hello,

First, an apology. It seems that if you reply to this email it ends up in a special Buttondown inbox that I didn’t know about. So if you think I’ve been ignoring you I probably haven’t. Sorry about that. I’ll do some replying soon.

5 things:

1. I’ve just had two weeks off so this resonates.

   

2. 99% of me wouldn’t enjoy this, but 100% of me finds it interesting. Tony Hawk’s Real Life Willy Wonka. There’s clearly something to be said for growing up in an Alaskan doomsday cult.

3. This clip got streamed at me, it’s from this episode of StarTalk. It’s about how humans learn incrementally via a curriculum whereas the AIs learn everything all at once. It reminded me of this bit of Barthes (quoted by Mary Cappello in Lecture):

   “If I had to create a god, I would lend him a ‘slow understanding’: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.”

   (Also this on how inefficient LLMs are versus humans, which is a useful reframing amidst all the friction talk.)

4. Related: this essay by William Davies

   “A depressing aspect of the plagiarism cases I discussed in my 2022 essay (but also students more generally) was that many students seemed to view writing as a series of traps, which they were certain to fall into sooner or later. In order to eliminate risk, they wanted to know in advance how an essay should be structured, what should be in it, and how it should be expressed. The threat posed by LLMs is not so much that they remove the difficulty of reading and writing (as the agonistic humanists would have it), as that they remove the playfulness, the uncertainty, and the intriguing mistakes.

   What needs reviving is not some classical ideal of “Man,” but, as Weatherby argues, poetry. Textual generation, he writes, “puts poetry on one end of a spectrum bookended on the other by ideology.” Where we feel compelled to use the correct words in the right order, for fear of consequences, we are victims of ideology. LLMs allow us to witness our own ideological constraints, showing us how our culture has been streamlined, disciplined, and constrained into certain forms of expression. Poetry, by contrast, is the exploitation of the improbable, based on the assumed freedom to put words in an order that wasn’t expected and hasn’t been done before. The point is not that only humans can write an improbable sentence; machines can too. It is that a student should be free to try one, and to get it wrong.”

5. Speaking of poetry, from a New Yorker piece on Hermes:

   “It would be difficult to find another luxury brand that promoted an employee from sewing bags to designing them after he submitted a plea written entirely in Alexandrines.”

   and this is damning with faint damn

   “In 2016, at a benefit auction, Jeffrey Epstein placed the winning bid on an internship at Hermès; the company withdrew the lot and reimbursed the charity. Dumas later explained that the last thing Hermès needed was to get involved with a “louche financier.”

   BASE COMMERCE

   There’s a wonderful new Haudoo! How To Stop Drinking. And all Haudoos are temporarily down to just £6.

   I’ll give you back your day.

russell

(There are 1017 of you - the earth receives about 10¹⁷ watts from the sun)