Sam Adams

Ingrid Bergman in "Spellbound"

Okay, look, I'm just saying: Ingrid Bergman in "Spellbound"

NYT piece on AI romance novels, linked in the next post

if you're 3 points short, it has to be 3 4-letter words

I try very hard to get to Genius before I turn to the Buddy; most days I succeed

YouTube video by Elvis Costello - Topic Tramp the Dirt Down

worked out for me in a week where I have been thinking about these lyrics

Deepfaking Orson Welles’s Mangled Masterpiece Will an A.I. restoration of “The Magnificent Ambersons” right a historic wrong or desecrate a classic?

whatever I think of their subjects (and it is ... complicated) I think this week's pieces from @michaelschulman.bsky.social and Alexandra Alter smartly demarcate the varied ways people are using generative AI, both exploitative and (potentially) transformative www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/b...

I had to go to the hint and even after I understood what it was I could not spell it correctly for the life of me

prompting ChatGPT to think about baseball

Chatbots were also bad at building sexual tension — the slow-burn, will-they-or-won't-they plotlines that romance readers crave. When told to craft a love scene, the bots usually jumped straight to the obvious narrative climax.

I enjoy the suggestion that generative AI is a lousy lay

Elvis, too.

I call BS on the exclusion of PORTAPOTTY

The Picasso Mystery, for those reading this far. Truly one of the great depictions of any artist at work.

On a whim, I asked ChatGPT to generate a review of a forthcoming movie “in the style of Sam Adams,” and it did a great job of sounding like me bullshitting my way through a review of a movie I’ve never seen

There’s a documentary where you watch Picasso finish a painting, take a minute to size it up, and then briskly paint over the whole thing so he can do something else. Greatness isn’t being satisfied with the first painting; it’s the conviction there is a better one you haven’t made yet.

Put more concretely, if I could do a better Pauline Kael, I would never have figured out how to do a good me

There’s a documentary where you watch Picasso finish a painting, take a minute to size it up, and then briskly paint over the whole thing so he can do something else. Greatness isn’t being satisfied with the first painting; it’s the conviction there is a better one you haven’t made yet.

“Did you mean ‘Yes’?”

Yup! I think, psychoanalyzing my own hatred of AI, that a lot of it stems from an intuition that what people want out of AI (affirmation, therapy, instant gratification) is what they increasingly want (or are being trained to want) out of art and culture
bsky.app/profile/alis...

What limits AI is the same thing that inspires real artists: failure. Everyone starts off trying to copy the things they love, and their distinctiveness begins where that imitation falls short.

the people who want you to believe that generative AI can paint like Picasso tend to gloss over the fact that Picasso didn’t have hundreds of Picassos to learn from. He had to make something new, which a model trained on old art is definitionally incapable of doing.

The Biggest Star of the Super Bowl Isn’t an Athlete—or Bad Bunny We’ve seen this game before, and it doesn’t end well for anyone.

happy Super Bowl Sunday! for all you commercials sickos, I make the case that this game's ad blitz will be to A.I. what 2022's was to crypto and 2000's was to the dot-com boom—with all attendant implications for our broader economy and the celebrity-promotion complex: slate.com/technology/2...

My resume also lists all the jobs I applied for and didn’t get

I did not know that at the time, but I guessed that was the only way the joke would be funny

“Washington isn’t a cultural center the way New York, Nashville and Los Angeles are.”

(The other possibility, of course, is that Lewis really was dead meat and this anonymous source is part of a campaign to attach the blame for a catastrophic decision to his gilded corpse.)

Senior management at The Post were livid when they discovered Lewis was attending Super Bowl-related festivities in San Francisco around the time of the news of the job cuts. It came off as "callous", said one person in the newsroom familiar with the situation, adding that "the Super Bowl thing was the last straw".

The sense that Lewis had lost the newsroom only increased on the day the job cuts were announced. "There was no communication from him about buyouts, the person added. "He didn't put out a statement. Senior editorial leadership was furious.

I assumed Will Lewis noped out of the Post layoffs and went to a Super Bowl party on Tuesday because he already knew he was dead meat. But it was apparently pure heartless arrogance, of a kind even Jeff Bezos couldn’t stomach. www.ft.com/content/5fa6...

let’s just scroll down and see what the guy arguing that “the world” works more smoothly when for-profit enterprise supplants public funding does for a living …

If DC’s major newspaper hadn’t just fired all their arts critics, I’m sure one would be available to slap down this lazy let-the-markets-decide propaganda

The underlying problem may be that the world has moved on from a time when government-sponsored institutions were often better than similar private-sector ones. The U.S. Postal Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Public Broadcasting Service were once important and excellent institutions. But they succumbed to maturity costs, politics, bureaucracy, mission drift and underfunding. Meanwhile, competitive private-sector players emerged to fill the need.

Fact-check, please