As a young man, Gavin Newsom was often described in the media as having movie-star good looks. He certainly wields his face the way a movie star does: with the care and precision with which most people handle power tools.
~ Nathan Heller via The New Yorker
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There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
~ Ansel Adams
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Jane Austen and Charles Dickens were both masters of comedy, but the contrast between her ironic understatement and his histrionic exaggeration reflects profoundly different personalities and life experiences, in which class and gender played an important part.
~ Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic
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Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot.
~ Ted Chiang via The Atlantic
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Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure.
~ Donella Meadows
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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight.
~ Iain Banks
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For all of the exhilarating possibilities A.I. brings to medicine — diagnosing rare diseases, predicting individuals’ risks, discovering elusive drugs — one of its strongest footholds in health care today is its ability to eavesdrop on conversations and quickly generate notes from them.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine
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Anybody who embarks on a study of plagiarism hoping for bright lines is in for a foggy shock. Here is the land of blur.
~ Anthony Lane via The New Yorker
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Resitance is by nature reactive; it is not forward-looking.
~ Mark Lilla
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