Tag: Attention
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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life
For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/06/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen-review-a-brilliant-warning-about-the-gamification-of-everyday-life
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The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box,…
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The hard part: A quote from Jason Gorman
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking — with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions — into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a…
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Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package. Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship. Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without…
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How LLMs give semantic meaning to a prompt| ngrok blog
In summary, embeddings are points in n-dimensional space that you can think of as the semantic meaning of the text they represent. During training, each token gets moved within this space to be close to other, similar tokens. The more dimensions, the more complex and nuanced the LLM’s representation of each token can be. —…
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How harmful is the decline in long-form reading? – Marginal REVOLUTION
A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable…
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Kubrick on Lessons from Chess
think before grabbing, — Read on x.com/FischerKing64/status/1998785412559720910
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Write to escape your default setting – kupajo
Writing expands your working memory, lets you be more brilliant on paper than you can be in person. While some of this brilliance comes from enabling us to connect larger and larger ideas, much of it comes from stopping, uh… non-brilliance. Writing reveals what you don’t know, what you can’t see when an idea is…
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Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images
because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds. Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books — since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull — or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. When…
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The Genetic Evolution of the Human Race and Its Consequences for the Industrial Revolution
We do not claim that the Black Death instantly made Europeans smarter. Instead, we suggest that the post-plague economy may have amplified long-running selection on traits linked to educational attainment: learning ability, self-control, and long-term planning. In that sense, the Black Death looks less like a one-off catastrophe and more like a hinge in the…