flâneur

Keane Moraes

8 followers · 29 following · 1400 views

on the atlas — 135

highlights — 443

  • When I think about the people I am close to now, I hope that we can be close forever. But more and more I understand that I’m not the one who gets to choose that. I can only try my best.
    to be loved is to be changed - by Ava - bookbear express
  • An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation, and a train of thought has a natural rhythm. So when an essay sounds good, it's not merely because it has a pleasing rhythm, but because it has its natural one
    Good Writing
  • Trying to make writing sound good makes you fix mistakes unconsciously, and also helps you fix them consciously; it shakes the bin of ideas, and also makes mistakes easier to see.
    Good Writing
  • If you have to rewrite an awkward passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it less true. You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas has to be a change for the better.
    Good Writing
  • By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail.
    Good Writing
  • What is your comparative advantage as a human? What traits will be scarce? How can you stay a complement to machine intelligence? These are the qualities to lean into most.
    The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
  • Coding is far more efficient than it used to be; but people have responded by spending much more time coding than they used to, because the latent demand for software is so enormous.1
    Why I’m not worried about AI job loss - David Oks
  • Or maybe this means that we’ll have invented a digital god whose power, wisdom, and intelligence is to ours as ours is to an insect’s: we’ll have immanentized the eschaton. If you believe that this will happen, there’s no point worrying about the displacement of software engineers: you should just try to forget it all and enjoy life while you can, because apocalypse and revelation are on their way.
    Why I’m not worried about AI job loss - David Oks
  • Once the Internet reduced distribution costs to zero, three truths emerged: first, that “news”, once published, retained no economic value. Second, newspapers no longer had geographic monopolies, but were instead in competition with every publication across the globe. Third, advertisers didn’t care about content, but rather about reaching customers.
    The AI Unbundling – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • How many journalists have used a coding agent? How many engineers in SF have held a job besides code? It’s insane that Josh Hawley hadn’t tried ChatGPT until December despite pursuing aggressive regulation, and almost as bad that Sam Altman can’t imagine raising his child without AI
    My week with the AI populists: A DC report - by Jasmine Sun
  • Most researchers have no good answers on the future of jobs, education, and relationships; even as they earnestly sympathize with the harms. They know they should, of course. They donate, publish research, say what they can. But everything is Just. Too. Fast.
    My week with the AI populists: A DC report - by Jasmine Sun
  • Silicon Valley loves to design for success cases, asking, how good could things get? They point to the autodidact, the vibecode millionaire, a glowing future of immortality and infinite leisure too. That monomaniacal optimism is my favorite thing about tech. But the distribution has a downside, and we can’t ignore it. Whether in lawsuits or regulation, the bill will come due.
    My week with the AI populists: A DC report - by Jasmine Sun
  • Consider the “lurker rule” that all social media PMs know by heart: 1% of users on a platform do the vast majority of the posting, whereas 90% are passive consumers, and 9% might hit “like” every once in a while. Yes, the tech Twitter wunderkinds might be “learning in public” or cold DMing their way to jobs, but most users are doomscrolling and clicking on identitarian rage-bait.
    My week with the AI populists: A DC report - by Jasmine Sun
  • The FT’s architecture critic declared the data center the defining building style of the 21st century, “the first real major post-human building type, an architecture built not for us but for the computing power we are coding.”
    My week with the AI populists: A DC report - by Jasmine Sun
  • Loudoun County—the data center capital of the US, which houses roughly one data center in every two square miles—with photojournalist Stephen Voss, I finally got the distaste.
    My week with the AI populists: A DC report - by Jasmine Sun
  • Reserving AI use to nations in the crude bucket of “democratic” does not guarantee, as we see, that its applications will be just. (Also, Anthropic seems willing to build killer robots and do mass surveillance, just only once the models are a lot better than Opus 4.6, and only on countries besides the US.)4
    AI vs. the Pentagon - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmine’s substack
  • But remember that progress is not a scientific guarantee. Better technology alone does not automatically lead to human flourishing—even great capabilities need a friendly environment in which to diffuse
    AI vs. the Pentagon - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmine’s substack
  • Reading signals from brain regions involved with speech production, the goal of this study is to restore real-time speech for people with severe speech impairment caused by neurological conditions such as ALS or stroke.
    Two Years of Telepathy | Updates | Neuralink
  • I don’t believe we are nearly as close to a post-literate society as the critics think, but I also don’t believe that a post-literate society is going to bear much resemblance to a pre-literate society.
    Text is king - by Adam Mastroianni - Experimental History
  • When Victor is alone, we multiply him on several mirrors before he creates the Creature. Then the Creature and him are reflected in mirrors — together.”
    Making of ‘Frankenstein’: Guillermo del Toro’s Take on the Classic
  • The shift from intellectuals to influencers affects how we engage with ideas and decide what really matters to us. If the answer to “who shapes culture now?” is “whoever has the best skin”, then maybe we’ve lost something along the way.
    The death of the public intellectual - by bea
  • And while one could argue that Kim is an intellectual force in her own right for mastering the art of self-marketing, her influence is entirely aesthetic. She doesn’t make us think, she makes us aspire.
    The death of the public intellectual - by bea
  • Public intellectuals aren’t becoming difficult to find because we’re in any kind of deficit of brilliant thinkers, but because the space for these figures has nearly disappeared
    The death of the public intellectual - by bea
