At the time, the prevailing wisdom held that attempting to vivisect the models was tantamount to the haruspicy of the ancient Etruscans, who thought they could divine the future by inspecting animal entrails.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Critical philosophy implies above all historical criticism. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins.
~ György Lukács
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A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker. Developers using A.I. focus on the overall shape of the software, how its features and facets work together. Because the agents can produce functioning code so quickly, their human overseers can experiment, trying things out to see what works and discarding what doesn’t.
~ Clive Thompson via The New York Times
The college-educated are trained to expect that the world will make room for them, and when it doesn’t—when they suffer the indignities of wage work, with its unpredictable schedules and disrespectful bosses, and can see no way up or out—the blow isn’t just economic; it’s psychological.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Britain’s electrical network is in even worse disrepair than America’s. I am not sure if it is a geopolitical asset to be able to stiff-upper-lip one’s way through ineffectual government. Maybe it’s more of a liability. But my experience of criticizing Brits resembles my experience of criticizing lawyers.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Art changes all the time, and when it changes, so does its history.
~ Jacob Mikanowski
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The new apocalyptic coalition is a strange one. It includes evangelical Christians waiting for the Rapture, climate activists convinced we have blown past every tipping point, and AI researchers gaming out scenarios where the machine stops taking instructions.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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Calling all transmission of data “speech” is a gross distortion of reality, and a generation of teenagers raised on social media has borne the cost of it.
~ Tim Wu via The New York Times
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The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.
~ Søren Kierkegaard
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Much of the monotony in higher education is a result of the accreditation process. Accreditation should protect students from snake-oil salesmen, but unfortunately it has become its own racket. Existing schools try to lock out potential competitors. Timidity, ideological homogeneity, and red tape are all structurally encouraged by the accreditation processes.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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