Welcome to the age of average.

Looking for freedom, we found slavery." 

This, however, was the point. The art was not the paintings themselves, but the comment they made. We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit.

30 years after People's Choice, it seems the landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live.

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Welcome to the age of average.

Source:

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average/ 

Putin is a rest stop on the road of post-Soviet collapse

Putin is a rest stop on the road of post-Soviet collapse noahpinion.substack.com

“One AI Tutor Per Child: Personalized learning is finally here"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35198159

New comment by SilverBirch in "One AI Tutor Per Child: Personalized learning is finally here"

You know how that journalist had a long conversation with Bing and it slowly turned into a psycho-ex girlfriend? This is going to be hilarious, giving kids prolonged access to these AI tools. You get to the parent teacher evening at the end of a term at school: "Err... little timmy and his virtual assistant appear to have entirely neglected maths in favour of adopting Zoroastrianism".

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SVB and the Fed

o this puts the Fed on the horns of a dilemma. If it keeps raising rates, more things will break in the financial system. Bank balance sheets will get weaker, putting them in more danger of bank runs like the one that just happened to SVB. But if the Fed pauses its rate hikes or cuts rates to ease the pain in the banking world, it runs the risk of losing its credibility and letting inflation go out of control, necessitating even bigger rate hikes and even more pain in a few years.

SVB and the Fed noahpinion.substack.com

Is Archaeology Getting it Wrong? ‘Ancient Stone Tools’ Accidentally Made by Modern Monkeys | Ancient Origins

Until now, it had been believed that hominins like Homo sapiens ( modern humans ) and Neanderthals were history's only toolmakers. But the stunning results of this new study, which has just been published in Science Advances , call into question the identification of at least some ancient stone tools as human cutting or scraping objects. 

This wouldn't be the case for all of the tools identified , since many (if not most) ancient stone tools are found in archaeological contexts that show other indications of human settlement and activity. But isolated stone "tools" supposedly made by ancient toolmaking cultures may now require much more careful analysis than in the past, to be sure that they really are human artifacts.

Is Archaeology Getting it Wrong? 'Ancient Stone Tools' Accidentally Made by Modern Monkeys ancient-origins.net

Celebrating Cerebration: ON CREATIVITY - by Isaac Asimov - Bert Hubert's writings

To feel guilty because one has not earned one's salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/asimov-on-creativity/

#139: The biggest celeb in New York right now

https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/139-the-biggest-celeb-in-new-york

Didn't your mother ever tell you to share your toys?

I remember having a blazing row high-spirited discussion with someone about the way I thought about society. In a fit of rage an attempt to provide clarity, I tried using a metaphor:

"Didn't your mother ever tell you to share your toys?" I asked.

He looked at me, baffled.

"No..." he said, cautiously. "We each had enough toys."

That is the strawman crux of the issue. Those of us who grew up with limited resources know that sharing is caring. We've been taught from an early age that the only way to fulfilment is to share our possessions.

Didn't your mother ever tell you to share your toys? – Terence Eden's Blog shkspr.mobi

#138: Do you pass the Turing test?

#138: Are we the robots? haleynahman.substack.com

As we know, and despite their apparent cleverness, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are simply regurgitating things people have already said, with no deeper understanding. What they offer is, by definition, surface-level and formulaic. So what they excel at has a way of highlighting what in our modern world best engenders those qualities. Five-paragraph grade-school essays, corporate apology emails, cover letters, content-farmed articles, book summaries, biographies, meal or trip plans, etc. The pearl-clutching around, for instance, students, prospective employees, or media outlets now using bots to write their essays, cover letters, or articles seems, to me, like it's missing an insight. If these formats are so easy to bullshit that a robot can ace them, maybe they were never the vehicles for expression we pretended they were. Maybe we need to think of more creative, humanistic ways to teach, hire, and communicate.

Orwell and Dahl on Kindle

Michael Tsai - Blog - Orwell and Dahl on Kindle mjtsai.com

Sunlight is yellow parallel rays plus blue isotropic light

Sunlight is yellow parallel rays plus blue isotropic light lesswrong.com

A Movie Trailer Editor Deconstructs Iconic Trailers

A Movie Trailer Editor Deconstructs Iconic Trailers kottke.org