Documenting Life

“The cold-shoulder order was very infrequently used indeed, because people were so terrified of it. It simply involved publishing a notice that a particular person or firm was to be cold-shouldered. And the understanding was that if you worked with or for someone subject to the cold-shoulder, you would be cold-shouldered yourself. Because everyone knew that the big and important banks which formed the backbone of the Panel would always respect the cold-shoulder, it had a sort of viral property; nobody who relied on being able to work with Barclays would touch anyone who was cold-shouldered, so nobody who relied on being able to work with one of those firms would dare to, and so on; basically, anyone who got cold-shouldered would be completely shut out of the financial industry”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-cold-shoulder

“To the extent that their output is pushed into “mid-ness” by economic circumstance, L.L.M.s are not unprecedented. In a real sense, “why A.I. is writing mid” and “why most professional writing is mid” have the same explanation: “Good writing,” whether authored wholly by humans or generated by an L.L.M., requires capacious resources (whether in time and education and editing or in compute and training and fine-tuning) to create an idiosyncratic (and likely polarizing) voice for which there usually isn’t economically sufficient demand”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-writing-ever-be-good

“So – why not just give the decision to parties who definitionally don’t have a horse in the race, but who benefit in the long term and in general from the BBC’s presence as an independent and stable source of high quality English language media?

What I’m saying here is that the Director-General of the Beeb should be chosen by an ad hoc committee of the Oireachtas, possibly including a few representatives from the faculties of Trinity College, UCD and the University of Cork”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-cognitive-legion-etrangere

“American politics has changed. The Republicans felt it first. And the same way the Tea Party ate the GOP out from the inside, laying the groundwork for Trump and his MAGA rebrand, so too has what we once called The Dirtbag Left begun devouring the Democrats. The effects of the internet, a deeply alienating globalized economy, and the rise of a technofeudal billionaire class have finally cracked American Democrats wide open. We’re in a class war and it plays out on video feeds and those same billionaires own the algorithms that decide what side of it you end up on”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/we-did-it-zo

“But this is also the moment my engagement starts to tail off as a portion of the book’s… life in the world? Let’s say the book takes eight hours to read from cover to cover; if even one thousand readers finish it, that’s about four years of full time work, unless I fudged my math somewhere. I will, of course, read at readings, appear at appearances, and sign copies at signings, I will show up for my own work on social media, and most of all I will pledge myself to the keyboard as I write the next and final book in the Series. But so much of the book’s life now is out there, with you, rather than in here: it’s going out to be read, talked about, traded, borrowed from the library, left behind at youth hostels (that’s how I found my first Wild Cards book!), dog-eared and coffee-stained and in the world”

https://maxgladstone.substack.com/p/its-time-for-dead-hand-rule

“The hope for any book you write or publish is that it will be meaningful to people. Maybe not to everyone. Maybe not even to a lot of people. But you want some people to find it worth their while, whether it entertains them or elevates their perspectives or validate their feelings or expands their knowledge. You want it to somehow connect. It’s a pleasure to see it happen in real time”

https://shush.substack.com/p/occupying-john-street

“The same thing happened in the 2008 great financial crisis. There was the underlying economic activity — people building and buying houses — and then there was the financial gimmickry. It turned out that the finance gamesmanship far outpaced the actual economic behavior, and things got out of hand, and then the whole house of cards came crashing down”

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-ai-economy-is-full-of-financial

“The “imperial boomerang” is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are. This is a decades-long process, ratcheting up in earnest since the post-9/11 War on Terror, and any declaration of the moment when the boomerang’s sharp edge finally buried itself right in America’s skull is surely an arbitrary one. But last night will do as well as any”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/we-are-all-domestic-terrorists-now