be said to be about 6 ronnagrams rather than 6,000 yottagrams. The sun can be said to be about 2,000 quettagrams rather than 2,000,000,000 yottagrams. - NPR
Studies on the four-day work week prove it, too. "Instead of seeing time as a vacuum that needs to be filled, what might it look like if we considered that high performance is, in part, the result of work not done?" - Fast Company
Why? "Modern global computing systems have become more tightly intertwined and more reliant on hyper-precise timing, sometimes to the billionth of a second. Adding the extra second heightens the risk." - The New York Times
The stories of the Rote Kapelle group "show the power of joy, creativity, and love in the fight against the compliance, fear, and silence upon which fascism still depends." - Hyperallergic
Thinking that some things are true would no longer be an unquestioned assumption: we would understand why we ought to think that some things are true. - Aeon
