noah

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

The discovery that whales use sophisticated communication channels will encourage humans to explore how communicative our fellow earthlings may be https://t.co/yO3tYSCHBD

[Brandy Jensen @BrandyLJensen]

oh my god https://t.co/zdsOTQ6Elu

[ash 🍉 @StevieNicksTD]

RIP Quincy Jones

[Riley Walz @rtwlz]

I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below https://t.co/8D4yYNBPgu

[John Cooper @thejcoop]

Four straight minutes of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” It’s incredible. I had no idea she used it this much.

[The Minnesota Star Tribune @StarTribune]

UPDATE: The cougar spotted roaming the Lowry Hill neighborhood in Minneapolis this week was struck by a Hummer and killed as it crossed I-394 early this morning. https://t.co/SSQww5TMfq

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

"Moby Dick" was published in the U.S. on this day in 1851.

"What occasioned the change from the man who wrote 'Typee' and 'Omoo' to the man who wrote 'Moby Dick' and 'Pierre'?" W. Somerset Maugham wrote in a June 1948 appraisal of Herman Melville's novel:

https://t.co/WWkc579RhY

[Slow Lake Street @SlowLakeStreet]

“Lake is a designated Slow Street, with bollards to limit the number of cars on the road and make it more friendly to pedestrians.”

Correction: Lake has no “bollards.” It has a handful of dinky rubber posts, none placed in the driving lane. Real bollards may have deterred this.

[Travis Woods @aHeartOfGould]

Cormac McCarthy / 1933 - 2023

[P.E. Moskowitz @_pem_pem]

i wrote about the suburban/privatized american mind and how it fuels anti trans (and anti everything else) panic for @thenation https://t.co/dCnzQJ8gJk

[WIRED @WIRED]

The first floor was designed as an event space, complete with Hogwarts-style wooden banquet tables, a museum, a sweeping bar, and the Thinktocat, a giant bronze sculpture of GitHub’s mascot, the Octocat—a humanoid cat with octopus legs. https://t.co/ntmnNFZFvZ

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I asked GPT-4 to look up how to do prompts, and also the text to Calvino's Invisible Cities. The prompts were okay (they tended to include details that weren't visual), but the results were surprisingly interesting. Here is how it rendered: Ersilia, Maurilia, Valdrada and Esmeralda.

"In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain." (Calvino 76)

"The ancients buit Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes."

"In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise them for preserving everything that changes so beautifully." (Calvino 32)

"In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have always the choice between land and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in Esmeralda is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many, and they increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry land." (Calvino 88)

[Michael Luo @michaelluo]

.@susanorlean on the eventful life of Blanche, San Francisco's best-known swan. "Then things went all Greek tragedy." Read it. https://t.co/XZitxCAR3Z

[Jeff Speck @JeffSpeckFAICP]

IF YOU READ ONE THING TODAY.

This is the most important article I’ve written.

If you won’t read it, please unfollow me. I am no use to you.

https://t.co/QrNcKOrdGf

[Corry Wang @corry_wang]

I guess GPT-3 is old news, but playing with OpenAI’s new chatbot is mindblowing. https://t.co/so1TuXMQB0

We’re witnessing the death of the college essay in realtime. Here’s the response to a prompt from one of my 200-level history classes at Amherst

Solid A- work in 10 seconds

[Adrian Covert 🇺🇸🥑⚾️ @AdrianCovert]

With the storm slamming into California effectively ending wildfire season, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate the bullet we dodged this year.

[NPR @NPR]

Writer Mike Davis has died at age 76.

He was best known for his book 'City of Quartz' and other searing critiques of capitalism, corruption and environmental degradation.
https://t.co/2l7zE6fQ5q

[KTLA @KTLA]

Californians can now legally jaywalk https://t.co/fe4E2WYjsw #California

[Emily Guskin @EmGusk]

This graphic about where people go after college is ENLIGHTENING and probably something my dad would have cut out from the newspaper if it was in there in 2002. @andrewvandam https://t.co/4Z2hMwDjPX

[WIRED @WIRED]

OpenAI’s new tool can autocomplete lines of programming or conjure software from a simple prompt. It could also riddle the internet with even more bugs. https://t.co/9Jrq9csSxg