…slop is hardly a new phenomenon. Neither is the moral panic around it. AI-generated content is the latest iteration of an age-old trend: Whenever technology dramatically lowers the cost of producing media, it unleashes a flood of cheap, derivative work — and a chorus of critics convinced that culture has reached a new low.
— Read on a16zcrypto.substack.com/p/beyond-slop-taste-and-ai-moral-panic
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…most people’s dreams are not gated by money. Sure you need some money, but you probably don’t need as much as you might imagine. You most likely don’t need multi-million dollars to start your dream.
The bottleneck for most dreams is not financial. It’s a lack of confidence, willingness to take a risk, and face failure, or a lack of imagination of what is possible with current resources. If you want to write a novel you don’t need capital — you need discipline and 1,000 words a day. If you want to start a consultancy you need expertise and a first client, not a war chest.
A lack of money is a convenient thing to blame because it feels concrete, but it’s rarely the actual blocker for achievements.
— Read on kk.org/thetechnium/a-billion-dollars/ -
Like Hannibal, I wanted to rank powerful leaders in the history of warfare. Unlike Hannibal, I sought to use data to determine a general’s abilities, rather than specific accounts of generals’ achievements. The result is a system for ranking every prominent commander in military history.
The Method
Inspired by baseball sabermetrics, I opted to use a system of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). WAR is often used as an estimate of a baseball player’s contributions to his team.
— Read on medium.com/data-science/napoleon-was-the-best-general-ever-and-the-math-proves-it-86efed303eeb -
At this point you may be asking yourself, if sobriety sucks so hard, why bother? But you know damn well why! If you’re reading this right now and you’ve been through these things and you’ve been the addict, you know why. Because addiction is a lie and one that leads to a nightmare.
— Read on therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/sobriety-is-not-a-promise-to-be-happyPowerful reading if you are dealing with or have dealt with an addict.
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AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm’s boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content.
— Read on www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/05/time-magazine-has-a-separate-version-of-its-website-with-ads-only-ai-can-see/5283640 -
Humanity’s beliefs on many important topics have long been just inconsistent and incoherent across disparate fields of inquiry. Creating a huge opportunity to learn lots of big stuff fast: search for more contradictions between fields, and resolve them. (More)
If you learn key consensus results from many different fields, you will often find that they are in conflict, in ways one or both fields are unaware. As consensus results are usually correct, all you have to do is identify which field is more likely to be correct in this particular case. Which often isn’t that hard.
— Read on www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-to-be-a-usually-right-contrarian -
“I keep coming back to the Midwest because there is a relaxed contentment here that I find refreshing. The American Dream is largely working here again for both the front-row and back-row, after a rough couple of decades, at least relative to the rest of the U.S. I saw this in Michigan City, in South Chicago, in Duluth, and points in between.”
“There are respected jobs in the Midwest for the front-row who chose to stay, as well as the back-row—all of which you can get without long resumes built on lots of schooling and accumulated debt, and that makes all the difference. Housing is also far more affordable, and housing is probably the single biggest economic factor in the American Dream.”
— Read on walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-the-midwest -
One thing we’ve found very useful is to determine a uniform dimension for door frames. This has a few benefits. It allows us to transition from kit to kit without unique pieces, as well as allowing easy re-use of doors between kits. More importantly, it gives AI and animation a fixed standard to work from, which can be reinforced throughout the game.
— Read on blog.joelburgess.com/2013/04/skyrims-modular-level-design-gdc-2013.html -
The Pentagon on Friday released a new batch of documents and images related to UFOs, also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP, including a military pilot’s recollection of a huge, strange triangle that blocked out the stars over Afghanistan in 2002.
— Read on www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-pentagon-5th-release-documents-videos/ -
I’m listening to the Odyssey narrated by Dan Stevens. Odysseus gets lost. No one has made a workable map of the Mediterranean at this time. How do you get home?
We live in an age where everyone has a map. Even if you get lost without a phone, everyone near you has a map.
Hard to imagine the mental state of those sailors. The temptation to start a new life and give up must have been strong. The hopelessness and fear must have been overwhelming.
