From Around the Web
This is mostly an excuse to say I’ve tweaked the design of the site a little bit and I’m happy with said tweaks...
Highlights from Anne Lamott's "Somehow"
I wish the movement of love in our lives more closely resembled the grace of a ballerina, but no, love mainly tromps and plops, falls over and tiptoes through our lives.
I Sobbed Tears of Joy, Which Hasn't Happened in a Long Time
Penn, in his 4th year of the 5-year arch program at Arkansas, attended this earlier this summer, and described it as life-changing....
Copy of an Email from Mike Riddell, 2003
What I do know something about is constant suffering which you are forced to live with...
Helping Define This Thing We Feel Lacking in LLM Responses
Your value lies in your ability to leverage those work primitives, [the things that AI can produce], in ways that reflect your taste, in ways that reflect your expertise.
A Scene from the Bike Racing Post-apocalypse
Milo raced in the state championship road race in 2023 and last year, both times at Fort Cavazos and run by the same organizers...
New Short Fiction Section
I added a section to /writing: Short Fiction on the Blog. These are all the posts tagged #fiction, and some of my favorite posts here...
Why Are We Seeing Different Findings About AI?
Well, we haven't gotten specific enough about our questions, or we're using the wrong language or format for how we ask about it.
Intraducing Mastrodon
On May 25th I used Claude Code for the first time. I’ve used GitHub Copilot for some time, but I’d never used a “coding agent” with any success...
My Eyes
A long meander about a normal if premature eye surgery
I've Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is More Archiving
This was more than just a scholarly tendency to hoard footnotes or to lovingly alphabetise newspaper clippings. Derrida’s mal d’archive was more deeply affecting than that.
The State-of-the-art in AI Is No Longer About the Models, It Is About the Tooling Available Around the Models
Simon Willison: I really don’t like ChatGPT’s new memory dossier (May 2025)...
Weekly Roundup
In which I just [mostly] just compile things I posted about elsewhere…...
The Tyranny of AI Is Not AI Itself, It Is the Lazy, Rushed Product Designers with No Imagination or Sense of Craft
I’m doing it! I’m writing this post...
What I Might Be Seeing Was the Retreat of People into Themselves Because They Were Anxious and Alone
Adam Curtis on The Rest is Entertainment podcast...
She Don't Mind the Late Night Radio
One of the most delightful things I've found on the internet recently
AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them
As a “oh, it is already happening” follow up to the philosophical section of my Overview of the GenAI Landscape post, where I quote Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley...
I Guess You Are Afraid of What Everyone Is Made of
Hey, what are you looking at? Who the hell do you think I am?
Overview of the GenAI Landscape
Word salad on a few weeks' worth of thinking about this stuff from a few different perspectives
Kester Brewin: Countering Political Turmoil with a Real Summer of Love
From a talk given in 2017, all the more pertinent today...