Tobias Wilson-Bates

Verge headline: Is language the same as intelligence? The Al industry desperately needs it to be by Benjamin Riley Illustration of a polygonal persons face in profile, laid out a bit like a heat map. The person has an empty speech bubble where their brain should be

Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.

Read more from @benjaminriley.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

This looks really cool

Ooh, bad news there…

Entirely free from the outside world (and we likewise free from them)

SS Amontillado

They will be encouraged to reform their ways or accept an offer to an all-expense paid island getaway to await next year’s docking

Athens Cruise-liner has a nice ring to it 😅

Important that the people getting on the ship feel deeply that they have won a unique privilege, and I do think the ship should have lots of fun cruise ship things to keep them entertained for their year at sea.

Endless debates over who is “cruise eligible” and whether last year’s winners will repeat this year.

I feel like there should only be one cruise ship in the world and it only docks once a year, and, when it docks, we put all the most irritating cultural figures on the ship.

I once asked a bookseller at a large indie store how many people would have to buy a book for it to get the attention of the store buyer and cause an additional order and they said: Three.

2. It's rare for any creative, including writers, to be able to live solely off their creative income. Moreover, there is no correlation between the creative value of art and the income status of its creator. It's okay to have another gig to eat and pay bills and survive our capitalist hellscape.

It’s almost 2026…

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

Libraries are free for you to use, serve the public good, are great, support creators financially and, I cannot be clear enough about this-- ARE FREE FOR YOU TO USE-- so pirating books makes you kind of an asshole, not some Marxist revolutionary.

If the book you want isn't there *request it.*

important to realize just how seriously feelings of powerlessness in the face of vast structures & a learned understanding of the futility of individual effort are generational givens that anybody my age or older (work hard! succeed! things work out!) has no way to fully grasp—but we need to try

This is what pisses me off about the current higher ed crisis. The humanities always take the fall for structural failures of admin or low enrollment.

We already have to justify our own existences bc STEMy depts and admin refuse to learn what we do!!

I am quoted in this Globe article as Director of American Studies at BU, and I like my quote very much:

“It's a value to society to have people highly educated in disciplines, whether they teach at universities or not.”

For real! Frankenstein is more than just it’s summary of “making up a guy to get mad at”

Something I think about with the rise of anodyne spam summaries is that the style of a text is *also* a dimension of its content.

Marinades are great! I’m tired of doing all the work of cooking. You ingredients just sit together and think about how you ought to taste

Frankenstein is the story of a lonely sea captain who hears such a great story that he decides not to kill his entire crew in the arctic.

Dracula is a book about cleaning up all the folders on your desktop so that you can do a project with docs, pdfs, and sound files.

It’s what killed Dickens!

Writing great books is one of the coolest things a human being can possibly do, but it’s important to recognize that the vast majority of authors throughout history earned roughly the equivalent of Uber driver wages to create the works we study today.

In Morrow County, healthy adults were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases that usually afflicted the elderly.

In a survey of 30 homes, at least 25 miscarriages and a half dozen people living with one kidney were reported.

🔗 www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

It really is the logical way to do it, though also I think the way that Rashomon makes something incredibly difficult feel intuitive is part of it s brilliance

This is the way! Don Quixote is running around without pants, Tristram Shandy is all penis jokes! The greatest texts to me welcome the reader into their form of play

Modern Mina would have THOUGHTS about Adobe Acrobat and converting file formats.