Embeddings are a cornerstone in the world of machine learning, transforming the way machines interpret and process complex data. At their core, embeddings are numerical representations of information — such as words, sentences, or images — mapped into a continuous vector space. In other words, they translate data into a language that machines can understand and process efficiently.

Broadly speaking, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla are all “technology” companies. Looking more specifically, though, each company occupies fundamentally different categories of tech. Apple is a consumer computing hardware manufacturer. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. Other products that it makes, including the so-called “services,” are primarily accessories to or supportive of their consumer computing hardware: e.g., App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud. Apple’s specific product focus has remained unchanged since its founding as “Apple Computer Company.”

Meta has tried to pivot to the so-called “metaverse,” symbolically renaming the whole company from “Facebook” and continuing to pour $billions every year into the effort, yet with not much more return on investment than Apple’s own “spatial computing”, i.e., Vision Pro. And now Meta is trying to pivot to A.I., pouring a ton of money into that too, but with nothing much to show for it. We’re supposed to be impressed by Meta poaching individual Apple engineers with nine-figure pay packages, which in one sense is impressive, just not impressive in the sense of paying off for Meta. Perhaps it will pay off for Meta in the future. Or perhaps not. Meanwhile, Meta is still practically printing money at its old, core business: selling ads on social media

Jobs did not just make tech products willy-nilly, for no other reason than to maximize profit and stockholder returns. He was always focused specifically on consumer computing devices and platforms. That’s what he cared about, and where his experienced rested. When Jobs left Apple in the 1980s, what did he do? Again, he created a new personal computing platform, NeXT, a combination of hardware and operating system, just like the Apple II, Lisa, and Macintosh that came before. Jobs was innovating… on a theme, almost like a classical composer. Jobs was eventually able to return to Apple and become CEO precisely because Jobs made what Apple needed: a personal computer operating system, NeXTSTEP, which became Mac OS X.

It’s instructive to recall that the iPod, Apple’s second hit product under CEO Jobs after the iMac, was not only a consumer electronics device but also originally an accessory to the Mac.

I feel that McGee and other critics of Tim Cook fallaciously lump Apple in with other tech companies that are not Apple competitors. Tesla is not an Apple competitor. Neither are Nvidia or Meta, or for that matter, Amazon. You have to ask what makes Amazon a “tech” company. Amazon is primarily a retailer of physical goods. It sells those goods over the internet, which was novel in the 1990s but unremarkable today. I can order food online, but that doesn’t make the restaurant a tech company. If any product qualifies Amazon for the label, I’d say it would be Amazon Web Services. This is a business product, though, not a consumer product.

Why are we comparing Apple to Meta and Nvidia rather than to Samsung and Xiaomi on mobile, Lenovo and HP on desktop? Perhaps those markets have become saturated and don’t provide as much room for growth as other potential markets. So what? I get the impression that commentators complaining about Tim Cook’s lack of innovation simply want “growth,” unlimited growth, without any purpose behind that growth, technology without the intersection of the liberal arts, to use a metaphor from Steve Jobs, who always had a purpose, his innovation always oriented toward consumer computing hardware

Andrej is an extremely talented and experienced programmer—he has no need for AI assistance at all. He’s using LLMs like this because it’s fun to try out wild new ideas, and the speed at which an LLM can produce code is an order of magnitude faster than even the most skilled human programmers. For low stakes projects and prototypes why not just let it rip? When I talk about vibe coding I mean building software with an LLM without reviewing the code it writes.

If an LLM wrote the code for you, and you then reviewed it, tested it thoroughly and made sure you could explain how it works to someone else that’s not vibe coding, it’s software development. The usage of an LLM to support that activity is immaterial.

The job of a software developer is not (just) to churn out code and features. We need to create code that demonstrably works, and can be understood by other humans (and machines), and that will support continued development in the future. We need to consider performance, accessibility, security, maintainability, cost efficiency. Software engineering is all about trade-offs—our job is to pick from dozens of potential solutions by balancing all manner of requirements, both explicit and implied.

