Excellent! May more hyper-niche essays hit your Venn bullseye.

I genuinely think the reason execs were so certain AI could replace other workers is that they know it could replace them and they just assume everyone else does as little real work as they do.

We all agree that we like arts spaces & they make communities feel good & neighbourhoods nice to live in. Right?

And yet: look at what happened to The Giggle Dam in PoCo. And what happened to the Opening Nite Theatre in Mission.

Landlords and city halls shouldn't be able to kill venues so easily.

Would that even be possible? Would the landlord just be able to say "no. Dollarama will make me more money."? Would Pitt Meadows City Hall just say "that sounds like it'd be too much paperwork. denied."?

And if so: how the fuck are community-owned arts & culture spaces supposed to exist?

Ive been wondering: what if the community got together and raised funds to buy the Hollywood 3 and run it as a co-op performance venue? Keep one of the screens, convert the others into a stage for local theatre and/or a cabaret for comedy, improv & music. Apply for a grant, try and make it work...

The landlord is demanding an unreasonable amount, forcing them to close. And what for? To put in another fucking Dollarama!

I don't need to tell you this, but *we, as a society, need to decide we want to protect independent businesses, especially arts & culture spaces*

I love this quote from the article:

"But the best ideas often come from wandering, from play, from slowness. Real understanding takes time. Sometimes, it takes failing. Sometimes, it takes boredom."

You cannot replace the process!

It is yet another way we are willingly giving up control to some other corporate-owned interest. They tell us its empowering: "anyone can make anything now!" Meanwhile, it's terribly, insidiously the opposite: nobody knows how to do it themselves.

...a capitulation. It's giving in to the corporate, industrial, product-oriented mindset. The only thing that matters is how much *stuff* gets done. But in so doing, we abandon understanding of the process, curiosity for other approaches, care for the people involved, and the benefits of learning.

This isn't a "but we have calculators so we dont need to do math"situation. Calculators don't replace problem solving. You still have to think about and understand the problem in order to deploy the calculator.

The enthusiastic uptake of LLMs by students and academic institutions is...

Having curiosity and working through a problem or trying to create something yourself are *vital* in not just learning things, but also--and I genuinely believe this--in having a full and complete human experience.

Like, there might be a way we could make it more energy-efficient, teach people to expect inaccuracy, make sure only people who consent have their data used, etc etc

But ultimately, it's still cutting out such a crucial element of learning

(AKA fancy autocorrect)
which is that it's designed and encouraged to be used as a replacement for *process*.

All of the other ills are potentially fixable (barring the will of corporate interests preventing anything that harms their bottom line):

This thought brought to you by some magic I saw performed recently