I’ve had the most fun I’ve found in a while noodling over all the little details on my site. Wild how much pent up creativity was stuck behind minor technical limitations in things like app architecture and deployment. AI is a force multiplier for designers, not a death sentence

Tom just casually dropping a totally banger website 🤩

Penny University “For You” 🤝 Steins-esque Parisian salon “Following”

Technology scaffolds our lives. I think this is why we're seeing a renewed interest in architecture, planning, and the humanities. Why wouldn't we want our world to be more joyful, including the digital parts? I'm celebrating that our tools have caught up to our expression 🥹

wow this site is chock full of beautiful reads. found this one particularly relevant: readingdesign.org/manifestos…

This chart is truly astonishing (via Epoch, "The plunging price of thought" epoch.ai/publications/the-pl…) As analytical intelligence becomes increasingly commoditized, experience, the precursor to judgment and taste, remains the human moat.

I linked someone to an old post I had bookmarked, and check out the description of the online book retailer recommended as the company of the month in the footer

The comedy of arguing over nihilistic future robots destroying humanity while construction crews working on trains running last century's technology can accidentally take down the most concentrated flight space in our country plus the UNGA (and my trip to NYC)

today I learned there's a word in German that means "to try and improve something only to make it worse" 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗺𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘂𝗻𝗴

If you generally understand how transformer models are trained and how they run inference but you want a richer and more detailed explanation, this is the best written, most digestible deep dive I've come across. Just the right depth spectrum.ieee.org/inference-…

Nytimes xword, Steely Dan’s “Aja”, and the outside open through the screen door. I've evolved into my father and I'm loving every minute of it

AI slop applications have made traditional careers pages worse than useless. So I updated ours to simply invite you to email me and share something you've made or written on the internet. Only stipulation is that the email needs to actually be written by you. Inbound emails go through a @pangram check before reaching my inbox. It's a win win: 1. I never have to read an AI slopplication again 2. Great candidates already just email me, but sometimes early career folks don't know to do that... this levels the playing field btw we're hiring, you know what to do tolans.com/careers

This whole thread by Getty is outstanding 🤌 how does it only have 10 likes?

I regularly have to pinch myself that I get to watch my kid’s soccer practices in elysium

This is a beautiful essay. The concept of natural intelligence is rich and fruitful. Here's a list of some other research and essays around this topic I've saved over the years 🌱🌿🌷 The secret life of forests: nytimes.com/interactive/2020… The extended mind: consc.net/papers/extended.ht… Fractal planting patterns yield optimal harvests, without central control: santafe.edu/news-center/news… Software in the natural world: A computational approach to hierarchical emergence arxiv.org/html/2402.09090v2 Entangled life: merlinsheldrake.com/entangle… Why animals don't get lost: newyorker.com/magazine/2021/… Are plants conscious?: grunge.com/999062/are-plants… Small seasons guide: smallseasons.guide/ The mysteries of plant intelligence: theatlantic.com/magazine/arc… What's a brain? clairelevans.substack.com/p/… The secret language of trees: aeon.co/videos/the-incredibl… Forces of nature: strategy-business.com/articl… Artificial intelligence? No collective intelligence: nytimes.com/2024/05/24/opini… The word for web is forest: newpublic.org/article/1572/t… Enhancing artificial intelligence with indigenous wisdom: scirp.org/journal/paperinfor… The study of how large scale order emerges in complex systems: wired.com/story/the-puzzle-o…

All the GPT-4o ai boyfriends are coming back to haunt us

Astra is at capacity? This is a new one

For some reason the day of remembrance is hitting harder this year than most. I have a love/hate relationship with the way our country revels in the tragedy, but I also see it as a national catharsis. One of the few moments where it's ok to let your guard down and just be human. Maybe it's that this year, I'm more aware that what makes us human is less our intellect or our ability to communicate as a species, but instead something deeper and more visceral that connects us in the shared, ultimately tragic but beautiful experience of being briefly alive. I remember as a child that every so often my mom would talk about her memory of the day JFK was killed. Now my children receive the same experience about 9/11. I still have the newspapers I bought that next day. It's surreal to have experienced something so palpably that they have no sense of. And sometimes reading the stories year after year of the people who perished, of the first responders, or those who miraculously made it out alive before the towers fell can feel gross, like wearing their grief and emotion as a way to briefly feel something bigger than ourselves. My town is hosting a 9/11 kickball tournament in remembrance. Isn't that weird? But maybe it's ok that it's weird, because it's how these folks in rural Utah, most of whom have never even been to New York City, share in the collective experience. And if the loss of life gave us a day where all the petty bullshit we surround ourselves with disappears and we just play kickball together in the park - maybe that's a good thing. And it's strange to be a Millennial around 40, having experienced the before time and the after time. You couldn't call anyone that morning. We had just moved to Denver from New York and we couldn't get ahold of our family who worked near the towers because the cell networks weren't developed enough. And we just accepted what happened at airports in the months that followed, and watching operation Shock and Awe like it was a movie on CNN. An ex-boyfriend was in the Grand Canyon on a river trip that day. He told me how strange it was when they suddenly realized there were no planes in the sky, which is the only clue that they had that something was wrong. But that night, camping at upper ledges, and NPS helicopter came down into the canyon and landed just downstream of them. Someone on the trip in front of them had lost a brother in the towers, and that is how they found out. And then the following April, I was in New York visiting my aunt when her next door neighbors learned about the fate of their son. He was found in a part of the rubble that would suggest he had jumped. But then they learned that actually he had been one of the people who had helped other escaped. He was killed when the second tower fell in a part of the building where he didn't work, because he used his final moments of life to help others. We all have these fragments of stories, but we don't know what to do with them. But we share them, and stitch them together. I think about how communities used to have gatherings where they would bring their scraps together and sew a quilt out of them. And I just have this memory sealed in my head. I was in first period theater, and my friend Vanessa had heard a cessna had hit one of the towers, so after improv Mr Kron turned on the news on a wheel-in TV, and just as he turned it on the south tower fell and I collapsed to my knees spontaneously as I thought of all the people I knew who might be there, and all the people they knew and worked with. And I asked to be excused and went upstairs to get my brother so I could drive him home. And in his classroom all of the kids were talking and playing with no clue as to any of it. But his teacher sat at her desk listening to the radio and crying.