groucho

Imagine being a high-ranking NYT exec, watching a computer hellbrain churn for a few minutes and spit out a five letter word.

"See? We can help!"

"I UNDERSTAND that one time you saw YOUR MOTHER wearing CLOTHING. The HORROR of it. THE DRAPING FABRIC. THE DELICATE EMBROIDERY. The WAY it BUNCHED UP AROUND HER. I cannot begin to FATHOM how DISGUSTING it must have been for you. TO SEE YOUR MOTHER THERE in CLOTHING. This is not the kind of thing I like to imagine. The FOLDS and GUSSETS and BUTTON HOLES. Imagine your mother PUTTING HER CLOTHING ON, thrusting her STUBBY FINGERS through her BUTTON HOLES as she DRAPES HERSELF IN FABRIC. And when she was done she LOOKED IN A MIRROR....."

As a survivor of homeschooling, this is the one thing I wish more people understood: school is not about cramming enough data into a kid until they magically evolve into an adult. School is supposed to teach you how to think.

Not in an Orwellian sense, but in a "here's how to approach a problem, here's how to get the data you need, here's how to keep track of it all, here's how to articulate your thoughts, here's how to ask useful questions...." sense. More broadly, it should also teach you how to handle failure and remind you that you'll never know everything.

Abstracting that away, either by giving kids AI crutches or -- in my case -- the teacher's textbook and telling them to figure it out, causes a lot of damage once they're out of the school bubble and have to solve big, knotty problems.

I am ugly laughing at this. Well done.

I'm mostly talking about dry ingredients, which I can mash down, level off, leave heaping....

Most of the issues I had with cooking are a result of how recipes are. Recipe says dice a thing? How small? A teaspoon of something? The hell does that mean? I can fit a ton of stuff in there if I mash it down. Salt to taste? Forget about it. Pretty soon I'm operating in panic mode and maybe the recipe turns out but I'm too stressed out to enjoy it.

Enter Sohla's cookbook, which explains everything. It's part cookbook, part autobiography, and part reference manual. Her youtube videos are tremendous fun, too.

100%

Yeah I'd argue that creativity starts after the idea, when you roll your sleeves up and see it through to completion. Ideas are easy. Everyone has them. Doing the work by using your skills and tools is the actual creative process. Everything else is mindless ideation.

Or to put it another way, imagine a high-level executive telling the art department to come up with something cool for the next product line. He fires an email off, waits for the result, maybe sends a couple notes back. When he unveils the product, he says "look how creative and artistic I am." Is he? I'd argue he isn't. He just had the idea. Other people executed that idea. The best you can say about him is he guided the process along, but nobody in the art department needs him to be there.

Bones is, as usual, thrilled to be there.

This is my favorite thing I've seen today.

Nah it's just flat-out racist. C'mon, people.

He's real good.