I think vibe coding is the best tool we have to help experienced developers build that intuition as to what LLMs can and cannot do for them. I’ve published more than 80 experiments I built with vibe coding and I’ve learned so much along the way. I would encourage any other developer, no matter their skill level, to try the same.

As many have pointed out , not all code written with AI assistance is vibe code. Per the original definition , it’s code written in contexts where you “forget that the code even exists.” Or as the fairly fleshed-out Wikipedia article puts it: ”A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.”

Our AI minions are also exceptional tools for learning when you move too far towards the high-vibes-low-understanding end of the spectrum. I particularly like getting Claude to write me targeted exercises to practice new concepts when I get lost in generated functions or fail to implement something correctly sans-AI. Even though doubling-down up on engineering skills sometimes feels like learning to operate a textile loom in 1820.

Now, I hate the expression “conspiracy theory” and have been advocating against its casual use for a couple years now. I especially object to how commonly people use the term to slander popular beliefs that contradict institutional statements but are highly credible; we’ve learned that many “conspiracy theories” have ended up being true. But today, I’m going to use the expression to refer to things I’d define like this: a belief or set of beliefs which connect unrelated observations together based on a set of fundamentally false assumptions.

As the internet has proliferated unsubstantiated assumptions, conspiracies have become more abundant. The internet has also incentivized politicians, political influencers, media outlets, and pundits to constantly battle for attention. Attention means influence, which translates to votes, fundraising clicks, subscriptions and money, depending on what you are looking for. And easy ways to get attention include: stoking conspiracies, evoking fear, and providing shock value.

Republican conspiracy theories are at the center of conservative discourse and messaging. Conspiracy theorists on the left, in contrast, are usually marginalized

Skeptics argue that many of the classic symptoms of the disorder — fidgeting, losing things, not following instructions — are simply typical, if annoying, behaviors of childhood. In response, others point to the serious consequences that can result when those symptoms grow more intense, including school failure, social rejection and serious emotional distress.

There are two main kinds of A.D.H.D., inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive, and children in one category often seem to have little in common with children in the other. There are people with A.D.H.D. whom you can’t get to stop talking and others whom you can’t get to start. Some are excessively eager and enthusiastic; others are irritable and moody.

Although the D.S.M. specifies that clinicians shouldn’t diagnose children with A.D.H.D. if their symptoms are better explained by another mental disorder, more than three quarters of children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. do have another mental-health condition as well, according to the C.D.C. More than a third have a diagnosis of anxiety, and a similar fraction have a diagnosed learning disorder. Forty-four percent have been diagnosed with a behavioral disorder like oppositional defiant disorder.

This all complicates the effort to portray A.D.H.D. as a distinct, unique biological disorder. Is a patient with six symptoms really that different from one with five? If a child who experienced early trauma now can’t sit still or stay organized, should she be treated for A.D.H.D.? What about a child with an anxiety disorder who is constantly distracted by her worries? Does she have A.D.H.D., or just A.D.H.D.-like symptoms caused by her anxiety?

The subjects who were given stimulants worked more quickly and intensely than the ones who took the placebo. They dutifully packed and repacked their virtual backpacks, pulling items in and out, trying various combinations. In the end, though, their scores on the knapsack test were no better than the placebo group. The reason? Their strategies for choosing items became significantly worse under the medication. Their choices didn’t make much sense — they just kept pulling random items in and out of the backpack. To an observer, they appeared to be focused, well behaved, on task. But in fact, they weren’t accomplishing anything of much value.

Farah directed me to the work of Scott Vrecko, a sociologist who conducted a series of interviews with students at an American university who used stimulant medication without a prescription. He wrote that the students he interviewed would often “frame the functional benefits of stimulants in cognitive-sounding terms.” But when he dug a little deeper, he found that the students tended to talk about their attention struggles, and the benefits they experienced with medication, in emotional terms rather than intellectual ones. Without the pills, they said, they just didn’t feel interested in the assignments they were supposed to be doing. They didn’t feel motivated. It all seemed pointless.

