If you think you're a decent speaker of a second language, try spending a full hour narrating a simple suburban environment to a small child. You will very quickly discover gaping holes in your vocabulary that the average three year old would absolutely school you on. What the hell is a slug called? How about a digger? How do you say I'm stomping my feet? So this solves two problems at once: it has greatly improved my spanish, despite the fact that I'm often just talking to myself, and it has...| Deep Dish
My coming-out post on why I'm no longer an AI doomer seems to have struck a nerve. Hundreds of people responded across reddit, substack, twitter, email, podcasts, etc, which I'd like to say is just another day at the office for a Very Successful Blogger like me, but is in fact fairly unusual. There are too many threads to reply to individually, so I thought I'd condense the general thrust of the criticisms and respond to the best comments here. And they were (mostly) very good! I've ended up ...| Deep Dish
Maybe you have a voice in your head that whispers ‘jump!’ every time you lean over a balcony. I have recurring fantasies of deleting my presence from the Internet and going off the grid.| Deep Dish
IT'S BEEN A COUPLE YEARS since I did one of these roundups, during which time book club has really lifted my reading game, and so the pool of contenders has a lot of depth this year. After much agonising I've winnowed my favourite reads down to a top 10. The list ended up heavy on classics and big names, with fewer underrated or self-published authors—wow, Hemingway is a great read, no kidding—but I think that also tells you something. I've also read quite a bit of contemporary fiction—...| Deep Dish
What makes humans special? How is it that we are able to unleash the energy of the atom, transmute handfuls of sand into powerful djinn, and generally manipulate matter in any way not strictly forbidden by the laws of physics, while our hominid ancestors gather dust in the natural history museum? What tectonic forces have torn such a chasm between us and our surviving cousins, still banging rocks together in the animal kingdom? For most of history this was no great mystery: only humans have a...| Deep Dish