Entries tagged with “highlight”

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  IT BEGAN, AS all things must, with an awakening of molecules.

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  Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

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  A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

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  The real threat to creativity isn’t a language model. It’s a workplace that rewards speed over depth, scale over care, automation over meaning. If we’re going to talk about what robs people of agency, let’s start there. Let’s talk about the economic structures that pressure people into using tools badly, or in ways that betray their values. Let’s talk about the lack of time, support, mentorship, and trust. Not the fact that someone ran a prompt through a chatbot to get unstuck. 

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  I think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction. There is nothing wrong with developing those skills—in fact, I’ve learned the hard way how useful they can be. What is wrong is their fetishization, the way they were allowed to outrank the actual body of knowledge held within algebra or English lit. The result was that “learning” felt like a kind of bait and switch. And this frustrated me because I truly did love to learn—it just so happened I learned best away from my desk, where ideas and concepts could be made tangible. 

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  I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force. 

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  Chasing TikTok users doesn’t build a better platform for writers. It builds a different platform entirely. The value proposition collapses when your infrastructure for thought becomes optimized for the attention economy. You can’t serve two masters. You either build a tool for writers or you build an app for dopamine hits. Once you choose the latter, you’ve already traded your audience. 

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  Voting rights are never about who has the right to vote, they’re always about who has the right to win and who has the right to rule. 

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  Milei's crypto faceplant is a timely reminder that these guys can be defeated. The Tech Fascist project depends heavily on crypto. Our wannabe Silicon Valley overlords need their fake digital money to build a parallel financial system that can finance parallel forms of government. But they are building their dystopian dream on a scammy, shaky foundation that's bound to collapse sooner rather than later.

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  When a bad man has the advantage, cruelty and outrage are the consequences. —William Marshal

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  I was a reluctant convert but captured by the many layers, the hints at revelation, and a sound that I did not so much enjoy as I felt compelled to understand. Every track was a disheveled history of music. And armed with an array of sonics, Chuck D came forward and revealed a new level of Knowledge.

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  Put simply, if you selected the correct door initially (which happens 1/3 of the time), you shouldn’t switch when you’re offered the chance. If you chose the wrong door initially (which happens 2/3 of the time), you should switch. 

  This basic decision tree proves two things: the probability isn’t 50–50, and you’re better off if you always switch.

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  Hungary’s key lesson is you don’t protect democracy by talking about democracy — you protect democracy by protecting people. Only a democracy that works for the people is sustainable.

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  To be abundantly clear, as it stands, OpenAI currently spends $2.35 to make $1.

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  yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice.

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  The word 'amethyst' means 'not drunk' – a-methys – and ancient Romans and Greeks believed it could let you drink without getting drunk.

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  Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.

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  Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, *InfoWars* has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

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  “single-threaded leadership,” in which a single person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative and heads up a separable, largely autonomous team to deliver its goals.

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  Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities. — Andy Benoit