flâneur

Ally Zhu

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on the atlas — 33

highlights — 99

  • Somewhere between hyper-capitalist motivation videos, pseudo-spiritual tweets, and Instagram therapy infographics, a predominant mental-health narrative has emerged on the internet. It takes many forms, but is perhaps best defined by its penchant for isolation: it begs you to “focus on yourself,” to “protect your peace,” to sever relationships that don’t serve you and invest your newfound time and energy into self-improvement. Seductively, it whispers that you “don’t owe anyone anything.” It glamourizes — and moralizes — a life spent alone.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor …
    The Man in the Arena: Citizenship in a Republic - Theodore Roosevelt Association
  • France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the most important lessons is the lesson her whole history teaches, and that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries at every court in Europe the “freemasons of fashion” have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvelous instrument of precision, French p…
    The Man in the Arena: Citizenship in a Republic - Theodore Roosevelt Association
  • She is petite and blond and was wearing oversized sunglasses and holding a half-finished beer. Her hair was wet and she greeted him warmly.
    How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World | The New Yorker
  • Silicon Valley has generally held the view that government is too slow and stupid to oversee fast-breaking technological developments.
    Silicon Valley Confronts the Singularity - The New York Times
  • “They all want eternal life without the inconvenience of having to believe in God,”
    Silicon Valley Confronts the Singularity - The New York Times
  • The climate stakes are high. Last year, Congress approved hundreds of billions of dollars for solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other technologies to tackle global warming. But if the United States can’t build new transmission at a faster pace, roughly 80 percent of the emissions reductions expected from that bill might not happen, researchers at the Princeton-led REPEAT Project found.
    Why the U.S. Electric Grid Isn’t Ready for the Energy Transition - The New York Times
  • There are enormous challenges to building that much transmission, including convoluted permitting processes and potential opposition from local communities. But the problems start with planning — or rather, a lack of planning.
    Why the U.S. Electric Grid Isn’t Ready for the Energy Transition - The New York Times
  • Donald Trump had the raw power on the right. But it was Carlson who set the ideological agenda.
    The New Yorker
  • A detailed comparison of Milvus, Pinecone, Vespa, Weaviate, Vald, GSI and Qdrant
    Not All Vector Databases Are Made Equal | by Dmitry Kan | Towards Data Science
  • A detailed comparison of Milvus, Pinecone, Vespa, Weaviate, Vald, GSI and Qdrant
    Not All Vector Databases Are Made Equal | by Dmitry Kan | Towards Data Science
  • In “Good Arguments,” Seo offers a set of rules gleaned from his years as a debater and as a debate-team coach. For example, avoid an abstract word when a concrete one will do. To describe our educational institutions as “failing” might lead us to any number of solutions, maybe even existential questions about the nature of institutions writ large. But to call them “underfunded” draws a line between problem and solution. For Seo, precise language produces clearer sentences, and a better-defined “journey” for listeners to follow, furtively delivering them to the destination that you’ve already c…
    What Conversation Can Do for Us | The New Yorker
  • Then, one of my students asked "doesn’t last word art require surviving the test of time?" Everyone was astonished that something so obvious had been overlooked, and no one disagreed. So perhaps the distinction between first word and last word art is in the priority of the timeframe. An electronic arts festival needs to show what’s hot now. A museum collection curator needs to select what’s worth saving for future generations to experience. This distinction may be a healthy one to look at today in the world of high-tech business. We’ve just come out of a viciously first-word moment, where peop…
    First Word Art / Last Word Art
  • software art in particular differs from software-based art in general in that it exposes its instructions and codedness. Since formal instructions are a subset of conceptual notations, software art is, formally, a subset of conceptual art.
    Florian Cramer: Concepts, Notations, Software, Art
  • As a contemporary art, the aesthetics of software art includes ugliness and monstrosity just as much as beauty, not to mention plain dysfunctionality, pretension and political incorrectness
    Florian Cramer: Concepts, Notations, Software, Art
  • Concept art potentially means terror of the concept, software art terror of the algorithm; a terror grounded in the simultaneity of minimalist concept notation and totalitarian execution, helped by the fact that software collapses the concept notation and execution in the single medium of instruction code.
