Addison Del Mastro

the book Life After Cars by Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, photographed on the beach

reading this book in october on a beach day in new york city really drives (pun intended) the point of this book home.

congrats @brooklynspoke.bsky.social @thewaroncars.bsky.social !

Wake Me When AI Can Produce Sgt. Pepper The cultural provenance of stuff nobody thinks about, and AI and the skill ladder

If entry-level music/writing/etc. becomes imitative machine-written garbage, that’s not the loss. The loss is the Sgt. Peppers that won’t get worked and iterated into existence because the mechanism by which a fraction of artists can become something like the Beatles will have been broken.

Wake Me When AI Can Produce Sgt. Pepper The cultural provenance of stuff nobody thinks about, and AI and the skill ladder

"Put it this way: a great deal of what real humans are writing and creating is already poor and generic enough to have been produced by an imitative computer program." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/wake-me-wh...

Wake Me When AI Can Produce Sgt. Pepper The cultural provenance of stuff nobody thinks about, and AI and the skill ladder

"In a rich country, enough people are at the top that we can forget there was a ladder behind us, and that some people still need to grasp its bottom rungs." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/wake-me-wh...

I promise I won't post any more AI images, but man thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/wake-me-wh...

The front of this helicopter looks like an old tube TV!

Wake Me When AI Can Produce Sgt. Pepper The cultural provenance of stuff nobody thinks about, and AI and the skill ladder

The problem with AI (as it exists now) is that it's fundamentally imitative. It isn't reverse-engineering the human creative process, it's merely able to passably imitate cultural output that already exists. But great creators need to start somewhere. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/wake-me-wh...

Wake Me When AI Can Produce Sgt. Pepper The cultural provenance of stuff nobody thinks about, and AI and the skill ladder

"In an interesting way, this AI stuff is based on the same fallacy as the bigness in America: the slow disappearance of starter homes, small cars, small grocery stores, etc. What that represents is the removal of the bottom rungs of the ladder." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/wake-me-wh...

Wake Me When AI Can Produce Sgt. Pepper The cultural provenance of stuff nobody thinks about, and AI and the skill ladder

If you trained an AI on the first five Beatles albums, it would spit out passable-to-hacky early Beatles-esque stuff. Do you know what it wouldn’t do? It wouldn’t ingest Please Please Me and A Hard Day’s Night and spit out Revolver and Sgt. Pepper." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/wake-me-wh...

Ugh

Wake Me When AI Can Produce Sgt. Pepper The cultural provenance of stuff nobody thinks about, and AI and the skill ladder

Success and innovation and are processes, not end states. Iteration, experimentation, and even failure are inherent in what they are. When we try to mandate success, we destroy the process by which people reach it. This is about AI. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/wake-me-wh...

It is unfair to have cities where parking is free for cars and housing is expensive for people - Donald Shoup

Celebration of the life and work of Donald Shoup

Yes.

🗼 I arrived in Tokyo recently excited to try their legendarily efficient train system.

I left wowed by another mode of transit: its surprisingly safe streets.

Can Minnesota learn lessons from Japan’s war on traffic deaths? My reflection for @axios.com >> www.axios.com/local/twin-c...

Finally some good news

It's difficult to get people to realize when *they're* the people in Nineteen Eighty-Four who keep cheering and damning the enemy when the enemy in questions changes in the middle of the speech

The Neon God They Made Preservation, and taking preservation too far

What was it that made people in the midcentury period recoil from neon, and people today find it charming and alluring? thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-neon-g...

I assumed e-bike meant "motorized bike," and I probably know a little more about them than most people. Thank you!

Ha, why *is* it not an e-bike?

Great comment on my piece about San Francisco. This really is the core question at the heart of housing and urbanism debates: how much does a place's spirit or character reduce to its physical plant? thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-san-fr...

I really think this AI business is a big joke they're putting over on us (fully and properly spelled out the album name in the prompt!)

The Polio Vaccine Was a Miracle—and We Must Not Forget It As a polio survivor, I am a dinosaur today. My great hope is that our country’s living memory of the disease ends with my generation.

Some day, there won't be anyone left who remembers life before the polio vaccine. But while there still are, listen to them: www.thebulwark.com/p/polio-vacc...

I believe in free speech, but I think this sort of thing is civically irresponsible, and should be treated as on the same tier as clickbait/junk mail/listicles/etc., if not worse.

Oh no, I've reached my monthly article limit before I can read "The Grooms Smashing Wedding Cake in Their Brides' Faces"

The Neon God They Made Preservation, and taking preservation too far

It’s impossible to tell if neon is otherwise banned in San Francisco, per se, but the city's document on sign design regulations emphasizes “indirect illumination,” which would de facto ban neon. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-neon-g...

I go for the original but sorry/you're welcome

Comment on a moronic story about grooms smashing cakes into their brides' faces, Three Stooges style. I quite genuinely wonder how much being aware of every imbecilic thing someone somewhere did has helped dissolve social trust

The Neon God They Made Preservation, and taking preservation too far

What inspired me to pick up this piece again was going to San Francisco and seeing so much stuff that feels outdated and old—stuff that, in order to still be around now, would have to have been consciously kept around. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-neon-g...

The Neon God They Made Preservation, and taking preservation too far

One of the themes I've been thinking about a lot lately is what causes us to view a thing as retro/vintage/antique/historic/etc. Those things were new once, now they're hallowed by time. How do we make new things now that we will love now, or one day? thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-neon-g...