Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is burning through $1 billion a month as the cost of building its advanced AI models
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xai-burning-through-1-billion-a-month-as-costs-pile-up
“In 1812, the first edition of their anthology, comprising eighty-six stories, came out in an edition of 600, with an apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. It was not really intended to be read for pleasure at all by the children and households of its title; it was a learned work setting out to reconfigure the cultural history of Germany along lines that would emancipate it from the monopoly of classical and French superiority. Yet this collection—by the final, standard edition of 1857 the number of tales had grown to 210—was to become the most widely translated work in the world after the Bible and the Qur’an, rendered into more than 160 languages so far, including Xhosa and Tagalog, and still counting.”
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"Germany wasn’t yet Germany. It was a congeries made up of dozens of principalities and archdukedoms, free Hanseatic ports and archbishoprics. History shows us that the modern nation-state develops long after a national culture and its language: think of Italy and of Dante, writing five hundred years before Italian unification. For centuries, “most of the peninsula had been under German or Austrian or Spanish rule, while the Renaissance, indisputably Italian, was influencing the whole world. The Grimms were living in a time of turmoil and bloodshed. ”
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“One response to humiliation is to assert cultural riches and distinctiveness, even pre-eminence. ”
--- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time."
In the end an edifice of knowledge was erected that nobody had really foreseen or intended. Indeed, it stood in opposition to the anticipations and intentions of the individuals who had helped build it. For Wassermann and his co-workers shared a fate in common with Columbus. They were searching for their own "India" and were convinced that they were on the right course, but they unexpectedly discovered a new "America.
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What they achieved was not even their goal. They wanted evidence for an antigen or an amboceptor. Instead, they fulfilled the ancient wish of the collective: the demonstration of syphilitic blood.
--- Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
We must object in principle that nobody has either a feeling for, or knowledge of, what physically is possible or impossible. What we feel to be an impossibility is actually mere incongruence with our habitual thought style.
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fundamentally new facts can be discovered only through new thinking.
--- Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and development of scientific fact.
crazy vs stupid.
To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.
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A reason, more important, I think, than the inadequacy of stage-effects, is this: Drama has, of its very nature, already attempted a kind of bogus, or shall I say at least substitute, magic: the visible and audible presentation of imaginary men in a story. That is in itself an attempt to counterfeit the magician's wand.
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if you prefer Drama to Literature (as many literary critics plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making, and to constrain it to the limitations of stage-plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Of Fairy Stories.
“I like to use a different metaphor: a garden.
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On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and pleasure. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care.
And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or it with something healthier, something we choose for ourselves.”
--- Emily Nagoski. “Come As You Are.”
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