    Florian Cramer: Concepts, Notations, Software, Art
  • ince formal language is a language, software can be seen and read as a literature.
    Florian Cramer: Concepts, Notations, Software, Art
  • To discuss ``software art'' simply means to not take software for granted, but pay attention to how and by whom programs were written. If data doesn't exist without programs, it follows that the separation of processed ``data'' (like image and sound files) from ``programs'' is simply a convention. Instead, data could be directly embedded into the algorithms used for its transmission and output to external devices. Since a ``digital photograph'' for example is bit-mapped information algorithmically transformed into the electricity controlling a screen or printer, via algorithmic abstraction lay…
    Florian Cramer: Concepts, Notations, Software, Art
  • In fact, it is a straight continuation of romanticist philosophy and its privileging of aisthesis (perception) over poeisis (construction),2 cheapened into a restrained concept of art as only that what is tactile, audible and visible. The digital arts themselves participate in this accomplicity when they call themselves [new] ``media art''. There's nothing older than ``new media'', a term which is little more than a superficial justification for lumping together a bunch of largely unrelated technologies, such as analog video and computing, just because they were ``new'' at a particular time.
    Florian Cramer: Concepts, Notations, Software, Art
  • Likewise, the term ``digital art'' has been associated primarily with digital images, music or audiovisual installations using digital technology.
    Florian Cramer: Concepts, Notations, Software, Art
  • Merrill had stripped off his clothing, and Fredericks, feeling “wild with desire,” dropped to his knees before Merrill in the sand. Merrill knew that a record of this moment would wind up in the journal, so he waited for Fredericks to write an account—and then he stole the pages. In 1975, Fredericks wonders ruefully, “Does he have them still—like some fading photograph an aging beauty keeps?”
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • Nor does he address the ethics of writing about intimate experiences with other people and making it your “work”—and your claim on literary immortality.
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • Claude Fredericks has achieved a startling measure of the immortality he sought for his journal—his mammoth manuscript will presumably be housed at the Getty in perpetuity.
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • In the diaries documenting the period after Will breaks off the relationship, Fredericks stews in his loneliness, and for comfort he turns back to his “holy” books.
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • When I came to this passage, I had the eerie sense, and not for the first time, that Fredericks had entered uncharted literary terrain: a journal with a narrator who is unreliable, and quite possibly a fantasist. He is no longer confessing his experience “at due analytical length,” as Merrill had observed in his memoir. Fredericks is writing sentimental fiction.
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • If Julian is a divinity in “The Secret History,” he is a deeply ambiguous one. By the end of the novel, his aestheticism and his “cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death” have come to appear disquieting to Richard: “His voice chilled me to the bone. . . . The twinkle in Julian’s eye, as I looked at him now, was mechanical and dead. It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappi…
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • But unfortunately, now as then, people prefer to see fiction as fact.
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • It was these erroneous and larger-than-life fictions that caught my imagination as a young writer and went into the formation of the fictional character of Julian Morrow
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • It’s a boon to Tartt’s future biographers, especially as it brings to mind a line of Julian Morrow’s in “The Secret History” which was almost surely uttered first by Fredericks. When Richard Papen, the student narrator, makes the mistake of referring to classroom assignments in Greek as “work,” Julian issues a grandiloquent correction: “I should call it the most glorious kind of play.”
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • journal was less about cataloguing acute observations, or about capturing a milieu, or about imposing a literary sensibility on quotidian moments, than it was about the fact of having written.
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • Today, a visitor to the Getty can examine virtually all of Fredericks’s unpublished poems and the drafts of his plays, along with thirty years’ worth of his teaching notes and syllabi.
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • In the lecture, Fredericks extolls the journal as a special form. Because its author can reflect solely on what’s already happened, the narrative is perpetually in medias res—a “peculiar quality” in a literary work. Moreover, because the author doesn’t know while writing how his dilemmas will be resolved, the resulting narrative captures better than a novel “how complex experience actually is.” Fredericks goes on, “What I’d like to propose is that . . . we now are no longer content with the conventions of fiction, that the whole idea of character and plot . . . no longer seems to be true.” Thr…
    The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker
  • They’re also asking more fundamental questions about the country’s innovation environment: Have censorship, geopolitical tensions and the government’s growing control of the private sector made China less friendly to innovation?
