Society, trends, and the human experience.
Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy. Then I realised the method didn’t have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn’t have any, so my change would improve test coverag…
2010s digital media closes up shop.
my Substack talk and conversation with Benjamín Labatut
“To see like a dog in a work of art is to have moral perceptions about human beings”
I’m observing summer Fridays here at KDO again this year, which means I (mostly) won’t be posting here on Fridays. If past years are any guide, this doesn’t actually have too much of an effect on how much I work or post…more of a redistribution of time & effor…
"AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting," says Malin Hay, "as well as a lot of promising"
There are two types of anti-woke intellectuals. The first type criticizes ideas; the second is consumed by them
Psilocybin is doing what decades of philosophy couldn't: turning committed materialists into reluctant mystics
Harold Bloom, flatterer. John Ashbery was “THE POET ABSOLUTE,” yet A.R. Ammons’s work was “larger and better” — and then there was Henri Cole
Denis Johnson's life was a mess. His prose, somehow, was immaculate. How to explain the distance between life and art?
The humanities spent decades decentering the human. Now Big Tech is doing it better
Imagine a metastasizing heap of incalculable, forgotten junk. That’s what we’re all storing away in “The Cloud”
To anyone in love with the precious, fleeting things of this world, resistance to disappearance seems only natural and proper. And yet
The publishing midlist isn't shrinking. It's growing faster than the pool of available readers
LLMs aren't conscious (and thinking they are is culturally dangerous)
Illustrated break-downs of how common objects work. Currently featuring a mechanical pencil, PEZ dispenser, retractable pen, and Zippo lighter.
Tolkien and Tech by Michael Lucchese Tolkien’s near-Luddite skepticism can still teach us how to relate to new technologies, even if motorcars have become an insurmountable fact of modern life. The Digital Revolution, from smartphones to artificial intelligenc…
India’s old bargain was to import energy and export services. The machine age is turning that into something stranger: imported cognition, exported workflows.
Governments are increasingly taking undemocratic steps in the name of preserving democracy—but this must be done with caution.
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctl…
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! The elder child took me to the cinema to see The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last…
“Descartes Against Humanity” and Other Games Designed by Famous Philosophers.
Chipotlai Max is an AI agent that runs on “stolen compute” from Chipotle’s AI chat bot. They are looking to borrow from bots from Ikea, Expedia, Home Depot, and others.
Team Spirit is a wonderful short film for ESPN by Errol Morris about the funerals of die-hard sports fans. I love the Steelers fan laid out in a recliner under a Steelers blanket in front of a television with a Steelers game on as if “he just fell asleep watch…
The official trailer for season three of Silo. Looks like we finally get some origin story stuff (well, more than a brief scene at least).
We will now find out
On this date in 2004, the Killdozer rampage took place. “The bulldozer effortlessly demolished cars and buildings, including the home of a former mayor, the office of a newspaper that had sided against him in an editorial…”
Jamelle Bouie: The cruelty is still the point of the Trump regime. “This isn’t a border security policy. It’s cruelty as governance — directed at people this administration has decided don’t deserve dignity.”
Throughout most of human history, the weather has resisted humanity’s desire to change it. For thousands of years, we have sacrificed children, sung songs and danced, brewed alchemical concoctions, chanted prayers, fired cannons, and made many other futile eff…
Here’s what the case looks like without the hyperbole.