I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
Donald Knuth posted this a long time ago, and I wonder whether he has been able to continue an email-less existence. Could you even sign up for basic utilities these days without having an email address? Asking for … myself, though as social media implode and the internet necrotizes email increasingly seems like a great technology. Still, I have for many years dreamed of imitating Knuth’s fellow computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra and just mailing out handwritten letters to interested parties.
By the way, Knuth has been trying out Claude.
Freddie preaching the gospel:
The spectacle of grown adults insisting that we simply cannot judge college students for outsourcing their thinking to machines is one of those little moral evasions that contemporary culture specializes in: tender, quasi-therapeutic, progressive-sounding, and ultimately a form of abandonment. Of course we can judge them! It is our duty to judge them. There is no such thing as schooling without judgment; no matter what the Cool Professors say, assessment has always been part of education, always always always, and all assessing is a form of judging. That we are judging ethically and morally when we tell students that it’s wrong to cheat does not make it any less core to the educational mission. And the idea that cheating with an LLM is somehow beyond moral evaluation because the technology is new, or because capitalism is bad, or because everybody is anxious, or because life is haaaaaard…. These feelings are not expressions of compassion but condescension dressed up as sophistication. Students are not, in fact, incredibly fragile creatures, and to the degree that they are it’s because we’ve told them to be. Students are moral agents. They make decisions. They know when they’re cheating! And when we refuse to say so, when we wrap every act of dishonesty in therapeutic fog, we’re not liberating them from shame or coercion; we’re telling them that their choices don’t matter, that their integrity isn’t worth defending, and that the university itself has no purpose beyond the smooth processing of tuition payments into credentials.
I have a large collection of Library of America volumes, and I love almost all of them, but one big disappointment is American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. I’m disappointed because the collection exemplifies an attitude that I questioned in my little essay “How Not To Save the Planet.” Too many pieces in the collection are about “the Earth” or “the planet” or “Nature” or “the environment”; not enough are about specific places.
That’s because in AItopia nobody will ever go anywhere.
Jane Freilicher, The Painting Table