‘You’ve likely already seen the large complex of buildings in Shanghai that was picked up as a single block and walked to an adjacent site by a phalanx of miniature robots. Then walked back into place again.

The 432 individual machines used for the move were “actually omnidirectional modular hydraulic jacks that are capable of lifting around 10 tons each,” New Atlas explains. “Sensors monitor pressure, vibration, and alignment while a centralized AI control unit coordinates the balance and movements into a synchronized crawl.”

It’s easy enough to imagine these technologies being permanently built into the urban fabric someday, allowing buildings to relocate for large construction projects or even to dodge flash floods; or demented emperors requiring all their court’s buildings to be mobile, with urban-scale choreographers designing elaborate birthday fetes of architectural dressage; or even that—given how these robots were allegedly installed, involving an earlier sequence of “remote-controlled robots that can move through narrow corridors and doorways,” all guided by a virtual 3D model of the entire complex—some wild new form of whole-building heist becomes possible. Send in the robots; jack the building up; steal it.…’ — Geoff Manaugh via BLDGBLOG

‘PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it – and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.

The “second brain” metaphor is both ambitious and (to a degree) biologically absurd. Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose.…’ — Joan Westenberg via I Deleted My Second Brain

‘Lately, it has been difficult to ignore a tendency at The New York Times to make astonishingly bad news judgments. The paper’s obsession with a view from nowhere is long-standing, but as Republicans increasingly circulate insane conspiracy theories and racist nonsense, the cult of centrism has taken a self-destructive turn.…’ — Elizabeth Lopatto via The Verge