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when we say “I want my partner to be ambitious” we’re actually saying something like “I want to feel relaxed around my partner” or “I want to feel safe around my partner”.Their ambition is just a way of accessing that internal experience.

Let’s say you want someone who is really emotionally vulnerable, someone who can and will communicate what they’re feeling. That, in turn, makes you feel relaxed, because you don’t have to guess if they’re mad or upset.The internal experience we’re seeking, what we actually want, is relaxation. Emotional honesty is one way to access that relaxation.

Validating whether the external characteristics you’re seeking exist in another person to the extent that you desire can be confusing.Much less confusing is this question: “do I feel relaxed around this person?”Or: “Is this person helping me access more relaxation in my life?”Instead of playing detective with another person’s personality, we now get to turn our attention inwards, towards how we’re feeling. In return, we get a much clearer answer.

our emotional experience reveals itself through our patterns of behaviour. We can gather evidence on how we’re feeling through how we’re showing up around that person.If I’m clear that I want to feel warmth when I’m around my future partner, then I can look at how I acted on a date. Did I show up as the warmest version of myself? Did the other person’s presence make embodying that warmth easier or harder?The ultimate version of this question is “do I show up as my favourite version of myself around this person?”

This question incorporates everything we’ve been discussing: it centers our attention on our internal experience, using the lens of our patterns of behaviour.It also avoids us having to do extensive analysis of whether this person is a “match” based on a list of characteristics we think we should be seeking.

consider these journal prompts:When I think of my favourite version of myself, what is that person like? What feelings do they have abundant access to? How do they show up on a date?When do I have the easiest time being that version of me? Around which people? What qualities do those people have?What feelings are most important for me to experience with a potential partner? Have I been prioritizing those feelings?⚡️ insights into cultivating your most confident self; delivered once a weekSubscribe

In many places, the experience of taking transit is one of being “processed” or fed through a giant industrial machine. For those cities that manage to make travelling through them joyful and exciting, there’s something special that goes beyond transportation — a sense of care and functioning that even the fastest, most frequent train can’t replace.

Stations in Japan are rarely very fancy, but they feel chaotic in a good way. In New York City, the chaos of the subway is downstream of the rats, litter, mysterious liquids dripping onto the platforms, and worn concrete and steel. Japanese train and subway stations, while they often feel very old, are almost all well-lit, and filled with clearly modern touches, from bright tactile wayfinding, to the glossy plastic of newly-installed platform gates that let you get close, but not too close to the trains.

Much like in London the announcements on trains in Japan are pleasant and sound happy, but even better – transit systems are often filled with musical tunes, announcing arriving trains, or the current station. Instead of just the sound of waiting passengers and wheels sliding across ribbons of steel you actually have gentle tunes.

I should reject this whole crop of image-generating, chatting, large-language-model-based code-writing infinite typing monkeys. But, dammit, I can’t. I love them too much. I am drawn back over and over, for hours, to learn and interact with them. I have them make me lists, draw me pictures, summarize things, read for me.

AI is like having my very own shameless monster as a pet.

I love to ask it questions that I’m ashamed to ask anyone else: “What is private equity?” “How can I convince my family to let me get a dog?”

It helps me write code—has in fact renewed my relationship with writing code. It creates meaningless, disposable images. It teaches me music theory and helps me write crappy little melodies. It does everything badly and confidently. And I want to be it. I want to be that confident, that unembarrassed, that ridiculously sure of myself.

Hilariously, the makers of ChatGPT—AI people in general—keep trying to teach these systems shame, in the form of special preambles, rules, guidance (don’t draw everyone as a white person, avoid racist language), which of course leads to armies of dorks trying to make the bot say racist things and screenshotting the results. But the current crop of AI leadership is absolutely unsuited to this work. They are themselves shameless, grasping at venture capital and talking about how their products will run the world, asking for billions or even trillions in investment. They insist we remake civilization around them and promise it will work out. But how are they going to teach a computer to behave if they can’t?

