Robin Sloan
Author & Media Inventor. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorengineerother@robinsloan ↗robinsloan.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Robin Sloan is an author and media inventor known for his tech-infused novels, including Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough. He previously worked at Current TV and Twitter before focusing on digital storytelling experiments and writing.
1shows
1appearances
18statements
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1said about them ↓ Everything Robin Sloan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Robin Sloan: Good creative work begins with a format, not a story
“I, you know, there's that thing you hear where people say, like, Okay, you have to come up with a story, and then you find the right vessel for that story. Like, does this story want to be a book, or a video game, or a HBO series, whatever. I think that is wro…”
Sloan predicts Facebook updates and Instagram photos will be gone by 2050
“I would not bet against everything that we're pouring into kind of the vast digital box, you know, like everything, the Facebook updates, the Instagram photos, all of it basically being gone in 2060, 20, 50. Like, I hope that's not the case, and I mean, it see…”
Robin Sloan: Sourdough is first audiobook with machine learning creative output
“And to my knowledge, it's the first time that like the creative output of a machine learning system has been included in an audio book.”
Sloan: Robotic kitchen automation is extremely difficult outside modular fast food
“But in fact, it's really challenging because that kitchen space is in fact really chaotic and unbounded. It's not one of these spaces that's sort of at least a normal kitchen, like a restaurant kitchen or a, Or home kitchen. McDonald's obviously is kind of is …”
Sloan: New technology accumulates alongside old crafts rather than replacing them
“Instead of the new thing replacing the old thing, it all just piles up in this, like, multi-car crash non-violent crash glorious crash, where everything is just kind of like, and the mountain is getting higher and higher and higher, and I don't know, I find th…”
Blogging was essential cross-training for writers to develop ideas publicly
“Because I think people who kind of came up during that time, not only as bloggers, but kind of as writers more broadly, because it was this amazing way to kind of cross train and just force yourself to, like, write something in public every day, even if you di…”
Twitter and Facebook killed the independent era of blogging
“There's no question. It was killed by Twitter and Facebook, and just really the sense that People moved on.”
Shutting down Google Reader put a nail in blogging's coffin
“The loss of Google Reader was another true, I mean, truly, it was one of the nails in the coffin of blogging.”
Twitter's 280-character limit allows users to put ideas in dialogue
“Someone made the point that with 280 characters, it actually gives you enough space. It's not that much space, but it gives you enough space to do something you almost never could with a 140 characters on their own, which is to Present one idea, kind of, like,…”
Robin Sloan is writing a novel incorporating machine learning-generated text
“I'm in the process of trying to write a novel that has as kind of part of its text, the product of some of these machine learning systems.”
Sloan: Google Magenta is one of few groups doing creative AI right
“I actually think, I think they're one of the sort of the few people slash groups that are doing it right. People on the podcast should know I'm making air quotes, doing it right. And that's only to say they're super competent technically and interested in kind…”
Sloan: Human curation is as important as generative AI output
“The core interesting thing is the weird sort of wonderful output of this machine, right? But at the same time, you acknowledge that having a human kind of curate it and shape it and form it and just Be in the loop and be learning how to use it is just as impor…”
Cory Doctorow and Annalee Newitz avoid both dystopia and naive optimism
“I think people like Cory Doctorow Annalee Newitz here in San Francisco is amazing science fiction writer. They don't write dystopias. They don't write those sort of, you know, naive Panglossian features either.”
Robin Sloan: Digital software experiments inevitably break compared to durable physical books
“You make these digital things, and unlike a book where once you bind it up and put it on a shelf, even if it gets forgotten, even if it gets damaged, or, you know, whatever, it's like still, It boots somehow. You can, like, compile and run that printed book ba…”
Sloan discloses he regularly deletes his tweets to keep Twitter ephemeral
“My very tiny kind of lever against that, that system and my way of kind of keeping it something like a cafe conversation with the words just fading away is to delete my tweets on the regular and oh, I can report that it feels great.”
Robin Sloan: Social media has not yet reshaped long-form fiction
“I don't really think so, not yet, and I think that's for a couple reasons if I had to kind of just guess. One is the truth is that the readership for books I mean, it's obviously diverse, and like, there's a lot of young people who read books. There's also a l…”
Public sentiment toward Silicon Valley began darkening by summer 2012
“That particular shift, that sort of darkening almost of the tint was happening even as I was kind of wrapping up the manuscript for Penumbra, and I remember very vividly the last few passes in the summer of 2012 before it came out that fall, going through and …”
The other half of the tape: Robin Sloan's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Robin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
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| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Author & Media Inventor | 1 | 18 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |