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Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable. Style is a set of constraints that you stick to. You can explore many types of constraints: colors, shapes, materials, textures, fonts, language, clothing, decor, beliefs, flavors, sounds, scents, rituals. Your style doesn’t have to please anyone else. Play by your own rules. Everything you do is open to stylistic interpretation.

Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.

Having a style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives you focus. I always pluralize tags so I never have to wonder what to name new tags. Style gives you leverage. Every time you reuse your style you save time. A durable style is a great investment.

if you want to edit your constraints, you can. It will be easier to adopt the new constraints if you already had some clearly defined. You don’t need a style for everything. Make a deliberate choice about what needs consistency and what doesn’t. If you stick with your constraints long enough, your style becomes a cohesive and recognizable point of view.

I will quibble with “There is no simple formula”. It’s the execution that is difficult and complex. But at a high level the formula Apple has applied to make the iPhone (and iPad) the unprecedented success that they are is remarkably simple.

keep iterating, tirelessly and continuously, to improve that product year after year. Focus on aspects that cannot be copied or imitated. In the iPhone’s case, those are things such as custom chips, superior hardware components and manufacturing techniques, software frameworks decades in the making, a culture that prioritizes great design, and an ever-expanding ecosystem that keeps customers in the flock by making them happy.

I am a huge fan of early experimental cinema – pioneers like Mieles and John Stuart Blackton but also experimental animators like Mary Ellen Bute, Oskar Fischinger, and Len Lye. At the simplest level, I love animation, and I am fascinated with the idea that through animating we bring things to life. In studying these artists' work you can see them exploring the boundaries of what film, a young and nascent medium at that point, can be.

I love to write shader code, which, at a simple level, means you are writing the code at the pixel level – saying, execute this code for this specific pixel to figure out its color. This makes it ideal for light simulation, where you can sort of set up virtual lights, and calculate how the pixel will be lit or what color it should be. I find it a form of painting by light and I like to explore what visual stories we can tell this way. Shader programming is often very free form and improvisational, where you keep changing and seeing what happens and I find I enjoy working in an iterative way with these algorithms.

In teaching I think often my job is to work with folks with an arts background and help introduce computation concepts and computer science / coding into their vocabulary and vice versa, helping folks with a technical background explore how to make art and poetry. I feel like I am helping people cross bridges

Much of the mockery towards Che came from the queer community, who were pretty easily able to see the difference between an authentic representation of a queer character, and a kind of walking diversity checkbox designed to bring a style of woke chaos to a story.

AJLT has clearly been engaged in the criticism of SATC - the three main characters all get a black friend who is given almost equal time and importance. And Che not only answers criticism of lack of representation of sexuality on SATC, but cuts off future criticism of AJLT.

In one scene, Che is watching a focus group give feedback on the pilot of their sitcom. A young, clearly queer member speaks up about how much they hate the “character” of Che in the sitcom. They clearly represent the fan and critical response to Che Diax in AJLT season 1, and it’s fascinating to see what the show thinks these kinds of people are - ie a minorly updated blue haired woke stereotype.

In the show, this brings Che to tears, and through this scene, our criticism of Che is emotionally rebuked. We can see that the tears of Che Diaz are the tears of the writers, appalled at our meanness.

fans are always going to be motivated by different things to the writer. A fan, especially ones with the kind of parasocial relationship to shows and characters that are big these days, are always going to want the best for the character, to see their favourites thrive and find love and get the magic sword, etc. A writer doesn’t and shouldn’t care about any of that - a writer should only be writing the best story, creating the most fulfilling narrative arc. Sometimes, when it comes to crafting a narrative, pain and suffering is important for the character, goals need to be unreached, swords remain in the stone.

Introduced as Carrie’s “modern” podcast partner, and then later Miranda’s queer sexual awakening, Che was a non-binary standup comedian who unfortunately had a lot of functions to fulfil in the story. They were a kind of stand-in to represent exactly everything that had changed in sex and dating and gender and sexuality in the years since the original Sex and The City had gracefully left our screens.

They were a truly baffling character, a kind of frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from hazy ideas of gender and queer theory, mashed into one character to be a comedic foil for the older (and somewhat startlingly conservative at times) original characters - but also as a way to try and seriously engage with ideas of representation and diversity. You never knew if you were meant to laugh at Che, or at the other character’s moments of less-than-wokeness around Che - or take them seriously.

And Just Like That - a show that can only be described as watching Sex and the City through the aged filter on TikTok while suffering a potentially fatal fever - is the greatest show on television. By that I mean it’s so bad. God I love it. It’s just inexplicably confusing, a show defined by big swings that almost never hit, but that doesn’t matter, there’s a kind of deranged joy in that. It’s almost perfect. But it’s also so weird.There seems to be a happy chaos to the show, a willingness to just put forward insane new developments for these beloved characters, and just run with it.

the reason that Che Diaz felt so out of place, a sore thumb, is  because their entire arc in the latest season is responding to fan and critical discourse.

