Escape the algorithm
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the U.S. is in the middle of a great shift — in the 19th and 20th centuries, high class in America was defined as “anything French”, while in the 21st century it’s defined as “anything Japanese”.
Apparently the Japanese don’t realize it yet? More here.
NASA’s been clear that it doesn’t intend to replace the space station.
Instead, the agency wants to shift from landlord to tenant, purchasing space station services from private players rather than running a facility of its own. It’s betting the private space industry can help drive down costs and accelerate innovation.
— Read on singularityhub.com/2025/12/26/the-era-of-private-space-stations-launches-in-2026/
the way we think about the world—made of separate, clearly labeled “things” that you can depend on to “be themselves”—is an illusion. The universe is governed by physical laws that are all about movement, forces, warping, and never about peacefully existing in a room
— Read on planktonvalhalla.com/20251204-purpose-from-first-principles/
What do you notice about this reconstruction? That’s right, it looks awful. In the eyes of modern viewers, at least, the addition of this matte, heavily saturated color has turned a really good work of art into a really bad one.
— Read on worksinprogress.co/issue/were-classical-statues-painted-horribly/
The head tax is bad tax policy dressed up as soak-the-rich populism. It’s the kind of thing that sounds good in a City Council speech, but creates real harm for the workers it’s supposed to help. If we want to find more revenues to close our budget gap, we have better options5, and we should focus on them. Chicago tried this before, decided it was a mistake, and eliminated it. We shouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment. This is what time-locked language models make possible. Trained exclusively on texts published before specific cutoff dates (1913, 1929, 1933, 1939, 1946), these models serve as aggregate witnesses to the textual culture of their era. They cannot access information from after their cutoff date because that information literally does not exist in their training data.
Oddly, today’s sweet plum pudding hails from a meatier dish. As Maggie Black writes in History Today, the dish that eventually evolved into plum pudding originally contained preserved, sweetened meat “pyes” and boiled “pottage” (that is, vegetables) and was enjoyed in Britain as early as Roman times.
— Read on www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-figgy-pudding-180957600/
This morning, I woke up in a supremely comfortable bed, knowing there would be no deadly predators or pests to eat or infect me. With cheap soaps and pristine, hot water, I became cleaner in five minutes than was possible for any human—no matter how wealthy—in the past.
With a flick of a switch, I conjured hot coffee into existence with a taste and quality that could not have been summoned by any empire or fleet previously. In a safe car that could rapidly whisk me to another country in a few hours—by driving onto a train that literally travels under the ocean—I typed a few keystrokes on a magic device that allowed me to listen to virtually any music recorded, anywhere on the planet, in the last century or so.
It was the opinion of the Symbolists, and Bocklin in particular that the purpose of art was to reveal through the use of a language no longer logical, but from “other” reality that hides behind that immediately perceptible with careful use of “symbols.”
From Arnold Bocklin, 60 Paintings
“My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement.”
— Read on www.rogerebert.com/features/bright-walldark-room-august-2014-well-jump-and-well-see-by-chad-perman
On the Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.
But this is supposed to be okay, because they are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.
— Read on slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/
10. The data center buildout reaches 3.5% of US GDP in 2026.
The scale of investment mirrors the historical expansion of the railroads. The only factor that slows overall building is perceived risk within the credit market, particularly in the private credit market. The massive growth in that asset class suddenly shows strains of increasing default rates, creating a potential bottleneck for the most capital-intensive infrastructure projects.
— Read on tomtunguz.com/2026-predictions/
Despite Neal’s reputation as a frenetic hipster, “I just realized that there weren’t that many trips,” Carolyn said. “It sounds as though they were doing this all the time. Half of them were coming home again — people don’t realize that Jack was going home and Neal was coming home. There weren’t that many anyhow…Jack took a trip once a year and Neal would take quickies here and there. But we had a very settled home-life for ten years.”
— Read on www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/carolyn-cassady-interview
One-bedroom units in the building average $3,500— except two of them, subject to the city’s rent-stabilization laws, which hold rents below $900 per month.
As a result, both units have been allowed to fall into disrepair, because the cost of restoring them to habitability is greater than what they’d generate in rent.
Pliny the Elder, who in his Natural History, completed in 77 AD, commented that the Empire’s legionaries had not yet extended knowledge of the island of Britain beyond the neighbourhood of the Caledonian Forest
— Read on www.linkedin.com/pulse/mythical-great-wood-caledon-part-1-origins-richard-oram-khkge
In my (extremely biased) opinion, the most stylish people on earth work at Fluevog.1 Unlike, say, Aritzia, you can walk into a store and never predict how the employees are going to be dressed. It’s a brand that celebrates individuality to the point where you’re allowed to wear whatever you want, as long as the look is totally your own. One day, I came across a video interview with an employee at their New York City store, Madeline Kevelson. After a brief scroll of her Instagram, @spiltmlk, I was smitten by her complicated, historical outfits that seem to exist outside of time.
— Read on freakpalace.substack.com/p/i-found-the-best-dressed-person-in
One of Diablo 4’s most significant technical changes is its fully connected overworld. Instead of isolated zones, players move through environments that update continuously. Enemy density, weather changes, public events and world boss timers are all managed through cloud coordination. As clients request updates, servers adjust local states to reflect global conditions.
The setup reduces the traditional boundaries seen in older ARPGs. It requires fast, consistent communication between server clusters and player devices. When too many events occur simultaneously or the server load spikes, players notice it immediately through latency or ‘rubber-banding’. Diablo 4’s smoothness during crowded encounters is largely a result of intelligent distribution of compute processes in multiple data centres.
— Read on www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/how-cloud-infrastructure-shapes-the-modern-diablo-experience/
While you can always twist reality to soothe your ego, iron, with its uncompromising physical reality, won’t support your self-deception. It doesn’t give a shit how you feel. As Rollins wrote, two hundred pounds “is always two hundred pounds,” regardless of whether you slept well, had a breakup, want to lift, or want the weight to exist.
What is iron in your life? What qualities, what people, what ideas can you rely on to bring you back to reality?
— Read on kupajo.com/iron-never-lies/