On stimulant medication, those emotions flipped. “You start to feel such a connection to what you’re working on,” one undergraduate told Vrecko. “It’s almost like you fall in love with it.” As another student put it: On Adderall, “you’re interested in what you’re doing, even if it’s boring.”

Socially, though, there was a price. “Around my friends, I’m usually the most social, but when I’m on it, it feels like my spark is kind of gone,” John said. “I laugh a lot less. I can’t think of anything to say. Life is just less fun. It’s not like I’m sad; I’m just not as happy. It flattens things out.”

John also generally doesn’t take his Adderall during the summer. When he’s not in school, he told me, he doesn’t have any A.D.H.D. symptoms at all. “If I don’t have to do any work, then I’m just a completely regular person,” he said. “But once I have to focus on things, then I have to take it, or else I just won’t get any of my stuff done.”

John’s sense that his A.D.H.D. is situational — that he has it in some circumstances but not in others — is a challenge to some of psychiatry’s longstanding assumptions about the condition. After all, diabetes doesn’t go away over summer vacation. But John’s intuition is supported by scientific evidence. Increasingly, research suggests that for many people A.D.H.D. might be thought of as a condition they experience, sometimes temporarily, rather than a disorder that they have in some unchanging way.

For most of his career, he embraced what he now calls the “medical model” of A.D.H.D — the belief that the brains of people with A.D.H.D. are biologically deficient, categorically different from those of typical, healthy individuals. Now, however, Sonuga-Barke is proposing an alternative model, one that largely sidesteps questions of biology. What matters instead, he says, is the distress children feel as they try to make their way in the world.

Sonuga-Barke’s proposed model locates A.D.H.D. symptoms on a continuum, rather than presenting the condition as a distinct, natural category. And it departs from the medical model in another crucial way: It considers those symptoms not as indications of neurological deficits but as signals of a misalignment between a child’s biological makeup and the environment in which they are trying to function. “I’m not saying it’s not biological,” he says. “I’m just saying I don’t think that’s the right target. Rather than trying to treat and resolve the biology, we should be focusing on building environments that improve outcomes and mental health.”

What the researchers noticed was that their subjects weren’t particularly interested in talking about the specifics of their disorder. Instead, they wanted to talk about the context in which they were now living and how that context had affected their symptoms. Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their “niche,” or the right “fit,” in school or in the workplace. As adults, they had more freedom than they did as children to control the parameters of their lives — whether to go to college, what to study, what kind of career to pursue. Many of them had sensibly chosen contexts that were a better match for their personalities than what they experienced in school, and as a result, they reported that their A.D.H.D. symptoms had essentially disappeared. In fact, some of them were questioning whether they had ever had a disorder at all — or if they had just been in the wrong environment as children.

The work environments where the subjects were thriving varied. For some, the appeal of their new jobs was that they were busy and cognitively demanding, requiring constant multitasking. For others, the right context was physical, hands-on labor. For all of them, what made a difference was having work that to them felt “intrinsically interesting.”

“Rather than a static ‘attention deficit’ that appeared under all circumstances,” the M.T.A. researchers wrote, “our subjects described their propensity toward distraction as contextual. … Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”

For the young adults in the “niche” study who were interviewed about their work lives, the transition that helped them overcome their A.D.H.D. symptoms often was leaving academic work for something more kinetic. For Sonuga-Barke, it was the opposite. At university, he would show up at the library at 9 every morning and sit in his carrel working until 5. The next day, he would do it again. Growing up, he says, he had a natural tendency to “hyperfocus,” and back at school in Derby, that tendency looked to his teachers like daydreaming. At university, it became his secret weapon

I asked Sonuga-Barke what he might have gained if he grew up in a different time and place — if he was prescribed Ritalin or Adderall at age 8 instead of just being packed off to the remedial class. “I don’t think I would have gained anything,” he said. “I think without medication, you learn alternative ways of dealing with stuff. In my particular case, there are a lot of characteristics that have helped me. My mind is constantly churning away, thinking of things. I never relax. The way I motivate myself is to turn everything into a problem and to try and solve the problem.”