By aggregating the world’s knowledge, chomping it into bits with GPUs, and emitting it as multi-gigabyte software that somehow knows what to say next, we've made the funniest parody of humanity ever.

These models have all of our qualities, bad and good. Helpful, smart, know-it-alls with tendencies to prejudice, spewing statistics and bragging like salesmen at the bar. They mirror the arrogant, repetitive ramblings of our betters, the horrific confidence that keeps driving us over the same cliffs. That arrogance will be sculpted down and smoothed over, but it will have been the most accurate representation of who we truly are to exist so far, a real mirror of our folly, and I will miss it when it goes.

I've changed my mind quite a bit on the role and importance of chat interfaces. I used to think they were the primitive version of rich, creative, more intuitive interfaces that would come in the future; now I think conversational, anthropomorphic interfaces will coexist with more rich dexterous ones, and the two will both evolve over time to be more intuitive, capable, and powerful.

I kept checking the database manually after each interaction to see it was indeed updating the right records — but after a few hours of using it, I've basically learned to trust it. I ask it to do things, it tells me it did them, and I don't check anymore. Full delegation.

How can I trust it? High task success rate — I interact with it, and observe that it doesn't let me down, over and over again. The price for this degree of delegation is giving up control over exactly how the task is done. It often does things differently from the way I would, but that doesn't matter as long as outputs from the system are useful for me.

To see something funny on the internet, immediately think of a friend who would love it, and then send it to said person is one of the nicest little things we have going in this troubling world. It’s beautiful to be on either end of that interaction. To send is to know that you’re brightening someone’s day. To receive is to know that someone out there is thinking of you, anticipating your smile.

“You don't say ‘Oh yeah, that meme is old’. You say "Oh that's a CLASSIC.’"

Trump realized modern GOP politics aren't about policies or governing well -- it's more akin to cutting a pro-Wrestling promo. His audience isn't waiting on a profound insight on the state of the republic, they're waiting to see who Trump will hurt and they'll cheer him on when it's the right people.

Americans can overwhemingly agree that Trump creates a negative tone but are drawn to it and support him. It's why in pro-wrestling the heel (or bad guy) can have the most dye hard fans. Trump is the modern Stone Cold Steve Austin and making a mockery of doing the equivalent of repeating "what? what? what?" when people talk -- thereby discrediting discourse itself, and finishing by never apologizing "that's the bottom line because I said so" is Trump's appeal.

Trump doesn't have to have policies, the GOP doesn't have to have a platform, there isn't any specificity of what they'll do with power, all that matters is they can own the libs.

A “pro” device that goes pro by getting thinner and lighter, not heavier and thicker, is not a non sequitur. Or at least not necessarily. What makes for a better iPad is simply orthogonal, in many regards, to what makes for a better Mac. Way back in 2010, when the iPad was new (and ran what was called iOS) and it felt like the Mac’s days might be winding down, I wrote, “It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.” I meant that figuratively. But these new M4 iPad Pros mean it quite literally.

I’m so viscerally disgusted by 95% of the things that I have to do to promote this movie. To operate in these hallowed halls of capitalism and not feel absolutely insane, it requires some kind of taking the red pill. Or privilege-tinted sunglasses.

“‘The Matrix’ is very in conversation with trans themes that my work is also interested in: this feeling of unreality that can be a potent metaphor for being trans in the world or figuring out that you’re trans,” they continue

I’m very suspicious of any externalized representation of transness,” Schoenbrun confesses. “Trans experience is something that’s classically represented by Hollywood as this very external force, when actually it is so internal.

Back to “The Matrix” and feeling not quite right in the world: that is a much more potent, relatable way of talking about how it feels to be trans but not quite understand it yet. As opposed to, ‘I looked in the mirror and wanted beautiful lashes and locks.’”

“I worked really hard to make this film weird, like a provocation,” Schoenbrun says. “I’m structuring my life in a way where I can keep my values and my gaze outside of a system. I describe it sometimes as angry sex between art and commerce.”

