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Crushes are fun. Or at least they’re supposed to be fun as long as you keep them that way. As long as you don’t get emotionally invested or fixated or keep imagining your reality to be what it is not. But if you expect too much or feel too easily, you might end up with self-inflicted heartache which just leaves you feeling empty-handed or just empty inside. And all of this for someone who never even promised you anything from the start.

maybe it's better to think of people you know highly. It's good to have that positive outlook and perspective on that person because you want to do well in front of them. It's not delusional or scary at all. It's just a shift in mindset and honestly if you want to see things in flowery rose-colored glasses (and it helps) then I don't see why not?

The criticisms I have been seeing about the features of the Pixel 8, however, feel like we are only repeating the kinds of fears of nearly two hundred years. We have not been able to wholly trust photographs pretty much since they were invented. The only things which have changed in that time are the ease with which the manipulations can happen, and their availability.

We all live with a growing sense that everything around us is fraudulent. It is striking to me how these tools have been introduced as confidence in institutions has declined. It feels like a death spiral of trust — not only are we expected to separate facts from their potentially misleading context, we increasingly feel doubtful that any experts are able to help us, yet we keep inventing new ways to distort reality.

The questions that are being asked of the Pixel 8’s image manipulation capabilities are good and necessary because there are real ethical implications. But I think they need to be more fully contextualized. There is a long trail of exactly the same concerns and, to avoid repeating ourselves yet again, we should be asking these questions with that history in mind. This era feels different. I think we should be asking more precisely why that is.

The questions we ask about generative technologies should acknowledge that we already have plenty of ways to lie, and that lots of the information we see is suspect. That does not mean we should not believe anything, but it does mean we ought to be asking questions about what is changed when tools like these become more widespread and easier to use.

“The trailer of Dune is a good, good trailer of one industrial movie,” he says. “It’s good, but is similar to other pictures. Nothing, nothing which can open your mind. But it’s a lot of fun….this trailer shows me it is a good industrial picture, but it’s not art. It’s some kind of art. It’s industrial art. It’s possible, there are very marvelous industrial art pictures.”

The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

A prime minister indicted in three corruption cases cannot look after state affairs, as national interests will necessarily be subordinate to extricating him from a possible conviction and jail time.

impatient yet patient; brilliant yet dumb ask questions that make people they talk to smarter and more specific

have specific, correct hot takes (if young, on the path there) delivered a ton of interesting projects that weren’t helpful for anything in particular (whether it’s writing, coding, leading or anything else) learn really fast & you can see it from their behavior actions reflect beliefs have a history of embarrassing cold emails

do what’s required to get where they want to get (rather than only doing what they’re good at)

take ideas seriously type really fast (clearly a spurious correlation but still interesting)

don’t settle for proxies, zoom all the way in & out keep doing what they believe is the right thing in the absence of any positive feedback or only negative (even if only perceived) feedback from others

have thought through everything use first principles when there are no priors & use priors when there are priors extremely curious

Last year I burnt myself out on introspection and developed a personal philosophy to “take action towards things I think I want until I can come up with a good reason to stop.” Operating in this way might make me look flighty from the outside but on the inside, I know it’s one of the main reasons my life continues to feel like it’s getting better and better — experimentation till I find the things that feel really right.And really right is what I’m going for. Not right on paper, not right only if I turn off my brain, and definitely not right only in the eyes of others. In my book, a good decision is one you know in your heart, mind, and body to be true for you. Some call this discernment, others call it wisdom. All I know is that it’s really hard to find.

Now, uncertainty is a fact of life — one of the few universal rules to this grand, intricate game we’re all playing. As I understand it, the game goes as such: First, conquer your fear of rejection. Second, conquer your fear of uncertainty. Along the way, you’ll need to reckon with your fear of cringe.

But you know what helps? Actually listening to yourself. Not just the insecure parts of you that have something to prove and find it fun to root around for meaning in the struggle. No. It’s the voices that care about your experiencing day-to-day contentedness, belonging, and don’t believe that everything should feel hard that deserve the megaphone — they often sound quite similar to a best friend or parent.

being loved completely actually does the opposite — it motivates me to become more concentratedly myself by providing the comfort of verified belief in my own value. I mention the love thing because I think it has a lot more to do with what makes a decision good than we like to admit (maybe because it’s cringe!). But as Julie Dempsey says in Before Sunrise: “Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?”

