flâneur

Ruozhen Gong

17 followers · 25 following · 2570 views

on the atlas — 253

highlights — 605

  • Thousands of his songs under the name the Best Birthday Song Band Ever celebrate birthdays,[3] each sung about a different name.[citation needed] As of 2024, 600 of his songs invite different feminine names to the prom, and 500 of them are marriage proposals. The Sorry Apology Person is another of his pseudonyms,[8] with songs for specific apologies.[3] Other albums consist of topics such as sports teams, animals, jobs, weather, and furniture. His other band names include the Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, the New Orleans Sports Band, the Chicago Sports Band, the Singing Film Critic, t…
    Matt_Farley
  • the actual technical reality made possible by digital communication networks, and understand both the advancements and limits of algorithmic automation.
    The University Within the Limits of Automated Knowledge - Journal #161
  • technical being whose life is made possible by prosthesis
    The University Within the Limits of Automated Knowledge - Journal #161
  • This conversation about the knowledge of life won’t be possible without a renewed critique of political economy, which is fundamentally an organological struggle underlying the long process of anthropogenesis.
    The University Within the Limits of Automated Knowledge - Journal #161
  • The recent court case accusing social media companies of trying to get young people addicted to their products is only the tip of the iceberg, since it is not only young people who get hooked on viral videos. Artificial intelligence becomes artificial stupidity when it is mainly used to predict and determine user behavior, or to market and surveil. There is nothing technical about this form of stupidity. It is a perversion born of a technological fanaticism that reduces life to computation, human will to patterns, knowledge to data. Returning to humanism, however, is not a way out, since this …
    The University Within the Limits of Automated Knowledge - Journal #161
  • However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI.
    If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
  • AI prose is filler, an expanding foam insulation made of words.
    If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
  • Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.
    If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
  • many of our problems are not limited by a lack of objective intelligence.
    Infinite midwit
  • what you spend nearly all your time doing is trying to stop the system becoming mind numbingly mediocre. You really feel the pull of the averaging effect of AI
    Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
  • every new technology promises better clarity, yet its essence is determined by the noise it produces. The friction of limits is what gives a technology its character, so when a system becomes too smooth, too all-encompassing, or too accommodating, it stops having a signature at all
    Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
  • “Whatever you find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit, all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
    Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
  • A flawless, virtuoso output from GenAI can feel lifeless, while something raw or broken might have something interesting about it.
    Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
  • Eno often says while making music he feels like a gardener: planting loops and textures, then watching them sprout into something unexpected with the potential to become incredibly beautiful with a little bit of care and pruning. The machine may produce material, but the job of shaping it into something meaningful still rests with him. It is creativity as cultivation.
    Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
  • That’s how I think of art, is how we are service to one another.
    Author Ocean Vuong on being generous in your work – The Creative Independent
  • “metaphor unites reason and imagination,” says george lakoff and mark johnson in their book, metaphors we live by (1980). “metaphors are not merely things to be seen beyond. in fact, one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors. it is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world. metaphor is as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious.”
    My website is a shifting house ... | Laurel Schwulst
  • websites are living, temporal spaces.
    My website is a shifting house ... | Laurel Schwulst
  • that's going to be dead the moment you publish. a website, or anything interactive, is inherently unfinished.
    My website is a shifting house ... | Laurel Schwulst
  • why not have a personal website that works strategically, in parallel to your other activities?
    My website is a shifting house ... | Laurel Schwulst
  • how can you make it fun or thought-provoking or (insert desired feeling here) for you? how can the process of making and cultivating a website contribute to your approach?
    My website is a shifting house ... | Laurel Schwulst
  • clarity is one of many possible intentions for a website. there are other legitimate states of mind capable of communication—a surprising, memorable, monumental, soothing, shocking, unpredictable, radically boring, bizarre, mind-blowing, very quiet and subtle, and/or amazing website could work. you also need not limit yourself to only one website—as perhaps you'd like to confuse or surprise with multiple.
    My website is a shifting house ... | Laurel Schwulst
  • Good story and good explanation superficially have much in common. But they are very different. Something can be a good story and a bad explanation; or a good explanation and a bad story. We saw this in Darwin, with his willingness to sacrifice good story for a deeper understanding of the world
    Developing creative identity
  • how new creative identities emerge, often from the work of near-amateurs.
    Developing creative identity
  • Identity matters. To do good work, you need a strong sense of how to be effective, models for valuable work
    Developing creative identity
  • ocean humanities, science fiction, media studies, science & technology studies, and the environmental humanities.
    Melody Jue: Ocean Memory — LONG NOW TALKS
  • marine coral as a climate archive.
    Melody Jue: Ocean Memory — LONG NOW TALKS
  • non-visual forms of perception, Jue challenges human-centered timelines
    Melody Jue: Ocean Memory — LONG NOW TALKS