“The simple model has always been, basically, ‘A.D.H.D. plus medication equals no A.D.H.D.,’” he says. “But that’s not true. Medication is not a silver bullet. It never will be.” What medication can sometimes do, he believes, is allow families more room to communicate. “At its best,” he says, “medication can provide a window for parents to engage with their kids,” by moderating children’s behavior, at least temporarily, so that family life can become more than just endless fights about overdue homework and lost lunchboxes. “If you have a more positive relationship with your child, they’re going to have a better outcome. Not for their A.D.H.D. — it’s probably going to be just the same. But in terms of dealing with the self-hatred and low self-esteem that often goes along with A.D.H.D.

The alternative model, by contrast, tells a child a very different story: that his A.D.H.D. symptoms exist on a continuum, one on which we all find ourselves; that he may be experiencing those symptoms as much because of where he is as because of who he is; and that next year, if things change in his surroundings, those symptoms might change as well. Armed with that understanding, he and his family can decide whether medication makes sense — whether for him, the benefits are likely to outweigh the drawbacks. At the same time, they can consider whether there are changes in his situation, at school or at home, that might help alleviate his symptoms.

Admittedly, that version of A.D.H.D. has certain drawbacks. It denies parents the clear, definitive explanation for their children’s problems that can come as such a relief, especially after months or years of frustration and uncertainty. It often requires a lot of flexibility and experimentation on the part of patients, families and doctors. But it has two important advantages as well: First, the new model more accurately reflects the latest scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. And second, it gives children a vision of their future in which things might actually improve — not because their brains are chemically refashioned in a way that makes them better able to fit into the world, but because they find a way to make the world fit better around their complicated and distinctive brains.

Where previous generations of tech companies sold software to hotels and taxi companies, Airbnb and Uber used software to create new businesses and to redefine markets. Uber changed what we mean when we say ‘taxi’ and Airbnb changed hotels.

But for all sorts of reasons, the actual effect of that on the taxi and hotel industries was very different. The regulation is different. The supply of people with a car and few hours to spare is very different from the supply of people with a spare room to rent out (indeed, there is adverse selection in that difference). The delta between waving your hand on a street corner and pressing a button on your phone is different to the delta between booking a hotel room and booking a stranger’s apartment.

Sometimes disruption is much more about new demand than challenging the existing market, or only affects a peripheral business, as happened with Skype.

it’s always easier to shout ‘disruption!’ or ‘AI!’ than to ask what kind.

Taste has historically been reserved for conversation about things like fashion and art. Now, we look for it in our social media feeds, the technology we use, the company we keep, and the people we hire.

When I ask people what they mean by “taste,” they’ll stumble around for a bit and eventually land on something like “you know it when you see it,” or “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” I understand. Words like taste are hard to pin down, perhaps because they describe a sensibility more than any particular quality, a particular thing. We’re inclined to leave them unencumbered by a definition, to preserve their ability to shift shapes.

’ve found a taste-filled life to be a richer one. To pursue it is to appreciate ourselves, each other, and the stuff we’re surrounded by a whole lot more.

I can’t think of a piece of writing that does this more effectively than Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In her words, “a sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about... To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble.

Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

Someone could have impeccable taste in art, without producing any themselves. Those who create tasteful things are almost always deep appreciators, though.

we typically talk about it in binaries. One can have taste or not. Great taste means almost the same thing as taste.

They’re the people you always go to for restaurant or movie or gear recommendations. Maybe it’s the person you ask to be an extra set of eyes on an email or a project brief before you send it out.

It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention.

As John Saltivier says in an essay about building a set of stairs, “surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.”

To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.” The sought-after interior designer may not mind gas station coffee. The prolific composer may not give a damn about how they dress.

Taste in too many things would be tortuous. The things we have taste in often start as a pea under the mattress.

it is often formed through the integration of diverse, and wide-ranging inputs. Steve Jobs has said, “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

taste gets you to the thing that’s more than just correct. Taste hits different. It intrigues. It compels. It moves. It enchants. It fascinates. It seduces.

Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize  true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul. This is why it is so alluring.

many snobs (coffee snobs, gear snobs, wine snobs, etc.) often have great taste. But I would say that taste is the sensibility, and snobbery is one way to express the sensibility. It’s not the only way.

