Jim Collins: “Repeatedly in my journey, I’ve started out with what I think is the question, self-renewal, corporate vision, whatever, and I’ve ended up with the method leading me to a much bigger question that the method answers. And so in this case, all of a sudden, as I got deeper and deeper into it, I realized I’m not studying self-renewal. Self-renewal is a residual artifact of really the big question, and the big question is the title of the book, which is the question we all face with, which is What to Make of a Life?”
Steve Newman: “Agents are comparatively weak at high-level decision making, but they make execution cheap. So sometimes, instead of trying to choose the right path, you can just tell the agent to explore every path…Don’t ask AI to help you make a design decision. Just have it pick six options, code all six, and see which ones came out best…People use the term “agent” pretty loosely. The core idea for me is a system that pursues a goal rather than following a script.” [via Arnold Kling]
NYTimes: ““Rooster,” which stars Carell as a best-selling author lecturing at the same small college where his professor daughter’s marriage is publicly imploding, is about a father’s efforts to stay in his adult child’s life. But funny. “The Bill [Lawrence] recipe is, not only is it going to make you laugh, it’s going to tap into something in your own life,” said Zach Braff, the star of “Scrubs” and a longtime collaborator.”
FT: “The dominance of screens and the addictive quality of phones and social media, which tech companies have long monopolised, is something to react against. Even the presence of your phone is a trigger, now looped into automatic function. It is productive to be clued up about how our brains interact with screens. But the solution is not the interminable cry of optimisation: attention isn’t something you can just ramp up and up and up. We need breaks. Natural slumps occur during the day. Different forms of attention demand more of us. Mindless scrolling can actually provide your brain with relief, while letting the mind wander can be creatively or philosophically vital. Or it might just feel good.”
Mint: “There isn’t anything Arijit Singh can’t sing. Give him a ghazal, and he will make it sigh. Or a Mohammed Rafi-singing-for-Shammi-Kapoor pastiche, where he will channel old-school playback. He will do western pop inflections that feel like a breeze. He will, of course, nail those weepies that he’s synonymous with. But he will also lay bare his voice, with its grains and cracks and other imperfections, in haunted Vishal Bhardwaj compositions. He will do amusing vocal stunts in a faux-Arabic tune for Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Arijit Singh is India’s No.1 singer for a reason…He had a peak (2013-17), then what should have been a post-peak, yet there was no visible decline. If anything, his cultural dominance only intensified. In 2023, he became Spotify’s most followed artist in the world. And then he announced his retirement from playback singing. At age 38.”