A lot of Americans are underinsured because of genuine hardship, and suffer more than their wealthier counterparts do from uncompensated losses. But lower-income people also suffer disproportionately if coverage isn’t available at all.

In California, insurance companies are prohibited from using statistical modeling to assess future fire risks when setting rates; premium increases must be based on insurers’ loss history, not on the growing likelihood of serious fires.

Jesse Keenan, a Tulane University urban-planning professor who studies climate change and the built environment, expresses some frustration with consumer advocates who view the rising cost of coverage as a “power play” by the industry. “It often is,” he told me. “But what [advocates] don’t acknowledge is the culpability of a lot of different actors—local governments that do not strengthen land and zoning use, state legislators who pass laws making it harder to place obligations on homeowners, and a federal government that writes big, unconditional checks. So there is a lot of blame to go around.”

Pesci and Tomei, on the other hand, create a quirky relationship that I liked. Neither one is played as a dummy. They're smart, in their own ways, but involved in a legal enterprise they are completely unprepared for. Tomei's surprise appearance as an expert witness is a high point, and left me feeling I would like to see this couple again. Maybe in a screenplay that was more focused.

Haigh tells this potentially maudlin story with such a light touch that even its biggest reveals hit like a velvet hammer, and his screenplay so movingly echoes Adam’s yearning to be known — across time and space — that the film always feels rooted in his emotional present, even as it pings back and forth between dimensions.

And so Haigh, in rather overt terms, slowly begins to recontextualize Adam’s sexuality as more of a conduit for his despondency than a root cause, leveraging a personal story about the consequences of keeping pain out into a primordial one about the catharsis of letting it in

“All of Us Strangers” does too, and it never shies away from how hard it can be to start again, especially once Harry begins to struggle with his own advice

Jonah provides basic instruction in mindfulness techniques, like focusing on the breath or sensations in the body, to learn to make space for difficult emotions and harsh, self-critical thought patterns nonjudgmentally.

When viewed with curiosity, the intensity of the emotions and thoughts is reduced, and clients gain more space to respond with wisdom and compassion. By observing these inner experiences without running away from them, mindfulness-based therapy helps clients increase insight into the patterns and underlying causes of mental health symptoms like anxiety, depression, or compulsive behavior.

If you are using emotionally independent language, it may trigger some insecurities in the other person who may think that you aren’t as interested or invested in the relationship. It may be helpful to let the other person know that you are working on your emotional reactivity and trying out new approaches, to help minimize the potential perceived threat on their end.

Becoming emotionally independent can be a challenging journey, although there are numerous potential benefits to reclaiming your own needs and desires and decreasing your emotional reactivity to other people (i.e., managing your own insecurities or unproductive relationship expectations).

By engaging in self-soothing strategies prior to starting the conversation, you can begin to neutralize your anxiety so that you don’t start the conversation prematurely in an emotionally reactive way. You want to be able to hear what your loved one is saying to you without reacting from a place of fear, sadness, or anger. This is part of creating emotional independence. The objective is to create some distance between you and your loved one so that you can understand their experience independent of it being seen as a reflection of your value or the stability of your relationship.

Inboxes only let us Close open loops if they’re reliable—that is, if you can add something to it with total confidence that it’ll get “handled” in some reasonable timeframe. “Handled” is fuzzy: you just need to feel that the fate of those items roughly reflects your true preferences. You’ll trust an inbox system which ends up dropping 90% of items if the other 10% were the only ones you really cared about. You won’t trust an inbox system in which 90% of tasks get done, but the 10% which don’t get done are the ones you really cared about.In efficient inboxes, it may be easy to maintain this kind of confidence: the departure naturally rate exceeds the arrival rate. But most knowledge worker inboxes don’t look like this. The rates are highly variable, which creates bottlenecks. Not every item actually needs to get handled, but people are over-optimistic, so items accrue in a backlog.

“Come right off ‘Fury,’ right? I had the town in my hand — could’ve done anything, and I did do anything,” Ayer continued. “And [I] go on this journey with [‘Suicide Squad’]. And the same thing — authentic, truthful, let’s do all the rehearsal, let’s really get in each other’s souls. Let’s create this amazing, collaborative thing, right? And then ‘Deadpool’ opened, right? And they never tested ‘Batman v. Superman,’ so they were expecting a different result, and then they got hammered by all the critics. Then it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re going to turn David Ayer’s dark, soulful movie into a fucking comedy now.’”

