flâneur

Stella Jia

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on the atlas — 71

highlights — 522

  • I will start psychologically rather than logically. The major objection cited by people against striving to do great things is the belief that it is all a matter of luck. I have repeatedly cited Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” It both admits there is an element of luck and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed or not, as you choose, from moment to moment by the way you live your life.
    You and Your Research
  • Certainly, near the end, it is nice to look back at a life of accomplishments rather than a life where you have merely survived and amused yourself. Thus in a real sense, I am preaching the messages that (1) it is worth trying to accomplish the goals you set yourself and (2) it is worth setting yourself high goals.
    You and Your Research
  • Over and over, I heard a version of this—not some vision of Jay returned to its former glory, but humbly, The mill is a big place. It’s just sitting there. It should be something.
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • In a recent article about Jay and rural data centers, Anthony Elmo, who studies economic development, said of rural towns: “They don’t have the resources to negotiate. They don’t know what to ask for. They don’t have the legal expertise, and they don’t feel like they have the leverage.”
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • This Lake Mariner data center is being funded and backed by Google. They know guys like me and guys like other guys in the country are gonna come to chase that money. These tech companies have the money to pay us accordingly, and sometimes we can get them to do it.
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • They wrote to Governor Mills and influenced her decision to veto the moratorium. What if the elders of Jay, less likely to deal with long-term consequences, were the ones for the data center, but the rest of the town wasn’t?
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • Secrecy is a tactic being used all over the country to get data centers built. Developers get town leaders to sign an NDA and only reveal the full scope of the project when it’s too late to do anything about it. When other towns have found out about secret data-center plans, there has been serious backlash. But not in Jay.
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • Melanie Sachs’s bill would have been America’s first moratorium. But it felt like more than just a legal milestone. This would have been the first meaningful limitation on the power of companies like Google and Microsoft and X and OpenAI that can sometimes feel limitless—the power to build the infrastructure they want, and through that infrastructure, the future they want.
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • Opposition to data centers is the singular unifying issue in American politics in 2026: 70 percent of Americans oppose data-center construction in their community. In Maine, it’s 72 percent.
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • Similar ideas had been proposed in a handful of other states, but none had passed a state legislature. Maine was the first place—anywhere—to ban new-data-center construction.
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • The moratorium would put a stop to large-data-center-construction in the state of Maine until 2027. The bill was called L.D. 307, and it would kill the project in Jay.
    The Town That Wants a Data Center Next Door - The Atlantic
  • Tech firms are making offers—including very enticing salaries—that are hard for academics to refuse. In the process, research that previously would have happened in the open is getting locked up behind closed doors.
    Where Did All the Computer-Science Professors Go? - The Atlantic
  • Technology is encoded not just in papers and patents, but in the tacit knowledge passed from mentor to mentee. Require universities and community colleges to embed practical technical training and externships into STEM curricula. Let hands-on experience and industry credentials count toward degrees. Reform accreditation, admissions, and tenure to reward real-world technical work alongside academic publication.
    Science: A New Golden Age – The White House
  • That enrichment should include the creation of manufacturing jobs, not just the development of consumer products. By rebuilding the link between science and hands-on craft, federal leadership can ensure that the economic returns of discovery, including the jobs, supplier networks, and process knowledge encoded in the hands of workers, accrue to Americans in every region of the country and every sector of the economy, sustaining our technological leadership for generations to come.
    Science: A New Golden Age – The White House
  • Move beyond consensus-driven peer review by adopting a broader menu of selection mechanisms suited to different kinds of science. Examples include “golden tickets” that empower individual reviewers to champion ambitious proposals, fast grants that deliver rapid funding decisions, prize challenges and advanced market commitments that pay for results, and regranting models that delegate funding authority to scientists to draw on distributed expertise.
    Science: A New Golden Age – The White House
  • Despite massive increases in biomedical funding since the 1990s, the rate of significant breakthroughs appears to have slowed and drug approvals have flatlined. Researchers today often spend half their time on paperwork and administrative tasks, a burden worsened by expanding federal and university bureaucracies that further reduce funding available for actual science. A smaller proportion of American citizens now fill post-graduate spots in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Our competitors are channeling unprecedented resources into science and engineering, taki…
    Science: A New Golden Age – The White House
  • That enterprise, however, was predominantly built around what became called the “linear model” of technical progress, flowing from basic research to applied research to development of technology and industry. A simplification even then, that model has grown increasingly inadequate as a description of progress eighty-one years later. Discovery today is most often an iterative loop between fundamental and applied work, with industry and engineering playing a vital part in spurring even basic research.
