Students from the elite school Tsinghua University protested with Friedmann equation. I have no idea what this equation means, but it does not matter. It's the pronunciation: it's similar to "free的man" (free man)—a spectacular and creative way to express, with intelligence.

The full 1984-published interview ↴ theparisreview.org/interviews/292…

the horses have unexpectedly returned with fireflies Hekigodo

“We had best forgive pain, and frankly admit it is impossible to imagine a happiness greater than what we enjoy in this human life of ours, so sweet and so bitter.…Yes, that is our garden-plot, which we must dig zealously.” —Anatole France

I was going to make a “hey look it's the first Sherwin Williams logo haha” joke, until I saw that the first “Cover the Earth” design (1893) actually precedes this image (1900) by about seven years. simplicissimus.info/index.php?id=6…

AI is typing in a room different from the one you are in now. It is typing the words summated from its model, and AI will be trained on it again and again, until the resonant distributions of its probabilities reinforce themselves, so that any semblance of coherence is destroyed.

youtube.com/watch?v=3XhDGk…

Text from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” (Ch. 9).

“Men must surely have some lurking suspicion of this great truth, seeing they never govern their conduct by reason. It is instinct and sentiment lead them. They obey their passions,—love, hate, and above all wholesome fear.” —From p.1 of Anatole France's essay, “Card Houses”

The wealth of recorded knowledge is too important to diminish a resource like the Internet Archive. What a sad, myopic act by the publishers, removing 500,000 books that library visitors could only ever borrow for an anodyne hour at a time (fantastic for references/citations).