Some thoughts on insects, weekends, film critics, influencers, and the value of time and effort.
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Ancient myths remixed for modern times by Vimoh.
A friend of mine, when talking about how far back we go, often says that we are childhood friends. I always thought this was not true, since we only met for the first time in college. But as I grow older, it seems she is right.
One of the most common woes among creative people forced to work in zones defined by algorithms is that they have to compromise on their vision. If they want to write or paint or produce something that their heart is screaming, they still have to take things like SEO and algorithmic feeds into consideration before they publish it. If they don't, if they just "follow their heart", they risk invisibility, or worse, disinterest.
The text and images AI-based tools generate are often very fluid. But hidden in that fluidity is a vacuity that may escape the unobservant among us. YouTube, for example, now has a feature that will both recommend videos you should make (based on what has worked till now) and what those videos should contain (based on the LLM that it sits on).
Think about a popular influencer you know. They could be any kind of influencer - fashion, politics, literary, travel - anything.
When you compete with someone, you become more like them. The longer you compete, the more you resemble each other.
A short Hindi rant about why social media's never-ending stream of urgency is a mayajaal.
My father recently went to a school reunion. Everyone there, like him, was in their seventies.
Someone wrote to me responding to my view that the capitalistic intent behind AI companies will send them down the same path of monopolisation as some previous information technologies, like social media.
We are a little strange, no?
There was a short fantasy film some time ago on YouTube called Ahalya. I won't spoil it for you, but I am reminded of the feeling of being stuck inside my own body, unable to communicate that I am a human being.
A rough bundle of thoughts about what I learned in 2024 that I am taking with me into 2025.
A short monologue on technology, the need to be human, and whether a great future can be built on top of tech utopianism.
I was speaking to someone about the kind of issues we often have with our parents and chanced upon an expression of the problem that I had not used earlier.
We have this running theme that AI is going to help us fix the world. That AI is going to solve problems like climate change or bring the cure to cancer and things like that.
To you and I, the world makes sense. Gods are good, demons are bad, and people are helpless before either. Bodhi knows better. ā Written by Vijayendra Mohanty ā Cover art by Pradeep Yadav
The problem with tech bros looking to decide the fate of all humans is that they lack the multiple perspectives that are necessary to gain a holistic understanding of the human world. I am not claiming to have access to all those perspectives either, but then again, I am not looking to tell the tech bro how he should live his professional life.
I was looking to write something and felt stuck, so I asked ChatGPT to pretend to be an alien and ask me questions. Basically, I used it as a source of writing prompts. Questions it asked me are in italics. My answers are in regular type.
We keep wondering why aliens have not made contact with us. And we keep wondering why we have not been able to find intelligent life in the universe. But do we even know what we are looking for?
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