Nate Anderson (my former student!) on how Reddit is trying to force people onto its app, employing the same enshittifying strategy that Substack does. This is why I’m on micro.blog. Manton makes apps for our convenience but never tries to force us to use them.
When Ford rolls out a new pickup truck, the CEO generally doesn’t go around giving keynote addresses about how much more lethal it will make American highways. But the AI industry is selling a narrative — a mythos, if you will — as much as it’s selling a product, and that narrative is one of revolutionary, transformational power. “Our product can make your life a bit easier, although there are still a lot of kinks to iron out” is not a trillion-dollar sales pitch; “we’ve invented something so powerful that it has the potential to destroy humanity” is. The company that can end the world controls the future, and investors will spend big on that upside bet. After all, if the world ends, an investor’s losses won’t matter anyway.
I think I’ve mentioned that every morning — every morning without exception — I wake up with a different song in my head. Never know what the internal roulette wheel will serve up, whether something from fifty years ago or from last week. Anyway, this morning I got a banger.
Illustrations by Bruno Bamanti for an edition of Caesar's Gallic Wars: 
John Ruskin, The Kapellbrücke, Lucerne (1857)
Teri had a rather complicated surgery today and all went well — thanks be to God! One bright moment: her nurse — imagine a grizzled Jerry Garcia with a thick Texas accent — said to her, “You’ve probably had a good many more drugs today than you have in a typical day. I don’t want to rush to judgment, but your tooth-to-tattoo ratio suggests that you’re not a heavy drug user.”
the productivity gains from coding agents are not evenly distributed. they’re split along a k-shape: senior engineers are getting meaningfully more productive. junior engineers are, at best, treading water. at worst, they’re getting worse.
This is exactly what we should expect. You have to be experienced (as a coder, as a researcher, as a thinker) to discern hallucinations and fakery. Only experience will make that alarm bell ring in your head. Younger and less experienced coders/scholars/writers will uncritically accept whatever their preferred chatbot offers them, and that will all too often lead them into more and more profound errors.
I don’t usually do straight book reviews on my blog, but I made an exception for Simon Armitage’s marvelous new version of Gilgamesh.