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Category: Post
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“The painting invites the viewer to wonder what has just happened, why it happened, and why the participants are dressed in such costumes. It encourages the viewer to reconstruct the preceding events through imagination.” — Read on apaintingstory.com/en/posts/the-duel-after-the-masquerade/
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No one told me the Vatican is a storage closet. Beautiful beyond imagination, yet overflowing with statues and paintings, like they ran out of room for the collections. People told me I would be “angry” at the Vatican for “stealing treasures.” I did not feel that way. I was overwhelmed with gratitude. The Vatican saved…
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A recent executive order issued by the White House directs NASA to establish the initial elements of a permanent moon base by 2030. — Read on singularityhub.com/2026/03/12/nasa-is-planning-to-build-a-permanent-moon-base-by-2030-heres-what-it-will-take/
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Historically, population decline has been driven by external and involuntary shocks like famine, disease, or war. Notable examples include: The Black Death in the 14th century The collapse of the Roman Empire China’s Great Famine. Unlike past population declines, today’s is voluntary and structural. — Read on chamath.substack.com/p/population-collapse We’re long past the point where this can…
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Based on the 2024 presidential election, 54% of Illinois voters are Democrats, yet Democrats hold 82% of Illinois’ U.S. House seats. With one fewer seat to work with, Illinois Democrats would have a difficult time drawing maps that would eliminate another Republican district. Keeping their current 14 seats would give Democrats over 87% of Illinois’…
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Europeans get lower salaries than Americans, but they receive better benefits. So who makes more? The average American pay is still one of the highest. But not by an enormous amount. I asked AI to help me understand the explanation. From Perplexity: the speaker argues you should use median, equivalized, disposable, PPP‑adjusted income from sources like OECD…
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Broadcast during just 23 weeks of 1982, and reaching no more than WCIU’s Chicagoland perimeter, The Chicago Party conformed only to those codes that suited it….treating Chicago audiences to dynamic performances by unjustly local artists trafficking in sweet soul, disco, and emerging electronic R&B, the pop forms then wrestling for urban chart dominance — Read…
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Curation – such as record collecting – has a beginning and an end. Curation does not continue infinitely; a record stops when it reaches its end. Curation is a choice among infinite options. A record costs money and takes up space, defining its limit. Your limited choices have meaning and therefore define you. Curation creates…
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Somewhere in the bowels of X, Sam Altman suggested asking an AI to provide the hardest question it could reasonably answer. Perplexity provides 1/ difficult questions it can answer reasonably well (given the availability of public information), and 2/ questions that are hard to answer. These are the questions it can reasonably answer based on…
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Somewhere I recall reading that for elite athletes, the winning combination was genetic talent, the will to succeed, and the presence of a father or close family member with the capability and drive to act as a secondary coach. I thought about that when reading this interview with Rudy Kraft, one of the earliest writers…
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The Fermi Paradox is essentially this: If the odds for intelligent life are so good, then why haven’t we met any aliens? The Paradox lists theories why. Personally, I think either they’re here and we don’t know about it, or we don’t know how to look. Casey Handmer has a new theory – we can’t…
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We got, not transhumanism (as deliberate, informed, rational decision to self-consciously go beyond natural human capacity), but surreptitious transhuman behaviour, without the weird philosophy or the new aesthetics….Playing god – but using these new, unfathomable powers to… become more normal. So call it transnormalism. — Read on www.gleech.org/enhance
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What’s actually important to me is that you really understand that this is a real possibility, for you, in your life. If you practice with honest diligence, with tenderness and patience and determination, one day you will understand that you were completely wrong about everything. And you will be so, so happy about that. More…
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I love how art-world denizens dress when they come to Los Angeles. The collector class interprets “dressing for/with/about fine art in LA” differently than I’ve ever seen elsewhere in the world, applying vast economic resources to fashion interpretations that I can only describe as “downstream from 1960s CIA experiments.” — Read on freakpalace.substack.com/p/the-freakiest-outfits-we-saw-at-frieze
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Today, we’re introducing Spectre I, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings. We live in a world of always-on listening devices. Smart devices and AI dominate our world in business and private conversations. With Deveillance, you will @be_inaudible . — Read on x.com/aidaxbaradari/status/2028864606568067491
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Can AI be used to analyze Powerball data? With the right dataset, it sure can.
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A more straightforward tactic: talk to your children often about the kind of working lives I’m outlining here, and the age of AI more broadly. Make them understand that the kind of single-track careers they see on TV or hear about in school — the kind that many of us have had — aren’t really…
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I wanted to see if AI could provide insight into local government. AI does analysis really well, those datasets are available, and it’s not something a normal person can do, unless they have hours to spare. Can AI simplify government bureaucracies so we can better understand our government. The answer? Yes, it can.
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