Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights

A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .

And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.

The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

Startupy

And so when one wonders why newsletters “came out of nowhere” just a few years ago, I think part of it is Substack providing a catalyst for a change in user behavior, mostly on the demand side. (As Kevin Kwok has [observed](https://kwokchain.com/2020/01/23/underutilized-fixed-assets/), after you've recruited sufficient people willing to pay money, professional supply will quickly come to dominate most of your market, drawn primarily by economic incentives.)

BAM Is Now Reader-Supported

Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

In fact, the dental-office “badness” of so much of the A.I. art is precisely why I don’t dispute Alexander’s assertion that people preferred it. Like any LLM output, A.I.-generated images are designed to please, not to provoke. [I’ve argued before that these images are, by their nature, almost unavoidably kitsch](https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-ai-art-spiral-images-tell-us)--comforting, straightforward, accessible, flattering. And people love kitsch!

People Prefer A.I. Art Because People Prefer Bad Art

Max Read

...catch up on these, and many more highlights