Plato had Socrates fret that writing would hollow out memory, leaving people with the appearance of wisdom rather than the thing itself. He was partly right and mostly wrong, because the offloading was modest and slow. What is different now is degree sharpening into kind: recall that is instant, total, external, and increasingly the default.
From When Memory Became a Service by Mark Ghuneim
The On Being podcast with Krista Tippett remains one of my favorite podcasts, but the episode with Michael Pollan gave me a huge pause. It wasn’t because of anything Michael said. I’m in the middle of reading his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness and I’ve always enjoyed hearing him speak. They touched on the topic of AI in the episode and Krista discussed her conversations with Claude. I was so taken aback at how taken she was with Claude’s answers to her questions and her gushing giddiness about it all. It rattled me. Not because I was at all surprised that she was using AI, but because of her reaction to it. Perhaps I was mistaking her infatuation with Claude when what she was really trying to express was wonder and amazement. I don’t know, but I can’t shake this feeling of disappointment at what I interpret as her being fooled in a similar way as Richard Dawkins.
The boy and I have been listening to the audiobook of The Hobbit while we’re in the car together. I made an awful error getting the Andy Serkis version and it’s virtually unlistenable. The audio volume of the voice over is all over the place, the voices are exceptionally over-acted and irritating, we literally had to skip the singing parts. It’s so distracting and unenjoyable. Come to find that we need to listen to the Rob Inglis recording, which sounds like it will be much more pleasant.
If you’ve installed OpenClaw and played with it, you know this Nat Friedman bit is probably true.
Friedman uses OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that runs on his computer, acting like a personal assistant. One day, his OpenClaw decided that he wasn’t drinking enough water, so Friedman instructed the agent to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he stays hydrated. According to Friedman, eventually the bot directed him to go to the kitchen and drink a bottle of water. It informed him that it was monitoring him via a connected camera in his home. “I’m going to watch to make sure you do it,” the bot supposedly said. Friedman did as he was told, and, moments later, the bot sent him a frame of him drinking the bottle of water and said good job. “I felt like I did do a good job,” Friedman said.
From Charlie Warzel’s Atlantic article, Too Much Is Happening Too Fast.
Speaking of playlists, Noah Kalina made this week’s Herb Sundays playlist. I’m a huge fan of Noah’s work (and his social media trolling).
Michael Chabon put together an absolutely stellar playlist of jangle music on Apple Music I’ve been enjoying this weekend.
Earlier this month, I mentioned that I started posting directly from Obsidian. I’ve been posting more frequently, or at least it feels that way! I think part of the reason is that I’m no longer looking at Micro.blog. Consumption eats creation.
My Micro.blog Publisher plugin is now live in the new Obsidian Community, which feels pretty cool. It’s a tiny thing, but it shipped and I use it every day. For someone that has so many incomplete projects and ideas everywhere, it feels like an accomplishment.
David Perell interviewed Maria Popova on his How I Write podcast. I’ve been reading Maria’s blog, The Marginalian (f.k.a. Brain Pickings) for many years and it’s one of the greatest the web has to offer. I might have to re-listen and watch on YouTube. It was a great interview.
One of my favorite parts of the conversation was when AI came up, though I was maybe a little disappointed (not surprised) that she had never so much as played with it.
AI will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. AI will never write the great American poem, the great French poem, because it hasn’t suffered. I mean, AI has not the capacity to suffer. Because even if you try to make it suffer, meaning write a command that is to execute failure, it’ll already be succeeding at executing failure. It will never know what it’s like to collide with its own impossibility. So AI can only ever succeed.
She goes on to dismiss the idea of the tortured genius.
I don’t subscribe to the tortured genius myth. I don’t think it’s necessary to suffer in order to create. But I do think that out of what we have suffered and do suffer comes that restlessness to find meaning, to find beauty, to find wonder, to give voice and shape to what we feel that can be so lonely.
There are so many great moments in this interview.
TIL Brad Mehldau has a Substack (h/t Marginal Revolution). He also penned quite the takedown of New York Time Music Critic, Jon Caramanica. Woo boy!
While I’m not currently concerned about hantavirus, I am glad there seems to be a good tracker out there.