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France. Ad Feedback “A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. “There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

Roman’s one, sweeping, obliterating eulogy blows up on the launchpad, and instead, Logan ends up with three different eulogies — one from his brother (Ewan), one from Kendall, and one from Shiv — each with their own vision of who he was and how to summarize his life. The speeches are tipped against one another — with Kendall’s intended as an opposing viewpoint to Ewan’s, and Shiv’s a softening of Kendall’s. In classic Succession form, though, every eulogy contains its own hairpin turns and attempts to navigate contrasting ideas. Even after Logan’s death, Succession refuses to land on any single idea of who the man was.

As ever with Kendall, there’s still a question about what exactly he’s doing in all of that water. Is it a wellspring or a flood? Is it birth or drowning?

“Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the man he hired to create the network, saw a market that felt ignored and stereotyped when attention was paid. Like any good business — and journalism is a business — they set out to reach that market.

“Fox News had some good early ambitions. But fairly early on in its existence, the network pivoted far away from straight news and intelligent conservative commentary, and leaned heavily toward the loudmouths. And after that, it went from promoting the bloviators to platforming the outright liars. That was the moment the network completely jumped the shark and pivoted from presenting alternative viewpoints to presenting an alternate reality. This is Rupert Murdoch’s most meaningful political legacy—dutifully carrying water for Trump’s MAGA movement that banished real conservatism,” Lewis wrote. “Instead of elevating conservatism, Murdoch helped undermine conservatism as a serious philosophy, skewing instead toward tabloid conspiracy theories like birtherism and ‘rigged’ election allegations.”

Artists never complete a single, perfect artwork, and a single work never instigates an absolute transcendence in viewers. We may aspire toward this quasi-theological ideal, but art only has the ability to suggest the sublime. The real sustenance of the artistic is the scope of experience it provides, the cumulative sense of growth and cultivation of ourselves through art, a tendency toward a good that we can never capture but only assist in radiating itself and existence.

I quickly realized that my habits were more suited to going to galleries every week than to working regularly on longer pieces, that there weren’t very many shows I wanted to write about at length, and that a regular stream of blithe, off-the-cuff reviews would attract more attention than intermittent longer essays

Film, music, food and book critics write for a general public that can be swayed to spend their money one way or another, whereas the general public cannot afford to buy the art that is written about in Artforum.

Effectively, this is a next-generation step into computational photography. With quad pixels, you can easily see how the iPhone 14 Pro generated 12MP images from a 48MP sensor. It’s grade school division: 48 ÷ 4 = 12. But there is no 24MP sensor in the 15 Pro main camera. The Photonic Engine takes several images from the sensor for each photo, including a 48MP one for detail, and a 12MP quad-pixel one for low-light and noise reduction, then computationally fuses them together to produce a single 24MP image. Apple is having its cake and eating it too, merging the benefits of a sensor with many small pixels with the benefits of a sensor with fewer large pixels. You don’t need to know that this is happening, you just get more detail in your photos from the main camera.

We still believe that there will be a separation between the “application layer” companies and foundation model providers, with model companies specializing in scale and research and application layer companies specializing in product and UI. In reality, that separation hasn’t cleanly happened yet. In fact, the most successful user-facing applications out of the gate have been vertically integrated.

We predicted that the best generative AI companies could generate a sustainable competitive advantage through a data flywheel: more usage → more data → better model → more usage. While this is still somewhat true, especially in domains with very specialized and hard-to-get data, the “data moats” are on shaky ground: the data that application companies generate does not create an insurmountable moat, and the next generations of foundation models may very well obliterate any data moats that startups generate. Rather, workflows and user networks seem to be creating more durable sources of competitive advantage.

Some of the best consumer companies have 60-65% DAU/MAU; WhatsApp’s is 85%. By contrast, generative AI apps have a median of 14% (with the notable exception of Character and the “AI companionship” category). This means that users are not finding enough value in Generative AI products to use them every day yet.

generative AI’s biggest problem is not finding use cases or demand or distribution, it is proving value. As our colleague David Cahn writes, “the $200B question is: What are you going to use all this infrastructure to do? How is it going to change people’s lives?”

Here we argue that several—so far mostly unrelated—biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward belief-consistent information processing. What varies between different biases is essentially the specific belief that guides information processing. More importantly, we propose that different biases even share the same underlying belief and differ only in the specific outcome of information processing that is assessed (i.e., the dependent variable), thus tapping into different manifestations of the same latent information processing.