🔗 Are We Cooked? - by John Warner:

Since ChatGPT first appeared, rather than relentlessly focusing on the limits of generative AI, I’ve instead been trying to make an affirmative case for the importance of writing in this age of automated syntax generation, but I didn’t know what case to make against GPT-5’s parlor trick other than “Who cares?”

I don’t know how to fight against something that comes without any coherent value proposition other than, “Look at how fuckin’ cool this shit is.” If I say it’s not cool, then I’m out of touch. If I say that how cool something isn’t a great metric for utility toward human thriving, I’m against “progress.” I began to wonder what I’m even doing here.

🔗 Space Oddity: the weird history of the Soviet ANS synthesizer - 5 Magazine:

Picture a soundwave which is generated by music software from a passage of music. Now imagine drawing the soundwave first and having the software “read” and “play” it. That was the concept of the ANS — Murzin’s synthesizer named after his inspiration, Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin.

(via The Tonearm)

I find stuff like this fascinating, not just because of the weird ingeniousness of the instrument/machine itself, but because of all the strange cultural and artistic connections that digging into this sort of thing tends to turn up.

As a thoroughly casual rider of bicycles, my probably uniformed, knee-jerk opinion is that most people do not need stuff like hydraulic/disc brakes and electronic shifters.

Unless you are a professional racing cyclist, I am super skeptical that any of the marginal gains theoretically offered by this sort of gear is anything that going is going to make a difference, aside from its impact on the cost of your bike and of repairs thereto. And tbh the same goes for carbon frames and suspensions.

At my in-laws’ house where we are staying this week, there is a hummingbird feeder just outside of the window over the kitchen sink. Each morning as I am grinding my coffee, I watch the hummingbirds come and go.

I am always amazed at what territorial jerks hummingbirds are.

If a hummingbird is at the feeder, it runs off literally anything else that comes near—other hummingbirds, other birds (all shapes and sizes), I even just watched one chase off a fly that came buzzing around.