Where there is saxophone, synth is sure to follow.
Posts in "wastebook"
I suppose it can be said that I’m an absent-minded driver. It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.
No, no…AI won’t replace you.
A person using AI will replace you and 4,999 other people.
“cradle-to-crematorium biography” The best non-fiction to read this year
“Labor is valuable only insofar as it occupies a constraint the firm hasn’t yet automated.”
“Your brain hates unbounded risk. When there’s no plan, it escalates into dread.”
Perhaps the attraction is that film noir is a way of traveling into the past—the world right before I was born. When watching old films, I like to remind myself that to the people in the film, their world was just as rich as ours and felt just as “now” as ours does. Here’s John Koenig talking about the people in old photographs:
Of course, to them, it wasn’t all flickering silence and grainy black and white. They saw vivid color rushing by in three dimensions, heard voices in deafening stereo, confronted smells they couldn’t escape. For them, nothing was ever simple. None of them knew for sure what this era meant, or that it was even an era to begin with. At the time, their world was real. Nothing was finished, and nothing guaranteed.
That world is now gone. If the past is a foreign country, we’re only tourists. We can’t expect to understand the locals or why they do what they do.
I doubt that today’s young can understand the 1970s. If you cannot imagine a professor smoking in class, or the person next to you on the airplane smoking, without it seeming weird or annoying, then you’ll never understand what life felt like in the 1970s. Just as the people of 2075 will never understand that it 2025 it felt perfectly normal to walk into a friend’s house without taking off your shoes, sit down at a table, and begin eating an animal.
From Scott Sumner.
Once again I’m logging in from Ibiza. I wouldn’t say I’ve gone native, but I’ve been here long enough to get it. This is not fierce, grind-it-out, Silicon Valley society; even Austin Texas, that wellspring of slackerdom, has a harsher work-ethic. This little Mediterranean island with some genuine Lotus-eater aspects to it – the island of the Lotus Eaters was supposed to be Djerba over in Tunisia.
According to the Odyssey, you sail there, you partake of the Lotus, you go kinda blotto and everything’s groovy. You’re not supposed to succumb to this sweet and easy life, of course. Captain Odysseus makes everybody get back on the boat and recommence rowing for Ithaca. A few hundred Greek verses later, every blue-collar guy is dead and only Captain Odysseus is left to manage his narrative.
Maybe staying in Lotus Land wasn’t such a bad idea for the working man…
Enassholeification.
Consumer tech focuses on the process, enterprise tech on the outcome.