Tuesday, January 17, 2023
So these need to be as close to perfect as humanly possible. And we do think they are among the most perfect items that we have on Earth
— Michael Stadermann via @60minutes post with caption "The target shells used to create nuclear fusion reactions with the world’s largest laser are so tiny that scientists apply glue to them using a cat whisker."
Monday, January 16, 2023
If I knew I was gonna die of cancer or something, and I had like three months to live, I would vlog every day. I'd film so many videos, and then I would just schedule upload a video a week for the next five years, so it's like I'm still alive, and I would completely act like I'm still alive and everything, and I think something like that would be cool. I don't know why but I've fantasized... Not fantasized, but I've dreamt about that a lot. Like, I don't know, if I only had 30 days to live, what would I do? And for me, I would try to make a decade's worth of content and schedule upload it so they automatically go public in the future, and so it's just like I never died, I'm just there.
— MrBeast, "MrBeast: Future of YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram | Lex Fridman Podcast #351"
Sunday, January 15, 2023
The oven timer dings with glee,
The cookies are ready, come and see.
Golden brown and oh so crisp,
Lily's cookies are a true bliss.
— ChatGPT
Saturday, January 14, 2023
But there are existential worries, too. One high school teacher told me that he used ChatGPT to evaluate a few of his students’ papers, and that the app had provided more detailed and useful feedback on them than he would have, in a tiny fraction of the time.
— Kevin Roose, "Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.," The New York Times
Friday, January 13, 2023
Whatever he might have had in his mind’s eye was not what he was going to get. He needed to state his prompt cleanly and clearly. But the creativity bubbled out of the machine.
— Frank Pavich, "This Film Does Not Exist," The New York Times
Thursday, January 12, 2023
Sometimes, putting a number on how much of something you have takes years of effort.
— @broadinstitute
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
Currency and coin counter
— Listed under "Skills" on George A. Devolder Santos' resume
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
He devised a new filing system for investigative reports, in which any information that might "cause embarrassment to the Bureau" would be written on separate "administrative pages," easily detached from the main files in case of coutroom discovery.
— Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Monday, January 9, 2023
And also, we're no smarter them, we just have more crude knowledge in part 'cause of them. But like, you know, they were just as clever as us, you know?
— Bhaskar Sunkara on people from ancient history, "Bhaskar Sunkara: Socialism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #349"
Sunday, January 8, 2023
How ur Kaws collection is gonna look to ur grandkids someday
— @artreviewpower100 via @sebastianstudio
Saturday, January 7, 2023
Artists are capitalists masquerading as visionaries.
— @jerrygogosian
Friday, January 6, 2023
In a single Ohio factory, Hoover boasted, the FBI had already signed up 133 "confidential informants," each of whom "believes that he is the bureau's sole source of information within that organization."
— Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Thursday, January 5, 2023
Text doesn't exist without context.
— H*
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
McCarthy evidently believed that by courting Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an avatar of hyper-performative politics, he could co-opt her wing of the party. He was set to offer her valuable committee assignments, and, according to Draper, had even offered to create a new leadership position for her. But her elevation would be valuable to other Trumpists only if there were concrete things they hoped to accomplish together. Putting Greene on the Oversight Committee does nothing to help those who aspire to her notoriety. They don’t want policy; they want airtime.
— Michelle Goldberg, "Leopards Eat Kevin McCarthy’s Face," The New York Times
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
Hoover aspired to build the nation's most extensive collection of bullets, guns, cartridges, typewriters, tire treads, and paper watermarks, to assist local police in identifying scattered bits of evidence.
— Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Monday, January 2, 2023
This may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence, Daniel Herman writes.
The work that ChatGPT—an artificial-intelligence program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt—can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor.
— @theatlantic
Sunday, January 1, 2023
Each box corresponds to one week in an average 88-year lifespan, and every filled-in box is one that you have already lived.
— Instagram ad for 4K Weeks
Saturday, December 31, 2022
The truth is that power does not simply arrive. It has to be created, policy by policy, law by law, step by excruciating step.
— Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Friday, December 30, 2022
It's very good.
— David texting about Librería Torre de Babel while we were in the International Emerald Museum
Thursday, December 29, 2022
There's lots of things that I'd be tempted to buy, but nothing I can form a narrative around.
— David on items in the market stalls.
