Flipping the Flippers on May Day

...izes skin care routines, personal trainers, luxury vehicles and relentless self empowerment propaganda. Their plastic skinned appearance means they could probably slip into that weird new Barbie movie without putting on any makeup. This first episode of their new series focused on the affluent life of the hosts as they moved between suburban pool parties and their bland office. But what fascinated me most was what the show obscured: the immigrant...

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Autonomous Vehicles: Hype and Resistance

...ilicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, accommodating self driving vehicles will replay what happened in the early 20th century when the automobile and oil industries pushed for significant changes to our roads and cities to make cars work. For instance, these powerful economic and political industries turned the simple act of crossing the street into “jaywalking”. Then there’s all the parking lots, highways, gas stations and...

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Escaping the AI Vampire Castle

...t and suddenly break leaving the world a worse place. We’ve seen this with self driving cars, cryptocurrency, social media, and Elon Musk’s tunnels to nowhere and failed Hyperloop. There’s certainly useful things we can do with these large statistical models. Writing children’s books, however, is not one of them. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of language, how humans gain experience and how creativity works. I met a translator r...

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The Spatial Horror of House of Leaves

...rnism as the velocities of the spacecraft to those of the automobile—can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. Danielewski reinforces the hyperspacial theme via the text of the book, with ever shifting typography and an ongoin...

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Saturday Tweets: The Chapel Perilous

Two self portraits by Edvard Munch–one during and one after suffering from the Spanish Flu. Make a simple sifter coffee roaster “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb on warnings over systemic risks from global pandemics Museums reveal their creepiest objects in Twitter battle It Came From the ’70s: The Story of Your Grandma’s Weird Couch The Bread Influencers Flock of sheep visit empty McDonald’s restaurant during lockdown Super-rich jet off to disast...

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