    Science: A New Golden Age – The White House
  • “We can find examples of the greatest teams/collectives in history and feature them. Like an homage to humanity.” No destination, just exploring something that resonated with him. Everyone joined in without asking why.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • No one embodies this more than Simon, who, while responsible for the largest paradigm shifts in the product, is mostly just having a great time. “Simon is constantly solving problems for everyone else, but it’ll always be in these terms of, ‘I was just trying this thing and this happened,’ or ‘this thing failed and it was awesome,'” says a member of the engineering team. “He would never say this, but we’re all looking at him as a way to be obsessed and having fun.”
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • In the New York office right now, there’s a tiger team on what everyone calls “Project Applecart”—because it might just upset everything. New codebase, full rewrite of the product from scratch for the agent era, no attachment to what came before, no hemming and hawing or preciousness about how it used to be or tiptoeing around feelings. Notion needs to be evolving its codebase at agentic scale, not human scale.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • He took up photography and Chinese watercolor, majored in cognitive science, and only started coding to help friends build apps and websites. All of this gave him conviction that good taste comes from being a voracious student of many domains at once, and that core belief is contagious.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • The first step is to prototype. Whether it’s a product or a user event, a doc won’t cut it; Ivan demands something he can interact with and get a feel for. There also better be lots and lots of revs to look at. Every Notino knows to create as many permutations as their brain can muster. (The new sidebar they just launched had 22 tester versions you could toggle on or off in Notion’s internal workspace.) This explicitly includes wrong, unreasonable versions in case there’s a glimmer of something usable—which according to every Notino we asked, there usually is.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • Notion’s mission has always been about giving ordinary people power over their computing environments, directly inspired by Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart’s writings on how computers can augment human intellect and collaboration (not just automation). If this is your dream, you can see how Notion was meant to be an AI company the whole time. You no longer have to wrestle with the conventions of docs. So perhaps AI saved them (in both the practical and spiritual sense) by bringing Notion into closer alignment with their true ambitions.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • You expect this kind of “feel the AGI” talk from the big labs or young people caught up in the moment, not necessarily from executives who’ve spent the last decade building enterprise software and hired an illustrator before a first salesperson
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • Despite running the company together all day, Ivan and Simon get a lot of their big ideas out over the phone, talking sometimes three hours on nights and weekends about the possibilities of AI (many, but not all related to Notion). Neither ever wants to hang up, and when they recount what these calls sound like, it’s reminiscent of teens with a crush. It’s all “can you believe we get to” and “we’re so lucky to be alive at this time” and “what if we” and “yes, and” into the wee hours.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • Notion’s pre-GenAI past, instead, feels like deep roots—a shared worldview that ensures a certain standard, even as the team sheds old rules, features, people, and ways of working.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • This newest iteration lets teams command agents (in co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao’s words, “infinite minds”) to do real work—turning the hoards of context that Notion has spent over a decade capturing for companies into plans, executing them, and Slacking updates once they’re done.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • But during all this time, it didn’t necessarily seem like serious software to many. How high can the ceiling of “a note-taking app” really be? To some, it was just a prettier version of Google Docs and Sheets. So how, five years later, could Notion be the breakout of the pre-GPT companies to get to AI-first, first?
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • Notion always felt like a company built more on ideology, brand, and community than technical edge. For those new to it, Notion is software that gives users blank pages they can customize with modular drag-and-drop “blocks”—paragraphs, headings, checklists, databases, images, etc.—into whatever they want.
    Inside Notion - Colossus
  • The generation entering law school and frankly those entering the profession are AI natives. They are going to use AI no matter what anyone says. Trying to stop them is like trying to stop a new banking associate from using 1-2-3 in 1983. Not only is it impossible but it makes little sense. This is not about not having rules—for example the rules for cheating, stealing, hurting people and more all still exist and are in full force. This is about realizing that freedom of expression and use of information tools are intrinsically linked and controlling information tools is akin to controlling ex…
    240. Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before
  • The optimism for the possibilities drowned out those that thought of these tools as shortcuts, cheats, or unfair advantages. It was obvious by 1985 or so that not using a computer was a disadvantage, in academics or business.