First, and this is the default, they’re saying no because they just don’t like it. They have their own opinion of how this should be done and don’t want outsiders making them change it. Quite possibly they already considered your plan and decided against it. The new policy is probably awkward, annoying and inconvenient, and will cost money (even if it’s not explicitly aimed at profits). It’s a pain in the arse. However, it is also possible, and not actually a big deal, and in the end it won’t really damage the product or the company. They can do it - they just don’t like it.

In the end, it doesn’t actually matter much, and life goes on. ‘No’ just means ‘that’s annoying’.

Second, though, the tech industry (or the doctors, or the farmers) might be saying no because this really will have very serious negative consequences that you haven’t understood. My favourite example is California’s 2019 ‘AB5’ law. This aimed to classify ‘gig economy’ workers, especially (and deliberately) Uber drivers, as employees, with access to healthcare. This might or might not be a good policy objective (reasonable people can debate this), but the law itself was drafted so ineptly that it effectively made anyone who did any freelance work an employee, and hence in turn effectively banned freelance work. There followed a desperate scramble to exempt over 100 professions, from doctors to truck drivers to hairdressers, before the whole thing had to be abandoned.

the third kind is ‘we actually can’t do that’. The perennial example here, of course, is encryption. For the last 25 years, engineers have said ‘we can make it secure, or we can let law enforcement have access, but that means the Chinese can get in too” and politicians reply “no, make secure but not for people we like”.

My old boss Marc Andreessen, back when he was on the internet, liked to call this the ‘nerd harder’ argument. The engineer says not “I don’t want to” nor “that’s a bad idea” but “I genuinely have no idea how to do that even if I wanted to” and the policy-maker replies “you’re an engineer - work it out!” “Work it out” is generally a demand to invent new mathematics, but sadly, mathematics doesn’t work like that. Your MPs’ WhatsApp group can be secure, or it can readable by law enforcement and the Chinese, but you cannot have encryption that can be broken only by our spies and not their spies. Pick one.

The policy class that got their staff to print their emails will age out and be replaced by the generation that grew up sending emojis, and understands that tech policy is just as nuanced, complex and full of trade-offs as healthcare, transport or housing policy.

A person can’t mimic another voice perfectly (impressionists don’t have to pay licence fees) but they can listen to a thousand hours of music and make something in that style - a ‘pastiche’, we sometimes call it. If a person did that, they wouldn’t have to pay a fee to all those artists, so if we use a computer for that, do we need to pay them?

I think most people understand that if I post a link to a news story on my Facebook feed and tell my friends to read it, it’s absurd for the newspaper to demand payment for this. A newspaper, indeed, doesn’t pay a restaurant a percentage when it writes a review.

one way to think about this might be that AI makes practical at a massive scale things that were previously only possible on a small scale. This might be the difference between the police carrying wanted pictures in their pockets and the police putting face recognition cameras on every street corner - a difference in scale can be a difference in principle. What outcomes do we want? What do we want the law to be? What can it be?

OpenAI hasn’t ‘pirated’ your book or your story in the sense that we normally use that word, and it isn’t handing it out for free. Indeed, it doesn’t need that one novel in particular at all. In Tim O’Reilly’s great phrase, data isn’t oil; data is sand. It’s only valuable in the aggregate of billions,, and your novel or song or article is just one grain of dust in the Great Pyramid.

it’s supposed to be inferring ‘intelligence’ (a placeholder word) from seeing as much as possible of how people talk, as a proxy for how they think.

it doesn’t need your book or website in particular and doesn’t care what you in particular wrote about, but it does need ‘all’ the books and ‘all’ the websites. It would work if one company removed its content, but not if everyone did.

What if I use an engine trained on the last 50 years of music to make something that sounds entirely new and original? No-one should be under the delusion that this won’t happen.

I can buy the same camera as Cartier-Bresson, and I can press the button and make a picture without being able to draw or paint, but that’s not what makes the artist - photography is about where you point the camera, what image you see and which you choose. No-one claims a machine made the image.

Spotify already has huge numbers of ‘white noise’ tracks and similar, gaming the recommendation algorithm and getting the same payout per play as Taylor Swift or the Rolling Stones. If we really can make ‘music in the style of the last decade’s hits,’ how much of that will there be, and how will we wade through it? How will we find the good stuff, and how will we define that? Will we care?

“Wednesday night, we witnessed over two hours of fear-mongering and gaslighting, of cynicism and whataboutism, of canned talking points and memorized one-liners,” Hasan said. Despite the “pious-sounding, high-minded” tone struck by many candidates, their responses lacked substance and underscored their lack of seriousness in the race. “Forget a vision for America. These people have no vision for the Republican Party — a party that lost the House in 2018, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020 and only narrowly regained the House in 2022,” he added. “It was another reminder that the Republican Party of the United States is not a normal center-right or conservative party… These are political pygmies, trailing a disgraced front-runner who is facing 91 criminal counts in four different jurisdictions.”