STRUGGLING ARTIST? GIVE AWAY YOUR WORK FOR FREE.

ART THEORY / ECONOMICS / SOCIETY / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2024-01-02

Yann Le Cunn, a Chief AI Scientist at Meta, writes that only a few book authors make significant money from book sales, so most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison.  + 

STUDY BIOLOGY OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES

BIOLOGY / ECONOMICS / JOURNALISM / ESSAYS / 2023-12-30

We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”. Free markets’ invisible hand will correct?  + 

FIGMA AND ADOBE CANCEL MERGER!

BUSINESS / WEB DESIGN / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-12-18

Woha! Very unexpected reversal. Figma and Adobe have abandoned their proposed merger, after facing regulatory hurdles in Europe and the UK in particular, where the Competition and Markets Authority rightly determined the deal “would harm the design software market”  + 

CALLING ELVIS, ANYBODY HOME?

ENVIRONMENT / POLITICS / SOCIETY / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-12-16

Have you received “the call” from COP28′s final plenary assembly to “transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner”? No? Why not? By the way, the UNFCC gives us a 67% chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C, if global  + 

THE SLOW DEATH OF FILM FESTIVALS?

CINEMA / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-11-30

The Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival will be reducing the number of programs in its competitions. The National selection will go from 12 to 10 programs, and the International from 14 to 12. The second-largest French film festival, in terms of number of spectators  + 

THREATENING YOUR CUSTOMERS TO FORCE A PURCHASE IS A BAD IDEA

MARKETING / RUNNING / REVIEWS / 2023-11-26

Even online, the French struggle with “customer service”. A retailer of running shoes, i-Run, has been sending me monthly e-mails warning that the €8.29 credit I had after buying from them will expire today, if I do not re-order immediately. They’ve just sent me a  + 

I’M A CONSUMER, WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT?

ECONOMICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-10-25

“I’m a consumer, what’s wrong with that?” The way you consume? The quantity? The fact that luck gave you an opportunity to NOT be an animal, to use that neocortex to create a better world, maybe?  + 

ODESSA’S DESTRUCTION OF UNESCO HERITAGE SITES

ARCHITECTURE / POLITICS / ESSAYS / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-09-27

As of 13 September 2023, UNESCO has verified damage to 289 cultural sites in Ukraine: 120 religious buildings, 27 museums, 109 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 19 monuments, 13 libraries… In Odessa alone, a city near and dear to me from childhood  + 

ADOBE, SHUTTERSTOCK AND NOW GETTY OFFER THE SAME GENERATIVE AI “ART”

COMPUTERS / ECONOMICS / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-09-25

Today, “Generative AI by Getty Images” launched on an NVIDIA Edify / Picasso framework, trained on Getty’s own stock of photographs. Same as previously done by Adobe. And Shutterstock. And… Send me an e-mail when you need a one-of-a-kind, human-made  + 

ART VS LIMITLESS’ MONEY, SEX & POWER… WHO’D WIN?

CINEMA / ECONOMICS / FINANCE / SOCIETY / REVIEWS / 2023-09-18

Fascinating how the film “Limitless” by Neil Burger starring Bradley Cooper paints a dreamy picture of a struggling artist with an external solution to everything — a pill, stolen by the artist — to be used by the artist to pursue: 1) money 2) sex 3) power… and his art?  + 

HOW TRILINGUAL IS CHATGPT IN 2023?

COMPUTERS / LINGUISTICS / REVIEWS / 2023-09-05

What would a trilingual like myself do with a ChatGPT? Torture it with correspondence tests, of course. Here’s the result: 🤪 ChatGPT: If we were to use English proficiency as a base and attribute a numerical score of 100 to it, I would rank my  + 

$100 TO READ AND BACKUP MY OWN TWEETS. PER MONTH.

SOCIAL MEDIA / OUTSIDE NEWS / REVIEWS / 2023-08-24

Oh, now Twitter asks me to pay 100 USD per month to read and backup my own tweets on my server. Since early July 2023, I can no longer GET my own posts, sort them into 3 distinct languages and store them in my own  + 

IF ALEXEI MEDVEDEV REACTIVATES THEIR ACCOUNT, YOU’LL STILL BE FRIENDS

CINEMA / POLITICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-08-19

When I saw a “person missing” announcement in my Facebook feed, I somehow didn’t quite understand… “What’s going on? How so?” The usual, the so commonly trivial was going on — the death of an interesting person who did so much for Russian culture.  + 

CHATGPT. IT’S A CHAT.

COMPUTERS / PRODUCTIVITY / ESSAYS / 2023-08-14

ChatGPT. It’s a chat. Not AI. It’s not Intelligent. It’s not even a knowledge base of Humanity, like Wikipedia or PubMed. It’s a collection of statistical models of knowledge. Some licensed, some stolen*. Oh, and no one understands how the inside works. The chat predicts  + 

RUSSIANS DON’T CARE

ECONOMICS / LINGUISTICS / POLITICS / ESSAYS / 2023-06-13

You know what? Russians still living in Russia, the remaining 140 million of them, don’t care about the war. Nor do they care about their rulers or the Western sanctions. Or the Western companies having left or banned. Russia is stuck in yet another historical  + 

SAM ALTMAN – EVERYBODY THOUGHT: FIRST AI WOULD DO PHYSICAL LABOR

ART THEORY / COMPUTERS / MUSIC / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-06-04

Everybody thought: first AI would do physical labor, then some cognitive labor, then the really hard cognitive labor, like programming… And then, last of all, but maybe never, because it’s magical and human… was creativity  + 

ИСКУССТВО КИНО – THE LAST ISSUE TO PRINT

CINEMA / JOURNALISM / ESSAYS / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-05-24

Искусство Кино — published since 1931 and thus, together with “Sight & Sound” and “Cahiers du Cinéma” one of the earliest magazines to cover the film industry, art and theory — has printed its last issue. Yes, my work has been featured in it. But  + 

ELON MUSK: IF AI COULD REPLACE ME, SHOULD I BE DOING THIS?

HEALTH / PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-17

Elon Musk just said on CNBC something I’d been thinking about a lot: “If we do get to this sort of magic genie situation, where you can ask the AI for anything. And let’s say, even if it’s a benign scenario… How do we actually  + 

HOW TO BE HAPPY? MY 5 MINUTES DIALOGUE WITH CHATGPT

COMPUTERS / HEALTH / LINGUISTICS / ESSAYS / 2023-05-16

My conversation about human happiness with ChatGPT took 5 minutes. Question: According to what is currently known to science, what 50 factors, listed from most influential to least, influence a human (male, with an IQ above 100) self-reported feeling of happiness  + 

THE GLOBAL HARMONIZED STANDARD OF WOMEN

HEALTH / INDUSTRIAL DESIGN / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-08

Social media, especially Instagram, has succeeded to complete the Global Harmonized Standard of Women™, an industrialized process started by the female magazines (Vogue, ELLE…) It’s all pretty… scary. We now have a draft proposal for ISO review.  + 

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