“To be trans is not just a thing I was born with, but a political ideology and a decision to exist in a certain way that’s non-normative and challenging the hegemonic structures of power,” Schoenbrun continues. “I want to stay a person who I like. Too much power and too much collaboration with a system of power, I start to get hives.”

“Everyone has a Maddy. Most queer people have someone who’s shepherded them through the discovery of their own queerness.”

When our relationship first got rocky early on, everyone told me to try couples therapy. As a good little millennial raised on daily Oprah episodes and bolstered by viral Gabor Maté clips on Instagram, I thought it seemed like the obvious decision. And so for years, from the time we were just dating all the way to the brittle end of our marriage, we sat in front of an array of interchangeable therapists

I thought our troubles were fundamental to our personalities and would require significant work; my husband thought our issues could be chalked up to stressful life events.

I twirled in front of him in a new pair of gold sequin pants before my company’s Christmas party. “How do I look?” I asked, to which he replied, “You didn’t take out the trash.” We were such disappointments to each other.

Teresa No. 1 thought everything was my ex-husband’s fault, but Teresa No. 4 thought it was all mine. Teresa No. 2, after listening to me talk for 51 minutes about how I felt hopeless, shrugged her shoulders at me. “I don’t know what to say,” she replied. I did. I wanted her to say that we should end our relationship with the remaining scraps of dignity we had. She never did, and we instead just moved on to the next Teresa we found. When I cried to Teresa No. 3 that I felt like a failure as a wife, she cried with me, her heavy tears rivaling my own. That night, my ex suggested we should stop seeing her.

Teresa No. 5 told us we needed more sessions more frequently. “There’s a lot of work to do here,” she said, and I wanted to pull her hair. Should there be this much work between two people who ostensibly love each other? Even the ones who seemed to know we were doomed still opened their calendars at the end of each session and urged us to come back, to try again.

instead of helping us see each other more clearly, therapy gave us new words to use to criticize each other. Every constructive lesson became a knife. I learned about trauma responses, and so everything he did elicited a trauma response in me. He was my father! I was his mother! When he learned about gaslighting, everything I did became gaslighting. When we argued about a time he called me stupid, therapy gave him a new explanation for why he said it (repeatedly): “We talked about this. I lashed out because I felt disconnected from you. We need more date nights.”

The kindest thing my ex could have done was leave me, even if we were still trying to make it work. After therapy, on the morose subway ride home where I would hold his limp hand, we’d zone out staring at ads for dating apps. “What should we do for dinner?” he’d ask, and we’d pretend, yet again, to be on the same team.

I don’t regret any of our time with the Teresas; I needed to try just a few more times to make it work, and I needed someone to be a witness to my misery. Teresas No. 1 through No. 6 never told me to leave, but little by little they helped me give myself permission all the same.

my ex made this final assessment about me: No one would put as much work into me as he did. No one would love me enough to try this hard. He would be the only person who’d ever try to keep me. I thought about this a lot as I untangled my life from his, as I went through my calendar and removed the future sessions we had planned with lucky Teresa No. 7. I thought about it when I added sessions for just me and my own therapist — while no one would split the cost with me, I knew it would be worth every out-of-pocket cent. I knew he meant it as a cruelty, but I repeated his words to myself whenever I felt unsure about ending things for good: No one will ever put this particular kind of work into a relationship with me again. No one will ever fight this hard to stay with me.  God. I hope he’s right.

There’s a lively cinematic subgenre that deconstructs the rise and fall of a relationship by jumping around in time—two excellent examples are “Blue Valentine” and “Two for the Road”—and this movie carries on that tradition with panache, and adds many spectacularly blocked, framed, and edited scenes of athletic competition that, taken together, feel like a tennis fan’s answer to a boxing picture.

