“Here is where it gets interesting. If I use the same prompt and add ‘Amazing awesome and epic’, the picture gets noticeably better. ‘Oh,’ goes the neural net, ‘you wanted a good picture’. And how good a picture you get depends on exactly how you ask for it. There are several phrases you can add that seem to make things better, like ‘trending on artstation’ or ‘unreal engine’.”

“Tolkien had his beloved wife Edith. Sam had his Rose. But there is room, I think, for another kind of love, specific to both the real and invented worlds that Tolkien inhabited. A love that grew in extraordinary hardship, and ultimately could not survive outside of it; but that was deeply meaningful all the same.”

“[Edison] pushed aggressively for a standardized way of singing — one that aimed to keep American music under unrealistic constraints. This only made the public all the more enthusiastic when something more expansive and free came along. And he unwittingly provided the tools these radical new musicians needed to advance their agenda.”

“Strategy and product visions only go so far. And success in those areas has limited impact on real company culture. What makes working at a company fulfilling is actually quite simple. You have to align the goals of your organization with the health and stability of the employees.”

“[Y]ou could argue that the serifs, originally applied to inscriptions to be seen under sunlight, could be a form of light trap, even though people in the Ancient Rome wouldn’t have such terminology. They would have wanted to make the letters stay legible for as long as possible in the day, and serifs are more effective at keeping corners dark at variety of light angles than serif-less forms.”

“Ultimately there isn’t a rational justification for why we decided to mimic the early 2000s Windows style of rendering, but seeing those old browsers in Windows virtual machines resonated most with us, felt most.. retro.”

“We should ask ourselves, our communities, and our government: if a business can’t pay a living wage, should it be a business? If it’s too expensive for businesses to provide healthcare for their workers, maybe we need to decouple it from employment?”

“For years, Judy Malloy would not get the credit she deserved for being one of the earliest pioneers of ‘electronic literature,’ as the literary hypertext movement came to be called: pieces by men writing later became more famous and better-studied.”

“Not a single century passed in which this spot was not being used and transformed, and every transformation is still here. And all that time, from the first sacred spring, to the Mithraism, to today’s Irish Dominicans, this spot has been sacred.”

“If there is any reason for hope in the growing epidemic of long COVID, it is that some academic medical centers are taking these patients seriously and tailoring treatment to them. Medicine’s history with hard-to-identify chronic illnesses, particularly those that mainly affect women, has not been a good one.”

“Substack takes a small percentage of my subscription money, and that money goes to fund the writers they view to be better investments. I give them my money, and they use that money to pay men who have, in several instances, stalked or harassed either me or people I care about.”

“The end product is an internet-native sport that doesn’t need any of the troublesome real-life human players who are bound to disappoint us with their bad behavior. Instead, fans create narratives for players, inventing histories and team culture to surround and explain the random, simulation-based events of the game.”

“Dust grains had smashed into Juno at about 10,000 miles (or 16,000 kilometers) per hour, chipping off submillimeter pieces. … The spray of debris was coming from Juno’s expansive solar panels — the biggest and most sensitive unintended dust detector ever built.”

“Astell studied astronomy with John Flamsteed between 1697 and 1698, and her notes in Les Principes demonstrate that she had already attained a high level of understanding in the sciences prior to her formal studies with the Astronomer Royal.”

“It might be embarrassing today to admit that I learned my first bits of English from the three volumes of the adventures of Larry, a game series that even back then wasn’t particularly respectable. But this was the only such game I knew, school in 1989 was still exclusively into Russian.”