I have seen a few references to a song called “Choosin’ Texas” by an artist named Ella Langley beating out Mariah Carey for the longest-running No. 1 song of all time on the Billboard Hot 100. The surprise in all this is I’ve never heard of Ella Langley or the song that broke the record. I haven’t been into popular music since I was a kid and married to the radio, but I had an awareness of what people were listening to.
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Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Autumn Day – Rainer Maria Rilke
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.
Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now will not build one
anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long
time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing. -
Mountains of the Drowning
The Atlantic lets you read their articles free through RSS. Nevertheless, I like to share articles, and so I sometimes think about getting a subscription.1 However, when I read pieces like this one from Jonathan Chait defending female Democratic politicians being abusive, it dampens my desire to pay.
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Feed Confusion
I’ve gotten myself in a confused state with regard to my RSS and social media feeds.
- I’m using Reeder, which allows you to follow RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky and Micro.blog feeds. I’m following all four of those in a jumble.
- I’m also using Indigo, which can follow Bluesky and Mastodon feeds.
- I like the native experience, so I’m using the Bluesky app and site. I also use the Micro.blog app and site.
All this means I see posts multiple times. Since I’m only really using one RSS reader (Reeder), disentangling from this mess will mostly mean being more deliberate about my social media following. I’ll have to unwind where I’m following what people, which could take a while.
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I just read Dario Amodei’s convincing “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Much has to go right in his plans to create measurable effect, and with our current administration against policing AI companies for fear of giving China an advantage, I’m less than optimistic.
Good thing I read this piece by Cal Newport to dampen the effect of the rhetoric and balance things out.
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I Had A Plan That Was Built On Thinking Too Long
Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash I’ve read a few pieces recently that focus on the negative effects of activities that were believed to be universally helpful to mental health. One, an article by Bryce D. Fuemmeler in Mere Orthodoxy, explored the era of self-focus.
(more…)Not all of this can be blamed on Oxford—or, in fact, any other university whose students deal with these problems—but it is no secret that universities have intensified The Era of Self-Focus by centering campus life around self-care and grievance-based ideas. For example, while I was at Oxford during the coronavirus epidemic, we were inundated with self-care messages from the university administration asking about our well-being. Though well-intentioned, I found this mildly baffling. I was fantastic! I was at Oxford having an intellectual adventure! Yet even in my optimism, I noticed that the more messages I received to this effect, the more I began to question my own well-being. Put another way, I became more focused on myself, and less focused on ideas bigger than myself. A more realistic version of the administration’s messages might have been: Are you thinking about yourself enough today?
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’Til All Are One
Transformers: The Movie is showing in theaters in 4K starting in September to celebrate its 40th anniversary. I’m going to be like a kid when this comes out. I was so excited when the movie first dropped and fulfilled expectations with drama, action, and an exemplary cast of voice actors.
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I’m Coming Out
Bill Gates is coming out of a period of semi-seclusion to raise the alarm bells about generative A.I. Karen Weise covers the story for The NYT. One of the main concerns that Gates has is the potential for massive job losses.
He proposed a new tax on A.I. use, known as a “token tax,” to make it more expensive to replace people and provide money to help those who do lose work. A token is a basic unit of A.I. computing. The idea of taxing it has gained some traction, including on Wall Street, as a way to increase the cost of using machines instead of human labor.
Gates wrote a personal essay on his site about how dangerous the situation could be if not taken seriously.
AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice.
The man is not downplaying the stakes here. He believes that the reason his peers are not coming forward is that there is too much money to be gained.
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Will You Dance?
The latest casualty of the streaming wars is The Bird and the Bee’s 2015 album Recreational Love, which unceremoniously disappeared from Qobuz sometime recently. The album still shows up, but lists all the tracks as “unavailable.” Usually this is a sign that the service has loaded a newer version of the album to select. Not so in this case.
Music by The Bird and the Bee can sometimes be hard to find. The band followed up their first volume of Interpreting the Masters, an album of Hall & Oates covers, with a volume of Van Halen covers. The first is readily available, the second, almost impossible to hear on any format other than used vinyl.1 All the album’s listed on the merch site that the band links to are sold out. When there are so many music services out there, it seems careless not to make your albums available somewhere digitally.
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