  • disrupt our anthropocentric approaches to time, smell, and marine life as we know it
    Melody Jue: Ocean Memory — LONG NOW TALKS
  • how the concept of memory reshapes the questions we ask about the ocean.
    Melody Jue: Ocean Memory — LONG NOW TALKS
  • Claude can learn something in one language and apply that knowledge when speaking another. Studying how the model shares what it knows across contexts is important to understanding its most advanced reasoning capabilities, which generalize across many domains.
    Tracing the thoughts of a large language model \ Anthropic
  • the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction.
    Sorting Things Out
  • The Secret Allow yourself to go down rabbit holes A rabbit hole is not a distraction. A rabbit hole is your brain trying to tell you to pay attention to something you’re curious about. Ignore algorithmic rabbit holes.
    Are.na
  • a translation is never just a copy, it is always something new, always a collaboration
    Sense to Sense
  • Walter Benjamin, in The Task of the Translator, similarly suggests that translation is not about equivalence but transformation, a process that illuminates the original by placing it in a new constellation of meaning.
    Sense to Sense
  • Metaphor is a powerful tool that helps us understand things better. The core of ∞OS approach to learning is to offer a direct experience of a metaphor on the physical level. This provides a much more efficient pathway for information and ensures that it is incorporated on the level of reflexes, using the most efficient neural network there is: our bodymind.
    EightOS bodymind operating system — ∞OS
  • Rather than a pre-arranged composition, his music drifts and breathes, built from overlapping loops of different lengths that phase in and out of sync with one another, creating slow variations he can’t fully predict. Eno called it “a river of sound,” always the same and never the same. In that sense, ambient music was his first experiment with what he’d later name generative art: systems that grow and change within carefully set constraints.
    Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
  • Where do I stand in relation to the machine—above it, beside it, under it? Each position carries a different kind of power dynamic. To be above is to steer, beside is to collaborate, below is to serve.
    Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
  • the use of personas or character documentation to describe the product themselves. What does the object want? How does it feel about it? If it can sense its location and conditions how could that affect its behaviour? This kind of thing could be incredibly powerful and would allow us to develop principles for creating the finer details of the object’s behaviour.
    Ben Bashford - Journal - Emoticomp
  • A light touch. Very subtle in order to make them believable - without them being too ridiculous.
    Ben Bashford - Journal - Emoticomp
  • We could draw inspiration from things like Apple’s design of the sleep light on the Macbook Pro which is so obviously designed to pulsate at the same rate as its breathing would be (if it had lungs) whilst it’s asleep. It’s just enough that it gives the machine a feeling of sentience but what would happen if that speed was ever so slightly increased or decreased based on certain conditions? Would it give the impression that something is wrong? I reckon it might not immediately, but once you get to know the device and its personality you’d be used to its normal behaviour and then really notice …
    Ben Bashford - Journal - Emoticomp
  • Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.
    Part 1 - Hakim Bey - Hermetic Library
  • And so, life begins, not once, but again and again, in the moment we allow ourselves to want what might ruin us, to risk what might remake us, to trust what we cannot name but must follow. The erotic decision is never tidy.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided
  • It means making decisions that align with your aliveness, even if they offend your ego, your upbringing, your pay check.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided
  • The erotic seduces, vanishes, demands devotion. It does not say, “Indulge me”. It says, “Become worthy of me”. Sometimes it asks us to be alone. Sometimes to begin again. Always, to feel more deeply. And that is no small ask.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided
  • the erotic does not offer guarantees. Sometimes it leads us to joy. Sometimes to heartbreak. Often to both, simultaneously. But it always leads us somewhere real.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided
  • reclaiming erotic decision-making is political, not personal.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided
  • Eros threatens order. It whispers: you are more than this. You could leave. You could want something else.And that, to the status quo, is heresy.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided
  • These are micro-erotic decisions: not overtly dramatic, but deeply subversive. They signal to the self that aliveness matters more than efficiency, that presence outweighs performance. Over time, these small decisions shape a life that is beautiful, not just bearable; inhabited, not just lived. And that is the real measure of an erotic life: not how much you get, but how deeply you feel, how honestly you inhabit your own pulse.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided
  • Even theory, when it is most alive, is erotic: it seeks to seduce the mind into new shapes, to unravel certainties, to draw the thinker beyond the boundaries of what has already been thought. This is why true creativity always involves risk, not only the risk of failure, but of becoming someone unrecognisable to the self you were. The erotic decision changes your circumstances and rearranges your coordinates. It creates new desires, new questions, new problems worth having.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided
  • From a young age, we are encouraged to prioritise strategy over spontaneity, prudence over passion. We are told to plan our lives, manage our time, brand our personalities. Desire, in this framework, is a liability… too wild, too messy, too inefficient. But what use is a life composed entirely of safe decisions, if none of them ever stir the soul? The tragedy of many lives is that they were never felt, not that they were too short. They were never chosen, only followed.
    Erotic Decisions - by Tamara - Museguided