    240. Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before
  • An important lesson was being learned—one that matters for today—which is for all the fears that the tool would make things too easy and take away the process of writing, the reality was that there were those that used the tool effectively and those that did not. The mistakes were new. There were weird typos. There were duplicate paragraphs from errant block moves aka copy and paste. There were loads of half-finished sentences. These were all things that you didn’t see when writing a paper meant transferring a hand-written draft to a typed final draft, which is all one did with a typewriter.
    240. Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before
  • I know for many there is a visceral reaction to this. The government should protect us. Industry should not move forward until it can prove something is both good and safe. The easiest algorithm I have for this is to ask if some new technology will be used by the government alone before it is approved or neutered for use by everyone else. If that is the case then history tells us the technology is being used for control or even oppression first and foremost. I do not intend to be political here, but practical. In the case of AI, the connection of AI to freedom of expression is unshakable and i…
    240. Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before
  • While the initial concerns were about a potential unfair advantage for students with computers—something that will later be known as the digital divide—some began to speculate about longer term concerns of computers providing a form of cheating such as pre-written text. Interestingly the idea of connecting the computer to a database of other text or case law resources was simply speculation at this point. It is worth noting that just a year later it would be routine to use a dial-up service to gain access to databases like legal cases as I did with my Osborne.
    240. Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before
  • The primary concern it seemed was the anxiety the computer created for other students with regard to fairness.
    240. Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before
  • In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.
    Opinion | The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week - The New York Times
  • That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind …
    Opinion | The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week - The New York Times
  • But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings.
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment. But dopamine is a chemical, not a virtue. And what’s easy is not always what’s best for us. We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification? And if technology is hurting our community, what can we do to heal it?
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • “would destroy our visiting practices. We would stay at home with the television or radio rather than meet with other people.”
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • In his 2015 novel, Seveneves, Neal Stephenson coined the term Amistics to describe the practice of carefully selecting which technologies to accept. The word is a reference to the Amish, who generally shun many modern innovations, including cars and television. Although they are sometimes considered strictly anti-modern, many Amish communities have refrigerators and washing machines, and some use solar power. Instead of dismissing all technology, the Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values.
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey was working on a book about how places shape American lives and economic fortunes. He had a feeling that the rise of remote work might have accelerated a longer-term trend: a shift in the amount of time that people spend inside their home. He ran the numbers and discovered “an astounding change” in our daily habits, much more extreme than he would have guessed. In 2022—notably, after the pandemic had abated—adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003. This finding formed the basis of a 2024 paper, “Homebound…
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards.
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • It is obvious that the key question for us is not “how do we write 14 papers in a year?” but, rather, what kinds of knowledge can we create when the tools of inquiry themselves change?
    AI Enablement for Better Research - by Lamar Pierce
  • seek what March (1991) expressed as “the exploration of new possibilities.” We want to shift our focus to how AI is changing the production of science and how it can expand our knowledge, rather than merely increasing the number of papers through efficiency and reduced labor.
    AI Enablement for Better Research - by Lamar Pierce
  • do we want it to produce faster, cheaper versions of what we already do, or do we want fundamentally new science?
    AI Enablement for Better Research - by Lamar Pierce
  • As you’ll see below, we’re looking for contributions that enable and enhance our research in the spirit of public goods.
    AI Enablement for Better Research - by Lamar Pierce
  • When teenagers write their own essays, the work reflects their thoughts and personalities, their attempts to make meaning of their experiences. When we search for words, we are sifting through the same brain networks that form connections between ideas. A student who writes, “I’ll always think of learning to swim when I see a kite flying,” is connecting unique personal experiences in her life, which until recently was a clear signal of truly creative thinking
    Opinion | Writing Is Fundamental to How We Think - The New York Times
  • For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent. When a chatbot writes, it is predicting the next word that is most likely to make a “good” sentence or essay, based on the text it’s been trained on. It can identify sophisticated and creative word patterns independently of whether the underlying ideas represent something new.
    Opinion | Writing Is Fundamental to How We Think - The New York Times