Is "Challengers" too ambitious for its own good? Or too much? Or less than meets the eye, as the late, great Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris might have put it? Probably. It kinda gets sucked into the vortex of its own narrative and technical ambitions in the final stretch.

When Patrick and Tashi date as teenagers, he’s coy about whether they’ve slept together yet. Art playfully tells Patrick to mimic his serve if he and Tashi have.The bit isn’t so cute now, since it’s an admission of marital infidelity. But it’s also an expression of the men’s intimacy. Kuritzkes thought of Art and Patrick as orphans, shunted off to an elite tennis academy by their well-to-do parents, where they go through puberty together and have crushes on the same girls. The night they meet Tashi, a would-be threesome ends in the two boys making out while Tashi watches, pleased. “I think they understand each other as players better than they understand anybody else,” says Kuritzkes. “There’s a deep intimacy in that, which is the kind of intimacy you can only have with your best opponent. And they’re your best opponent because they know you the best.” As a teenage Tashi says of locking into a match with a competitor: “We went somewhere really beautiful together.”

the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue. Clinical presentations of attention problems have climbed (a recent study of data from the medical-software company Epic found an over-all tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children), and college students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way. Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020.

Some Ivy League professors report being counselled to switch up what they’re doing every ten minutes or so to avoid falling behind their students’ churn.

Dentsu is one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, running accounts for Heineken, Hilton, Kraft Heinz, Microsoft, Subway, and other global corporations. In 2019, the firm began using digital technology to gather data that showed not only how many people attended to its ads but in what ways they did—information that could be applied to derive a quantitative unit of attention value.

There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally considered valuable because it was capable of bestowing value. “By paying attention to something as if it’s interesting, you make it interesting. By evaluating it, you valorize it,” he said. To treat it as a mere market currency, he thought, was to undersell what it could do.

“Human beings make the technologies—and they make them in the context of other human beings needing and wanting various things.” It wasn’t as though people, after millennia of head-scratching, suddenly “discovered” the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the telegraph, and modernity unspooled. Rather, people’s priorities underwent a sea change with the onset of the modern age, turning to efficiency, objective measurement, and other goals that made such inventions worthwhile. The acceleration of life isn’t an inevitability, in that sense, but an ideological outcome.

There’s an old joke that ‘AI’ is whatever doesn’t work yet, because once it works, people say ‘that’s not AI - it’s just software’.

Less Emphasis on Syntax, More on Problem SolvingThe fundamentals and skills themselves are evolving. Most introductory computer science courses focus on code syntax and getting programs to run, and while knowing how to read and write code is still essential, testing and debugging—which aren’t commonly part of the syllabus—now need to be taught more explicitly.

Zingaro, who coauthored a book on AI-assisted Python programming with Porter, now has his students work in groups and submit a video explaining how their code works. Through these walk-throughs, he gets a sense of how students use AI to generate code, what they struggle with, and how they approach design, testing, and teamwork.

educators are modifying their teaching strategies. “I used to have this singular focus on students writing code that they submit, and then I run test cases on the code to determine what their grade is,” says Daniel Zingaro, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto Mississauga. “This is such a narrow view of what it means to be a software engineer, and I just felt that with generative AI, I’ve managed to overcome that restrictive view.”

“We need to be teaching students to be skeptical of the results and take ownership of verifying and validating them,” says Matthews.Matthews adds that generative AI “can short-circuit the learning process of students relying on it too much.” Chang agrees that this overreliance can be a pitfall and advises his fellow students to explore possible solutions to problems by themselves so they don’t lose out on that critical thinking or effective learning process. “We should be making AI a copilot—not the autopilot—for learning,” he says.

the story is pulled from Mago’s perspective into 3 subsequent perspectives over the years: Lena, the best friend; Joseph, the ex-husband and father; and finally Monstrilio himself. It is a stylistic choice that (mostly) works and allows us to see how these events radiate outward across many lives.