If rich people often have good taste it’s because they grew up around nice things, and many of them acquired an intolerance for not nice things as a result. That’s a good recipe for taste, but it’s not sufficient and it’s definitely not a guarantee. I know people that are exceedingly picky about the food they eat and never pay more than $20 for a meal.

creating forces taste upon its maker. Creators must master self-expression and craft if they’re going to make something truly compelling.

artists are more sensitive. They’re more observant, feel things more deeply, more obsessive about details, more focused on how they measure up to greatness.

Picasso remarking that “when art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” Taste rests on turpentine.

the process of metabolizing the world is a slow one. Wield your P/N meter well, take your time learning what you find compelling, and why. There are no shortcuts to taste. Taste cannot sublimate. It can only bloom. To quote Susan Sontag one last time, “taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.

Design Engineer is the latest label we're chucking onto the pile of obfuscatory design titles alongside interface designer, interaction designer, software designer, web designer, product designer, design systems architect, UI/UX designer, UX engineer, UI engineer, and front-of-the-front-end engineer.

Throwing this extra label onto the pile feels necessary though. Design engineer captures something simple, important, and worth distinguishing: a person who sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering, and works to bridge the gap between them.

They're people who know how to run a design process to decide how something should work, look, and feel, and have the engineering chops to implement it. They can quickly iterate on ideas by cycling between design exploration, research, and live code. The skillset is ideal for prototyping, exploratory interaction design, and building robust design systems.

Most from a small set of companies like Vercel, Linear, The Browser Company and Replit, known for their attention to interface design detail and slick product interactions, who are clearly encouraging and cultivating design-engineer hybrids.

People are incentivised to only share their sexy, shiny, flawless creations, rather than their messy process or shameful failures. Some of the especially tedious and labourious work isn't easily shareable, such as advocating for robust design systems and cleaning up legacy code.

I am not under any illusions that these public works constitute the entirety of what design engineers create or spend all day making. I'm sure some spend their days “aligning stakeholders,” buried under a mountain of strategic documents and trapped by heirarchical approval chains. Say a small prayer for them.

With the comprehensive application of Artificial Intelligence into the creation and post production of images, it seems questionable if the resulting visualisations can still be considered ‘photographs’ in a classical sense – drawing with light. Automation has been part of the popular strain of photography since its inception, but even the amateurs with only basic knowledge of the craft could understand themselves as author of their images. We state a legitimation crisis for the current usage of the term. This paper is an invitation to consider Synthography as a term for a new genre for image production based on AI, observing the current occurrence and implementation in consumer cameras and post-production.

People subscribe to a set of beliefs because they identify themselves as members of a tribe—the left-wing or right-wing tribe. Thus they support whatever policy their team happens to support at a given moment. As Lewis puts it, “if the right-wing team is currently in favor of tax cuts and opposed to abortion, then those who identify with that team will adopt those positions as a matter of social conformity, not because both are expressions of some underlying principle.”

Issues like abortion, tax policy, immigration, criminal justice, and environmental regulation are mostly unrelated, so believing that (say) abortion is immoral, shouldn’t commit you to believe that (say) taxes are too high. Yet as Lewis points out, people’s opinions on these issues tend to travel together, as it were. Tribalism is a good explanation for why many Americans’ constellation of policy positions often are what they are: people first come to identify with a political party and only later do they come to accept all or most of its policy positions, even when the issues themselves are orthogonal to each other.

to approach the left/right split it might be best to start by wholly abstracting from political practice in order to enter the realm of political theory. In this context, political practice refers to the actions of politicians, social movements, and other political actors in the real world. Political theory, meanwhile, refers to the written or spoken articulation of political doctrines, either by writers (in their treatises) or politicians (in their speeches). Practice refers to what political actors actually do; theory refers to the normative justifications given for what ought to be done.

The main distinction between left and right is that the left advances a politics of egalitarianism, while the right opposes the left and attempts to defend some other value—tradition, for example, or individual freedom, or public order.

whatever its language, form, and following, it makes the assumption that there are unjustified inequalities which those on the right see as sacred or inviolable or natural or inevitable and that these should be reduced or abolished.

Consider some of the political ideologies we now refer to as leftist: socialism, radical feminism, and anti-racism. The three of them share a commitment to eradicating some system of power that is deemed to be unequal and hence unjust—respectively wealth, gender, and racial inequality.

leftists derive more egalitarian policy prescriptions from their view of equality than conservatives do, even if both can agree that all humans are of equal moral worth.

this analysis of the left/right split works best at the level of theory, as an ideal-type representation of both camps. The left claims to fight on behalf of equality, while the right claims to oppose the left and fight on behalf of individual freedom, or of social order, or some other value different from equality. In practice, both sides often fail to live up to their ideals; sometimes they even betray them entirely.

Across both time and space, leftists have sought to promote some strong version of equality, while rightists have sought to defeat the left and defend some other primary value.

Theories are helpful to the extent that they explain certain phenomena, and the left/right political spectrum does explain two of the main political-philosophic camps in modern history: those whose highest value is equality, and those whose highest value is both different from equality and, in their view, at odds with it.

a global pandemic struck, markets crashed, and the possibility of a democratic socialist presidency in America started to fade. Much of our work with clients has been about how to address new audiences in a time of massive fragmentation and the collapse of consensus reality.

All the while, people have been eager to launch new products more focused on impressions than materiality, and “spending on experiences” has become the standard of premium consumption.

it’s time to reassess the consumer experience that came along with the neoliberal fantasy of “unlimited” movement of people, goods and ideas around the globe.

Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience, popped up primarily in settings that were on the verge of disintegration, and hinged on physical pilgrimages to evanescent meccas. We also believe that the experience economy is dying, its key commodity (umami) has changed status, and nobody knows what’s coming next.

Umami was the quality of the media mix or the moodboard that granted it cohesion-despite-heterogeneity. Umami was also the proximity of people on Emily’s museum panel, all women who are mostly not old, mostly not straight, and mostly doing something interesting in the arts, but we didn’t know exactly what. It was the conversation-dance experience and the poet’s play and the alt-electronica-diva’s first foray into another discipline. It was the X-factor that made a certain MA-1 worth 100x as much as its identical twin.

“Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial. Umami is what you got when you didn’t get anything.

What was actually happening was the enrichment of financial assets over the creation of any ‘real wealth’ along with corresponding illusions of progress. As very little of this newly minted money has been invested into building new productive capacity, infrastructure, or actually new things, money has just been sloshing around in a frothy cesspool – from WeWork to Juicero to ill-advised real estate Ponzi to DTC insanity, creating a global everything-bubble.

Value, in an economic sense, is theoretically created by new things based on new ideas. But when the material basis for these new things is missing or actively deteriorating and profits must be made, what is there to be done? Retreat to the immaterial and work with what already exists: meaning. Meaning is always readily available to be repeated, remixed, and/or cannibalized in service of creating the sensation of the new.

The essential mechanics are simple: it’s stating there’s a there-there when there isn’t one. And directing attention to a new “there” before anyone notices they were staring at a void. It’s the logic of gentrification, not only of the city, but also the self, culture and civilization itself. What’s made us so gullible, and this whole process possible, was an inexhaustible appetite for umami.

eyond its synergistic effect, umami has a few other sensory effects that are relevant to our theory. For one, it creates the sense of thickness and body in food. (“Umami adds body…If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker – it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.”) For another, it’s released when foods break down into parts. (“When organic matter breaks down, the glutamate molecule breaks apart. This can happen on a stove when you cook meat, over time when you age a parmesan cheese, by fermentation as in soy sauce or under the sun as a tomato ripens. When glutamate becomes L-glutamate, that’s when things get “delicious.””) These three qualities: SYNERGY, IMPRESSION OF THICKNESS, and PARTS > WHOLE, are common to cultural umami, as well.

