Taking opportunities to connect
LLMs also, through their very design, conflate frequency with quality. It will drive you to the same books everyone else reads. The bestseller list is already self-reinforcing, and algorithms double down.
This example was pretty specifically about book recommendations, but I fully agree with it.
a slice of the early trans internet has been retrieved
1000 articles Wikipédia plus tard
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Cette semaine, j’ai publié mon millième article sur Wikipédia en français. (C’était en fait probablement plutôt mon 1002 ou 1003e article : je n’ai pas compté les quelques pages supprimées entre-temps par débat d’admissibilité.) Avec 6 ans et demi de Wikipédia dans les pattes, un rôle d’admin depuis un peu plus d’un an, et d’autres…
Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek
Fastest, Highest, Strongest: A Critique of High-Performance Sport by Rob Beamish & Ian Ritchie
Explores the use of drugs and other performance-enhancing practices in sport, tracing the development of the situation through its socio-political history. This work presents a critique of the use of athletes as representatives of political regimes, and the constant striving for medals that has altered the ethos of the Olympic Games.
This was an interesting and thought-provoking read on high performance sport and mostly on doping. Doping is a highly emotional issue and going through its history with a new lens took me out of my comfort zone − and it was fascinating. Beamish seems to have a very clear opinion that anti-doping policies are a…
Sur la dalle
Alex has a written a great post on self-care by focusing on news consumption. Right away you wrote, « Not only do I spend too much time on the Internet – I spend way too much time consuming content and news. » You took the words right out of my mouth. News isn’t limited to listening to reading it online, or watching it on the television (or historically radio). Now the news in the 21st comes in so many different mediums such as podcasts. I’ve seen an increase of this negative news. It discourages me to use any form of social media, even decentralized social media. I want to ignore but it seems hard not to even if you don’t click links. « Curating a me-friendly news experience » by « find[ing] the things that bring you joy and give your brain a break from the hate. » It’s important to step away from even if it’s for a little while. We can’t let it consume us to the core. It will make use dark and bitter. I catch myself becoming angry. You make a great point on finding the right sources and filtering things out by using an RSS reader. Even I as an avid New York Times and leftist news person, have to turn off my computer and throw my phone across the room to reattach myself to the world around me. It’s got to the point where I have to go into my terminal and turn off the Docker container and turn of my RSS reader. There has to be a better way for everything. Support local journalism because we need to know what’s happening in our hometowns and the places we live. We need to now what’s happening in our communities to make a difference and become aware what’s around us.
My government means to kill me
A fierce and riveting queer coming-of-age story, following the personal and political awakening of a young gay Black man in 1980s NYC, from the television drama writer and producer of The Chi, Narcos, and Bel-Air.
What an interesting little book. I’m not sure how I feel about it, really – probably because I enjoy reading memoirs, and reading a « fake memoir » makes me feel a bit icky. But for those who have always struggled to bridge the gap between fiction and nonfiction, this might be your perfect introduction. The protagonist…