March 2024 updates
Hi everyone,
New writing
Links
- Brighter Than a Cloud by Claire L. Evans:
In the absence of an organizing mind, everything comes unglued. Faces go missing and dark holes seem to eat half the universe. Migraine sufferers can experience the uncanny sense of consciousness doubling known as déja-vu, or its cousin, jamais-vu, in which the world feels newly-made. The world might feel suddenly very unreal, fracture into a mosaic, or slow to a stop-motion pace, dropping frames. The self might cleave in two in a fit of somatopsychic duality.
- How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day by Rachel Aaron:
I closed my laptop and got out my pad of paper. Then, instead of trying to write the scene in the novel as I had been, I started scribbling a very short hand, truncated version the scene on the paper. I didn’t describe anything, I didn’t do transitions. I wasn’t writing, I was simply noting down what I would write when the time came. It took me about five minutes and three pages of notebook paper to untangle my seemingly unfixable scene, the one that had just eaten three days of my life before I tried this new approach.
- Why transformative AI is really, really hard to achieve
Marc Andreessen, hardly a techno-pessimist, puts it bluntly: “I don’t even think the standard arguments are needed… AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy. How do I know that? Because technology is already illegal in most of the economy, and that is becoming steadily more true over time.” Matt Yglesias and Eli Dourado are skeptical that AI will lead to a growth revolution, pointing to regulation and complex physical processes in sectors including housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare. These happen to be our current growth bottlenecks, and together they make up over a third of US GDP.
Other
I'm looking for an incredibly creative and demanding videographer (for a project that might or might not involve reinventing the entire interview genre).
Have a great April!
Stay frosty,
Alexey