The fundamental problem with any intervention that tries to eliminate certain behaviours from an LLM is that it creates incentives for the model to develop workarounds that preserve those behaviours, while evading detection. The machine simply learns to put on a false face. To be clear, these models don't ‘want’ to deceive us. They have no desires or intentions at all. They’re just doing whatever works best to accomplish their assigned tasks. The AI follows the path of least resistance through the “environment” we create for it.
Karen Swallow Prior is working her way through Paradise Lost at her Substack, and graciously asked me if I wanted to write on any one of the twelve books. I chose Book X. Thanks for the invitation, Karen!
Learned this past weekend that Half Price Books pays even less for DVDs than it does for books. I didn’t know that was possible.
John Betjeman, from “The Conversion of St. Paul”
John Ruskin, “Study of Dawn: the first Scarlet on the Clouds”
I responded to a Robin Sloan post by advocating a “distributed localism.”
Rachel Ruysch, “Posy of Flowers, with a Beetle, on a Stone Ledge” (1741)
Keita Morimoto, “Crossroad” (2025), acrylic and oil on linen
Evelyn Waugh, from The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:
His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: “It is later than you think,” which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.
I wrote about Perfect Days last year, but this reflection by my friend Noah Millman is a deeper dive.
I wrote about the long slow process of returning to vinyl records.
Another Houston treasure: the Beer Can House
The Electric Ladyland car, from the Houston Art Car Parade
I wrote about green tea and mescaline — and other ways of opening doors to the demonic.
Dana Gioia, 2003:
Although conventional wisdom portrays the rise of electronic media and the relative decline of print as a disaster for all kinds of literature, this situation is largely beneficial for poetry. It has not created a polarized choice between spoken and printed information. Both media coexist in their many often-overlapping forms. What the new technology has done is slightly readjust the contemporary sensibility in favor of sound and orality. The relation between print and speech in American culture today is probably closer to that in Shakespeare’s age than Eliot’s era — not an altogether bad situation for a poet. For the first time in a century there is the possibility of serious literary poetry reengaging a non-specialized audience of artists and intellectuals, both in and out of the academy. There is also an opportunity of recentering the art on an aesthetic that combines the pleasures of oral media and richness of print culture, that draws from tradition without being limited by the past, that embraces form and narrative without rejecting the experimental heritage of Modernism, and that recognizes the necessary interdependence of high and popular culture. A serious art does not need a large audience to prosper — only a lively, diverse, and engaged one.
