Substrate

Only 0.1% of Elon Musk's trillion-dollar wealth is in cash, with the rest depends on the value of shares in his company on the stock market. But I'm not here to quibble over whether he was richer than historical figures such as Mansa Musa. It's all gauche, unnecessary, and built on the back of industrial level theft.

I don't think I've seen this painting before, but I really like it.

From the Guggenheim website:

During the years preceding his suicide in 1890, Vincent van Gogh suffered increasingly frequent attacks of mental distress, the cause of which remains unclear. Mountains at Saint-Rémy was painted in July 1889, when Van Gogh was recovering from just such an episode at the hospital of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in the southern French town of Saint-Rémy. The painting represents the Alpilles, a low range of mountains visible from the hospital grounds. In it, Van Gogh activated the terrain and sky with the heavy impasto and bold, broad brushstrokes characteristic of his late work.

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This is absolutely incredible from Lance Robertson:

I made a short speculative film as my final project for a course on Deepfakes and Synthetic Media that I took this quarter at UC San Diego, as part of my Speculative Design major.

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Prof. Kenneth Payne (King's College London) has published a paper entitled AI Arms and Influence: Frontier models exhibit sophisticated reasoning in simulated nuclear crises and summarised it on his blog. It's game theory on steroids.

This is such great satire from McSweeney's on the state of AI company financing. We all know it's a bubble, it's just whether it's going to pop or slowly deflate...

Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit. Goldman Sachs builds an altar to Benjamin in their lobby and cuts out the heart of a junior analyst on it every Friday. They call it “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” The name isn’t catchy, but the event becomes a management favorite nonetheless.

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This article by Justin Garson on the American Philosophical Association's blog is extremely relevant to my life at the moment. A few months ago, shortly before receiving a diagnosis of Overtraining Syndrom from a consultant, my GP prescribed me an SNRI deal with both physical and mental symptoms that I was experiencing. I'm still on it.

The ball doesn't always go in the hoop, the can doesn't always come out of the vending machine, the firework sometimes fails to go off, and the spoon sometimes sinks into the soup. That's life.

Paris-based motion design studio Parallel created a series of short animations which aim to do anything but impress, clips that highlight the frustrating day-to-day mishaps by turning them digital. The series, titled UNSATISFYING, aims to go against the trend of oddly satisfying videos that are currently pervading the internet, instead making audiences cringe with scenes that only deliver disappointment.

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I love the idea of "places that only exist at a certain time of the day". If you've ever sat in a quiet place before it gets busy, you'll know that the whole meaning and feeling of a place can change quite suddenly depending not only on the atmospheric conditions, but who's there with you.

I like this as an encouragement to do things. Everyone thinks that the way they see the world is "obvious" but it's very much dependent on everything from your genetics through to your experience and interests.