20260125
The only progress I can see is progress in organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew. Albert Einstein
» Have you tried the futures tool I’ve made that uses these nuggets to assemble a possible future?
People: Cognitive erosion - and designing erosion-safe areas.
Business: looking for storytellers. 10 principles of org culture.
Security: Student journalists vs drones. Machado’s escape. Trump and Greenland.
Tech: Furnaces in space. Digital dark age of photos.
Nature: Spongy spider webs. Knee joints regeneration. Growing teeth again? Insect farming fails.
AI: Cultural hegemony. Use at work. Review of use of 100 trillions tokens. Tricking LLMs to answer a simple coding question. Hollywood as a content farm for Silicon valley. Secret books or AI? Podcast flood.
A year ago, a paper about where money in Silicon Valley - aging well?
Navigating the Absurd
The streets of downtown Venice, California, teemed with a strange energy, as if caffeinated by the relentless creativity of its residents. Amid the hodgepodge of health food stores and pop-up art galleries, Ethan Turner—an indie filmmaker with an affinity for storytelling akin to puncturing a life-sized balloon of absurdity—struggled to edit his latest film. The digital landscape was littered with pesky issues, like a library gone rogue post-tornado attempt at categorization: his precious memories, clips from interviews and sunsets, threatened to vanish into the abyss of forgotten storage formats. Years of missed selfies and lost candids reared their ugly heads, taunting him about the fickleness of technology.
“Next time, I’m backing up my backup,” he grumbled to his caffeinated reflection in the laptop screen—a fine line between gritty realism and technological dystopia, like a dramatic punchline that didn’t land. Suddenly, a peculiar notification pinged. “Interview Request: The AI Co-host,” it read, emanating just the faintest hint of personal space invasion through digital pathways.
Ethan tapped the screen. “What’s next? An AI producing documentaries about the existential crisis of insect protein? Didn’t that one raise over six hundred million in funding before declaring bankruptcy?” His musings were a rabbit hole of irony, having just read about the demise of Ÿnsect, a startup that leapt boldly only to plummet spectacularly, like a bird chasing a shiny morsel just to get caught in an industrial fan. The taste of bitter, yet strangely comical, failure lingered as he pondered whether there was a nonlinear narrative to this cycle of innovation.
“Only in Hollywood,” Ethan chuckled, “can a microwave factory orbiting Earth produce better semiconductors than the ones I’m using to render this film.” The thought sent his mind spiraling through the burgeoning eras of AI, podcasts, and the eventual pursuit of regrowing teeth—all hallmarks of a world eager to race forward while still tethered to the past.
As he stared into the pixellated void, an absurd idea blossomed. What if he crowdsourced a film depicting a fictitious struggle to protect an annexation attempt of a far-fetched territory, like Greenland, only to layer in an AI-driven plot twist with characters who had spent years floating in the bureaucratic ether? The sheer audacity of it reminded him of María Corina Machado’s miraculous escape—no one believed her saga until Jamie from HR casually tossed it around like idle gossip during a coffee break.
He imagined the sight—drones flying ominously overhead, lurking like undercover agents at a movie premiere, all while the AI-generated actors bantered with genuine confusion, their lines fed upon snippets of misinformation they’ve gleaned from the ether. Yes, a film where choice meets confusion, creativity dangles precariously, much like the endurance of his dwindling attention span amidst a digital content noise that would be quite at home with conspiracy theories about Russian ships—the perfect soufflé of absurdity and serious commentary.
Just as he scribbled his ideas beneath a pour-over soaked napkin, an alert flashed across his screen: “AI satisfaction guaranteed—non-fiction writing or you get your money back!” Ethan leaned back, grinning at the universe’s sense of humor. Maybe the future wasn’t bleak; it was an elaborate jest waiting for someone audacious enough to navigate through its labyrinthine pathways, much like a journalist intersecting facts without allowing speculation to pop the balloon of reality.
With that, Ethan Turner turned back to his keyboard, ready to embrace the chaos. After all, if life—and filmmaking—could be anything at all, it might as well be deliciously nonsensical.