Umami hunting was a way for the West to consume an exotic, ethnic, global “taste” that was also invisible and up to their decoding / articulation.

when something is correctly salted, Chang argues, it tastes both over and undersalted at once. As a strange loop, this saltiness makes you stand back and regard your food; you start thinking about “the system it represents and your response to it”. He argues that this meta-regard keeps you in the moment and connected to the deliciousness of your food. We counter that it intensifies a moment in a flow, temporarily thickening your experience without keeping you anywhere for long.

strong flavors, namely umami, mark a surge of intensity in the flow of experience. It also becomes clear that paradox itself is at the heart of contemporary consumption. For example: “This shouldn’t be good but it is” “This doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be” “This is both too much and not enough” “I shouldn’t be here but i am” “This could be anywhere but it’s here”

Parts > Whole is just another way of saying a combination of things has emergent properties. In itself this doesn’t mean much, as almost any combination of things has emergent properties, especially in the domains of taste and culture. Coffee + vinegar is worse than its constitutive parts. A suit + sneakers is a greater kind of corny than either worn separately. Most emergence is trivial. The Umami Theory of Value centers on losing your sense of what’s trivial and what’s valuable.

If you tried to unpack your intuition, the absence of the there-there would quickly become evident. Yet in practice this didn’t matter, because few people were able to reach this kind of deep self-interrogation. The cycle was simply too fast. There was never time for these concoctions to congeal into actual new things (e.g. create the general category of K-Pop patrons for Central European arts institutions). We can’t be sure if they ever meant anything beyond seeming yummy at the time.

This was not meant to be a nihilistic, Gen-X faceplant (“nothing means anything any more”), since we think that perspective can paper over the nuances of consumer experience, business realities, and cultural crisis. Instead, we wanted to link macroeconomic and macrotrend observations to everyday experience, especially in the context of burgeoning collapse.

This is reflected in their name: a “language model” implies that they are tools for working with language. That’s what they’ve been trained to do, and it’s language manipulation where they truly excel. Want them to work with specific facts? Paste those into the language model as part of your original prompt! There are so many applications of language models that fit into this calculator for words category: Summarization. Give them an essay and ask for a summary. Question answering: given these paragraphs of text, answer this specific question about the information they represent. Fact extraction: ask for bullet points showing the facts presented by an article. Rewrites: reword things to be more “punchy” or “professional” or “sassy” or “sardonic”—part of the fun here is using increasingly varied adjectives and seeing what happens. They’re very good with language after all! Suggesting titles—actually a form of summarization. World’s most effective thesaurus. “I need a word that hints at X”, “I’m very Y about this situation, what could I use for Y?”—that kind of thing. Fun, creative, wild stuff. Rewrite this in the voice of a 17th century pirate. What would a sentient cheesecake think of this? How would Alexander Hamilton rebut this argument? Turn this into a rap battle. Illustrate this business advice with an anecdote about sea otters running a kayak rental shop. Write the script for kickstarter fundraising video about this idea.

A flaw in this analogy: calculators are repeatable Andy Baio pointed out a flaw in this particular analogy: calculators always give you the same answer for a given input. Language models don’t—if you run the same prompt through a LLM several times you’ll get a slightly different reply every time.

The purposive design, production and marketing of legal but health-demoting products that stimulate habitual consumption and pleasure for maximum profit has been called ‘limbic capitalism’. In this article, drawing on alcohol and tobacco as key examples, we extend this framework into the digital realm. We argue that ‘limbic platform capitalism’ is a serious threat to the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities and populations. Accessed routinely through everyday digital devices, social media platforms aggressively intensify limbic capitalism because they also work through embodied limbic processes. These platforms are designed to generate, analyse and apply vast amounts of personalised data in an effort to tune flows of online content to capture users’ time and attention, and influence their affects, moods, emotions and desires in order to increase profits.

Bikeshed refers to topics which have never recieved concensus and are likely to generate side-discussions and flames unless all participants are well-read on all the past history. It stems from the idea that big changes (like the building of a power plant) go through quickly, since everyone assumes that someone else has checked it out, while simple changes (like building a bikeshed) often get mired in bureaucracy, since everyone has an opinion on it.