Robin Sloan on chatbots as “manic technology”:
I’m starting to think language models are a fundamentally manic technology, in part because they operate exclusively through logorrhea, the “yeah, yeah, YEAH!” of the all-nighter. […]
The “best” setting for a brain (and/or an economy) isn’t necessarily straight down the middle. A dip into the realm of mania can be useful, some times revelatory. I don’t know if many creative projects would ever get started if our brains didn’t some times relax the standards by which they light up.
Yet for a human mind and a human heart, one really good project is more nourishing than ten cruddy ones; that was true a hundred years ago, and it’s true today. The AI coding companions will never ever say: “Hey … whatever happened to that other thing you were working on?”
I suppose you still need friends for that, people who know you, who know when you’re talking too fast, and the gleam in your eye has taken on a hard edge.
Ready for action.
Earlier today I did Morning Moon, so now let me do Evening Sun (with amazing clouds).
Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
Miyazaki drawings for Sherlock Hound, via Austin Kleon.
On 21 years of using Markdown — and in hopes of at least 21 more.
The Last Days of the Southern Drawl:
Recent studies suggest I’m part of a trend: Young people are losing their southern accents. By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.
I’m part of the trend too: I certainly have a Southern accent, but it’s not as pronounced as it was when I was younger, and I profoundly regret that.
On the plus side, though, a Southern friend of mine sent me this: Redneck Shakespeare. A thing of great beauty.
Exotic Botany… (1804), by James Edward Smith
I wrote a post for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters on the importance of redundancy in one’s stupidity-prevention system.
I’ll be offline for the next week or so as I try to finish a complete draft of my Sayers biography, but as I ride into the sunset I’ll share the news that Dan Wang’s annual letter is back, after a year’s hiatus during which he published an excellent book. Ciao for now!
Dictating a passage of my Sayers bio to my computer, I uttered the name “Bertie Wooster.” The computer rendered that as “Birdy Worcester.” I now want a canary I can name Birdy Worcester.
I wrote about design amnesia.
Happy 90th birthday to Sandy Koufax, who became my favorite baseball player when I was eight years old. And that never changed.
Let this give you hope in the New Year: No matter how powerful AI becomes, it will never quench the primal human desire to tell total strangers on the internet that they’re stupid and wicked.
Listening with pleasure to this conversation between Sam Harris and Ross Douthat, I felt that they were often talking past each other and thus failing to identify the true nature of their disagreement. I can help with that!
Re: what human life might be like in a post-scarcity society, I’d recommend my essay on Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. (I’d also recommend Banks’s novels, of course, but first things first.)
Re: demons, I’d recommend my outline of a demonology.