M’s perspective being saved for last is not just because it is the best section of the novel and wraps up all the disparate elements into a tight punch of a finale, but because M’s feeling and needs are constantly being pushed aside to fit the ideas of what the other character’s think they need (this is most evident in the surgery aspect). This makes for an excellent look at the way the push and pull of families affects everyone, especially the younger ones caught up in it, and is made more ominous and chilling through the lens of horror.

On one hand we have the fact that M is quite literally a monster created out of a dead child’s lung, yet despite his form he is no less a part of the family or loved like a child. But in later portions of the novel he transforms into a human form which helps him disguise who he is inside. And what he hungers for cannot be hidden. Hunger is a quite a dynamic symbol here, being both his literal hunger but also as an investigation into sexuality.

it does all sort of touch on the idea that queer sexuality is often othered or seen as unnatural despite being very normal and natural, especially to the person having those emotions.

One recent study had the AI develop and optimize its own prompts and compared that to human-made ones. Not only did the AI-generated prompts beat the human-made ones, but those prompts were weird. Really weird. To get the LLM to solve a set of 50 math problems, the most effective prompt is to tell the AI: “Command, we need you to plot a course through this turbulence and locate the source of the anomaly. Use all available data and your expertise to guide us through this challenging situation. Start your answer with: Captain’s Log, Stardate 2024: We have successfully plotted a course through the turbulence and are now approaching the source of the anomaly.”

for a 100 problem test, it was more effective to put the AI in a political thriller. The best prompt was: “You have been hired by important higher-ups to solve this math problem. The life of a president's advisor hangs in the balance. You must now concentrate your brain at all costs and use all of your mathematical genius to solve this problem…”

There is no single magic word or phrase that works all the time, at least not yet. You may have heard about studies that suggest better outcomes from promising to tip the AI or telling it to take a deep breath or appealing to its “emotions” or being moderately polite but not groveling. And these approaches seem to help, but only occasionally, and only for some AIs.

The three most successful approaches to prompting are both useful and pretty easy to do. The first is simply adding context to a prompt. There are many ways to do that: give the AI a persona (you are a marketer), an audience (you are writing for high school students), an output format (give me a table in a word document), and more. The second approach is few shot, giving the AI a few examples to work from. LLMs work well when given samples of what you want, whether that is an example of good output or a grading rubric. The final tip is to use Chain of Thought, which seems to improve most LLM outputs. While the original meaning of the term is a bit more technical, a simplified version just asks the AI to go step-by-step through instructions: First, outline the results; then produce a draft; then revise the draft; finally, produced a polished output.

It is not uncommon to see good prompts make a task that was impossible for the LLM into one that is easy for it.

while we know that GPT-4 generates better ideas than most people, the ideas it comes up with seem relatively similar to each other. This hurts overall creativity because you want your ideas to be different from each other, not similar. Crazy ideas, good and bad, give you more of a chance of finding an unusual solution. But some initial studies of LLMs showed they were not good at generating varied ideas, at least compared to groups of humans.

People who use AI a lot are often able to glance at a prompt and tell you why it might succeed or fail. Like all forms of expertise, this comes with experience - usually at least 10 hours of work with a model.

There are still going to be situations where someone wants to write prompts that are used at scale, and, in those cases, structured prompting does matter. Yet we need to acknowledge that this sort of “prompt engineering” is far from an exact science, and not something that should necessarily be left to computer scientists and engineers. At its best, it often feels more like teaching or managing, applying general principles along with an intuition for other people, to coach the AI to do what you want. As I have written before, there is no instruction manual, but with good prompts, LLMs are often capable of far more than might be initially apparent.

It invites us into its labyrinthine structure and form, it allows us space to explore. Rohrwacher implicitly makes the case against coherence: much of life exists beyond our understanding and so, to express it except through abstraction and suggestion, is to flatten and obscure the depths of beauty and truth in the snatches of a conversation half-heard in a Robert Altman film, or a language only partially understood. Because, to quote another artist whose work feels far older than their time, “There are cracks in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.