Hullo!

In spirit of Alan Jacobs’s Breaking Bread with the Dead, my old book of choice the past few weeks has been Middlemarch. A friend and I started reading it years ago, inspired in part by Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch; she finished it, I did not. But it couldn’t have been for lack of interest: it’s an engrossing, easy, hilarious read—long, yes, but witty and delightful along the way. Anyway, March is halfway done, but Middlemarch and I have many more pages to go.

Adventures continue, so another short one:

• A thoughtful piece from Sean about his approach to generative AI: “I’m a generative AI vegetarian.” These days, I use it now and again (and have even paid for Claude, to access some of the more full-featured offerings), as a casual observer of the industry; I find occasionally using the tools to be a good way to better understand how others might, what they’re good and not so good at. But Sean’s post, as he so often does, nicely gathers many links summarizing some of the core issues that generative AI perpetuates, like incentivizing closed instead of open sharing of information.
• Jennifer Robson with some excellent analysis on “exempt staff”, the political staffers in every minister’s office. Come for the data analysis, stay for the reflections on the importance of trust to functioning responsible government. (via SB)
• A thoughtful piece-provoking set of “things I’m not replacing” from Geoff Graham. Me? I’ve been thinking about where I can step away from the “buy mediocre to okay and replace more often” cycle—a similar theme.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas