Currently reading: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, ed. Edward M. Burns. Two volumes, nearly 2000 pages. Lots of academic and literary gossip punctuated by extended passages of intellectual fireworks. When it’s good it’s great. It will take me a long time to read it; I have made a pledge to myself to be patient. Burns made the decision to annotate everything — there must be 250 pages of notes here — but he still manages to leave out some things that need to be explained, and fails to correct many misspellings while also “correcting” spellings that were right. Moreover, from time to time he will add a note referring the reader to a letter that isn’t here, or is misdated and therefore unfindable. I can’t blame him: the task was immense and he made it immenser than it needed to be, so the opportunities for error number in the thousands. I’m sure I would’ve done worse. Still, one must come to this prepared to be often confused, or brought up short by editorial mistakes. Posts will be forthcoming. 📚
Robin Sloan: “In the late 2020s, I think a lot of people are going to discover that their job has become: ‘Translate your work into code. Translate yourself, while you’re at it.’”
TIL that the great literary critic Hugh Kenner once contemplated writing a novel about a Texas philanthropist named George Oilwell.
I wrote a while back about the A.I. business model — which is basically the big machine-learning companies telling that they’ll sell us the antidote to the poison they have administered — but this post gives a twist to the whole situation: When businesses start to realize that they’re paying vast amounts to get LLMs to do tasks that could be accomplished by a old-school coder writing a regex script … “I do think we’re about to see a lot of companies realize that a thinking model connected to an MCP server is way more expensive than just paying someone to write a bash script. Starting now, you’ll be able to make a career out of un-LLM-ifying applications.”
The Prince of This World’s tools will never dismantle the Prince of This World’s house.
Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong:
What’s undeniable is that we’re all living in a world where the whims and desires of wealthy and powerful men create uncertain, unstable conditions for everyone else. Although no other major chatbot has gone ballistic in the same ways as Grok, any one of them could be subtly tweaked to promote a given viewpoint over another, or to quietly manipulate users toward whatever purpose. Likewise, any major creator of AI models unwittingly [AJ: or wittingly] instills biases in its chatbots that are then difficult to expunge. Every user of mainstream AI or social media is subject to a calculus that they have no control over.
So maybe don’t use mainstream AI or social media?
I’m still adding to my anarchist notebook — and will, I hope, be doing so for the next 20 years or so. Make that 30.