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You notice the way a raven walks. The sun’s moving lances of light piercing the dark clouds. The unfurling white banners of the crashing waves. You notice these things because it’s in your nature to notice.
With a phone, you notice: Every injustice and every fear – real, imagined and exaggerated. You notice this because it’s in your nature to notice. And by noticing, you profit someone else.
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…don’t think you can time it so that you reach the same second of the same day each year and end up on the same spot on the Earth in its orbit. The whole solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy at around an estimated 500,000 km/hr. Just one hour of moving 500,000 kilometers is a distance much greater than the Earth’s distance to the moon.
— Read on dgilesphd.substack.com/p/no-you-dont-want-to-time-travel -
One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intelligence is seeing it as some kind of unbounded scalar stat, like height. “Future AI will have 10,000 IQ”, that sort of thing. Intelligence is a conversion ratio, with an optimality bound. Increasing intelligence is not so much like “making the tower taller”, it’s more like “making the ball rounder”. At some point it’s already pretty damn spherical and any improvement is marginal.
— Read on www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-will-more-intelligence-actually
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..,your name has a good chance of breaking down into two parts in exactly the same way as a Homeric hero’s, especially if you’re a George, Philip, Richard, or Roger.
This pattern, grafting two meaningful elements together, is extremely ancient, and extremely widespread: you see the same pattern not only in Ancient Greek names like Tele-machus ‘Far-Fight’ but also in medieval Germanic names like Æþel-stān ‘Noble-Stone’.
— Read on www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/does-your-name-belong-in-the-odyssey-indo-european-names -
He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much warrioring … Nolan makes the protagonist a likeable, all-American hero; Homer’s Odysseus wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory.
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Emily Wilson listed some of the difficulties of translating Homer into English. Among them: “There aren’t enough onomatopoeic words for very loud chaotic noises” (#2 on the list), “It’s very hard to come up with enough ways to describe intense desire to act that don’t connote modern psychology” (#5), and “There is no common English word of four syllables or fewer connoting ‘person particularly favored by Zeus due to high social status, and by the way this is a very normal ordinary word which is not drawing any special attention to itself whatsoever, beyond generic heroizing.’” (#7).
— Read on conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/emily-wilson/ -
Writing is still as important as ever, and it should be you doing the writing, not your AI. Writing forces you to think clearly and confront gaps in your logic. What has changed is that writing is no longer the only way to make an idea tangible. Coding agents are compressing the time between defining the problem and having something real in our hands to evaluate. It is time to amend the way we think about the process that’s brought us this far. You will learn more in one evening of building than in two weeks of writing about what you think will happen.
— Read on www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/06/return-to-two-pizza-culture.html -
And while he has been warned and tricked and occasionally even guided by the gods, he finds—as Nolan’s protagonists often do—that they are cold and distant. The responsibility to fix what is broken is his, not fate’s. Man is alone in an uncaring universe, but he can also be the master of his own fate. This is Nolan’s worldview, his Odyssey, as much as it is Homer’s.
— Read on reason.com/2026/07/17/with-the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-earns-his-place-as-hollywoods-great-liberal-humanist/ -
From the iPhone home page:
As part of our efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, iPhone 17 does not include a power adapter or EarPods. Included in the box is a USB‑C Charge Cable that supports fast charging and is compatible with USB‑C power adapters and computer ports.
We encourage you to use any compatible USB‑C power adapter. If you need a new Apple power adapter or headphones, they are available for purchase.
Gross.
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We thought—I thought—the internet served to create new forms of social participation. As in the old joke, we thought it was an orgasm, but it was asthma. The internet’s true affordance has been the emergence and training of AI. The internet digitized all our knowledge and all our language, making them available to AI. Now digital orality is making all our speech available to AI. By talking digitally with one another and with AI, we show AI how to connect all meanings to all contexts. By helping AI actualize language into speech, we show it how cognitive structures work. AI needs our digital orality, and that is why we are becoming digitally oral.
— Read on therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-andrey-mir
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