PicoBlog

Is there any form of ethical material that young men can view while masturbating, or is even the most thoughtfully presented, woman-owned and operated images and videos still fundamentally just objectifying women?    Granted, porn is a terrible template for young men to model their own sexual behavior upon. But what are the healthy alternatives to point them to? While it's important to learn about consent and safer-sex practices, those lessons don't address the entirety of a sexual experience.

How can you not be romantic about baseball? I read an essay in school about why baseball is America’s pastime. The thesis was something along the lines of “baseball is a microcosm of the American dream.” Unlike other sports, in which only people who play certain positions are likely to score the game-winning point, in baseball, everyone gets an at-bat. Individualism triumphs. You can contribute to your team a little (getting to first base, fielding the occasional grounder) or a lot (batting in a triple, pitching a no-hitter), but everyone gets their moment in the spotlight, a chance to show what they’re made of.

In the intro to this series, I told you how cognitive illusions systematically prevent people from building the lives they want… By causing them to make decision after decision based on faulty thinking. And how, once you know what these illusions are, you can combat them with signposts that let you know when you’re in the cognitive illusion zone… And external structure to help you navigate through the illusion.

I’m pretty convinced modern AI will be a world-transforming technology. As such, I think it’s important that non-professionals understand how and why it works. My goal here is to explain to a broader audience — readers who don’t know calculus — how OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator works, in reasonably thorough and rigorous detail, with a few illustrative diagrams … but no math whatsoever. Wish me luck. As mentioned in Part 1 of this post, DALL-E is first taught how to add noise to pictures, and then to reverse that process and “denoise” from smeared static into clarity, from chaos into order.

Damon Dash (via Shutterstock)Trapital is one of LinkedIn’s Must Read Series. Tell a friend to sign up for the newsletter.After Run-DMC’s aptly named Raising Hell Tour in 1986, hip-hop concerts were cast with a cloud of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Live performances were “poorly managed”, “not lucrative”, and “incited violence and gang activity”. Other genres of music faced similar challenges, but hip-hop was under the magnifying glass. Perception became reality, and hip-hop had to prove that its artists can tour, make money, and run an efficient program without problems.

On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes—you can find previous entries here—and this week I’m excited to chat with Dan Sinykin whose book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature was published last week. As that subtitle implies, Big Fiction is a rigorous and fascinating look at the last few decades of corporate conglomeration in publishing and how it has shaped American literature in everything from what types of books are published to how we conceive of genres.

December 6, 2023 edition. Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Erich Schwartzel. If you want to hear the full episode, become a paying subscriber. This week, Wall Street Journal Erich Schwartzel joins Meghan for a conversation about his December 2 article about social media super-influencers Rachel and Dave Hollis. After building a multi-m… ncG1vNJzZmillZy1orrDmqymZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe9GamqGdnGKxosLEZp%2BopJyewG6wxJqroWWVp7aktIysmqGvkafBu7HL

A platform where you can record what you’re reading and talk to others about what they’re reading doesn’t sound like a recipe for dystopia. But throw in a negligent billionaire conglomerate owner, optimization culture, and a competitive industry in which the line between reader and author is continually blurred… and you have a legitimate book lover’s he… ncG1vNJzZmibpaHBtr7ErKuunKmlvKV60q6ZrKyRmLhvr86mZqlnmKTEbrDInWSgp5%2BZv6atw6xkoJ2kYsCwecGamw%3D%3D

The invention of the electronic circuit changed the world. In just over a century, electronic devices upended almost every aspect of our lives — from transportation, to medicine, to the way we interact with each other and have fun. Despite this, a firm grasp of electronics remains elusive for most. I’m confident that much of the blame lies with the hydraulic analogy — a reimagining of electronic circuits as series of tubes.