    Why Chatbots like ChatGPT Weren’t Invented in China - The New York Times
  • This means low- or no-emissions technology is likely one of the biggest levers there is.
    Climate change (extreme risks) - 80,000 Hours
  • focusing on developing and deploying new technology seems more likely to succeed (and has fewer downsides, and faces fewer coordination issues) than seeking to encourage individuals to voluntarily reduce their energy consumption. This is because it doesn’t cost the innovator much; they can benefit from selling their inventions.
    Climate change (extreme risks) - 80,000 Hours
  • But in general we want to note that your personal carbon footprint is largely a distraction. If you cut your emissions by 50% you’ll save 2–10 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, whereas a carefully considered donation (for example to the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund) of only $10 could do more to reduce emissions than that.
    Climate change (extreme risks) - 80,000 Hours
  • For example, it’s been suggested that increased resource scarcity (in particular water scarcity) caused by climate change could increase the risk of conflict in Kashmir, one of the most important flashpoints for great power and potentially nuclear war (in this case, between India and Pakistan, even though both sides have an interest in avoiding war). We’re not sure this is right, but it doesn’t seem impossible.
    Climate change (extreme risks) - 80,000 Hours
  • a two-metre sea level rise (something like the IPCC’s worst-case scenario) would displace 2.5% of the world’s population. These figures assume we wouldn’t act to prevent this displacement — measures like building protective dikes could reduce this to less than half a million people.
    Climate change (extreme risks) - 80,000 Hours
  • However, there isn’t consensus on this. If the modelling in this study is right, cloud feedbacks would cause an extra 8°C of warming on top of the expected 6–7°C associated with that quantity of emissions. That would bring us into the extreme regions of the effects listed below.
    Climate change (extreme risks) - 80,000 Hours
  • A sufficiently advanced AI planning system would also include instrumental goals in its overall plans.
    Preventing an AI-related catastrophe - 80,000 Hours
  • In one example, a robot arm was asked to grasp a ball. But the reward was specified in terms of whether humans thought the robot had been successful. As a result, the arm learned to hover between the ball and the camera, fooling the humans into thinking that it had grasped the ball.34
    Preventing an AI-related catastrophe - 80,000 Hours
  • Even before getting into the actual arguments, we can see some cause for concern — as many AI experts think there’s a small but non-negligible chance that AI will lead to outcomes as bad as human extinction. We’re making advances in AI extremely quickly — which suggests that AI systems could have a significant influence on society, soon. There are strong arguments that “power-seeking” AI could pose an existential threat to humanity7 — which we’ll go through below. Even if we find a way to avoid power-seeking, there are still other risks. We think we can tackle these risks. This work is extreme…
    Preventing an AI-related catastrophe - 80,000 Hours
  • That’s because climate change’s impacts will still be significant – it could destabilise society, destroy ecosystems, put millions into poverty, and worsen other existential threats such as engineered pandemics, risks from AI, or nuclear war. If you want to make climate change the focus of your career, we include some thoughts below on the most effective ways to help tackle it.
    Climate change (extreme risks) - 80,000 Hours
  • The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems. The world that scrolls past you on Twitter is not the real world. You cannot calibrate your sense of what’s valuable and necessary to the current fashions in your field.
    What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.
  • 100,000 people received an engineering bachelor’s degree in the U.S. last year. There are at least 100,000 people, every year, looking for an engineering problem to solve. I have my own plea to all such people —
    What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.
  • People have figured out these things! The formulas exist in Excel spreadsheets and Matlab code, buried on old hard drives somewhere. Sometimes they’re vaguely described in prose in published papers. But they aren’t accessible — they’re difficult to find, and generally impossible to “grab and use”. The rare author will be able to make up their own models; most authors have no choice but to trust and regurgitate soundbites.
    What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.
  • Climate change is too important for us to operate on faith. Citizens need and deserve reading material which shows context — how significant suggested actions are in the big picture — and which embeds models — formulas and algorithms which calculate that significance, for different scenarios, from primary-source data and explicit assumptions.
    What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.