  • In essence, the public intellectual was a rare embodiment of both intellectual depth and cultural visibility, making them important cultural forces of their time.
    The death of the public intellectual - by bea
  • It’s someone I used to love’s favorite movie.
    aftersun (2025) - by laurenyip - synchronicity
  • In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterised by a globalised, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channelled through social media, and so on.
    Unpacking late capitalism - The University of Sydney
  • “The truth” of cinema, Bresson argues, “cannot be the truth of theatre, not the truth of the novel, nor the truth of painting.” To be truly powerful, truly alive, cinema must play to its own strengths: “It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.”
    That's Not Cinema! - by Ed William - Rough Cuts
  • We are so fixated on how technology will out-skill us that we miss the many ways that technology can de-skill us
    The End of Thinking - Derek Thompson
  • “If you want a picture of the future,” as Orwell almost wrote, “imagine a screen glowing on a human face, forever.” For most people, the tragedy won't even feel like a tragedy. We’ll have lost the wisdom to feel nostalgia for what was lost.
    The End of Thinking - Derek Thompson
  • Perhaps a great deal of television is not meant to absorb our attention, at all, but rather to dab away at it, to soak up tiny droplets of our sensory experience while our focus dances across other screens. You might even say that much television is not even made to be watched at all. It is made to flow. The play button is the point.
    Everything Is Television - Derek Thompson
  • Netflix producers reportedly instruct screenwriters to make plots as obvious as possible, to avoid confusing viewers who are half-watching—or quarter-watching,
    Everything Is Television - Derek Thompson
  • When I say “everything is turning into television,” what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video
    Everything Is Television - Derek Thompson
  • In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.
    The Monks in the Casino
  • The state that once poured concrete for public parks now licenses gambling platforms. The country that regulates a lemonade stand will let an 18-year-old day-trade options on his phone.
    The Monks in the Casino
  • The pro-social script—date around, marry, settle down, buy a house, have a kid—feels more like a luxury every year. The anti-social script—porn, posting, parlays—feels easy and even costless. If young people are throwing out the old script, it’s because they’re hunting for a deal, just like everybody else.
    The Monks in the Casino
  • The operator of the New York Stock Exchange recently invested $2 billion in Polymarket, a platform for gambling on politics, sports, and anything else. Google is partnering with Polymarket to display betting prices in their search results.
    The Monks in the Casino
  • Young men are “continuously cultivated” by their media to become dupes and suckers “in service of the profits of an ever-expanding roster of gambling and gambling-adjacent industries
    The Monks in the Casino
  • Artists are pressured to do whatever possible to be seen and heard, not their best work out of love.
    everyone wants to be a DJ, no one wants to dance
  • As creation gets conflated with entrepreneurship, making art becomes an experience, a lifestyle, to be bought and sold. The subtle injunction to network, curate, and fetishize ourselves (and spend as much money as we can afford along the way) can’t be good for us.
    everyone wants to be a DJ, no one wants to dance
  • Maybe the issue is an inherited impulse to be creative, but primarily as an exercise in value-making. Participation in the creations of others, for so many of us, has been made to feel like a means to an end
    everyone wants to be a DJ, no one wants to dance
  • It’s Morpheus challenging Neo in The Matrix: “Do you think that's air you're breathing now?” The limitations we’ve accepted as natural — degrees, credentials, specialized skills, years of experience — are no longer the barriers we believed they were to making things happen.
    Agency is Eating the World
  • This will include sectors such as defense, healthcare, space exploration, biological research, and AI advancement itself — all domains where the variance of prediction models is higher than the acceptable risk threshold.
    Agency is Eating the World
  • We’re now facing a rupture, a phase transition. AI has eroded the value of specialization because, for many tasks, achieving the outcome of several years of experience now takes a $20 ChatGPT subscription.
    Agency is Eating the World
  • Specialization is a necessary precondition for success, making it a form of local monopoly. We live in a homeostatic equilibrium: even the most intelligent and driven people can't possibly perform every job simultaneously.
    Agency is Eating the World
  • True agency is an unruly psychological trait. It’s the willingness to act without explicit validation, instruction, or even permission. It’s the meme “you can just do things,” knowing that “you can poke life, and something will pop out the other side.”2
    Agency is Eating the World
  • This system would include miniature design and construction facilities; the design and fabrication of a camera motion control system; electronics and mechanical facets, and a complete optical house and animation department.
    The American Society of Cinematographers | Star Wars: Miniature and…
  • Though it may sound like a culmination of everything I’ve spent my career working toward, I now believe that it’s a red herring at best and a one way ticket to extinction at worst. 8 billion gods competing in what will undoubtedly become ever-escalating zero sum games will create 8 billion infinitely capable humans in 8 billion separate realities.
    Gossip is Good
  • There are, of course, many shades to gossip. The prosocial version of it helped us collectively coordinate and flourish, and it only worked when both context and care were present. Context meant holding the truth at full resolution, and care meant refracting that truth thoughtfully in service of both the subject and the listener.
    Gossip is Good
  • At 10x code velocity, our current approaches to testing, deployment, and team coordination become the limiting factors. The bottleneck just moves.
    Joe Magerramov's blog: The New Calculus of AI-based Coding
  • That means that a typical build and test infrastructure will need to become an order of magnitude faster than it is today. Just like online video games become unplayable when there is high lag between player's inputs and the game's reaction, it's really hard to move 10x faster if every commit still requires a lengthy delay before you see the feedback.
    Joe Magerramov's blog: The New Calculus of AI-based Coding