A Sunday of Liberty

Optimism makes us perpetual enemies of those future moments that do not meet our expectations, which means all future moments.

Claire Askew: As well as being a charity shop nerd, I’m also an author, and a huge bookworm.

Today anyone can write a reasonably good article on anything; but no one wants or is able to sustain the strenuous effort of thinking just one single thought through to its finest conclusions.

There have been a few briefly-popular 80s/90s bands coming through town recently, playing small clubs.

I went into solitude because I wanted to love the human being, but I could only ever hate them.

The fixed-pie/zero-sum idea again: there are only so many readers to go around, and AI posts are stealing readers from human writers.

Put down your lamp, Diogenes.

And Niemand descended from his mountain and came to the marketplace, where he found a great multitude of lonely men and women.

“It’s not a competition” says the man selectively tallying encomiums as if it’s a competition.

Jeremiah Johnson: “We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists,” Adler-Bolton told attendees.

Rare books.

I see men in such a way that the best novels seem to me to be peopled with cardboard cut-outs — and it could not be otherwise. — Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2 Drew Calvert: Whereas self-help offers insight and fantasy offers what Iris Murdoch calls “…

“Four days among normal people” is an intriguing pilot study, but the sample size is troubling, the methodology appears uncontrolled, and I’m not seeing preregistration.

The surrounding context of this post isn’t important here.

As soon as I feel or suspect someone or something wanting to take hold of me by acting on my sensibility — beggars, religion, politics, works, etc., trying to break my heart, convince me through fear or pity, through ways which bypass the mind — I rebel, I

In the 28th letter to Lucilius, Seneca tells him that travel won’t solve anything because you take yourself with you: what you need is “a change of soul rather than a change of climate.”

While it is true that the paragraph as an actual unit of thought has been replaced in much online writing with the paragraph as a display case for a sentence, the reprehensible tendency easily predates AI.

When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age?

As long as the awareness of something is lacking, it cannot be a sin—although it can certainly be an impediment.

And Niemand came among the readers and found them greatly pleased with themselves.

I cannot help suspecting that there is something systematic and labored about this attitude of perfect misery, this absolute disgust.

As the afternoon grows shorter, and the early evening drives us home to complete our chores, we are reminded of the shortness of life, and become more pensive, at least in this twilight of the year.

Is AI going to kill us all, or is this all just more political machinations?

To the man of sincerity, the man confessing: what do I care about what you’ve done, what you’ve coveted, dared, omitted, regretted, wept over etc.?

Thinking things over…Is there anything in that so very different from the ancient (and modern) practice of consulting “spirits”?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: In the past week, consulting virtually any major news source—not to mention social media—has meant confronting the prospect of an AI apocalypse.

“Accel_” has 231 views.

I see my reflection in this remark of Father Hardouin: “Do you think I got myself out of bed at 4 o’clock in the morning every day of my life in order to think like everyone else?”

From the late 18th through the early 20th century, there was a Russian millennarian sect called the Skoptsy who practiced voluntary castration.

Henry Oliver: It is an inevitable step to make that knowledge available via an LLM.

Above all, one or two senior monks should be assigned to go around the monastery during the hours the brothers are free for reading and see to it that there is no slothful brother who spends his time in idleness and gossip and neglects his reading; such a…

Henry Oliver: And it seems to me that The New Dark Ages is largely written for people who struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more.

Josh Nadeau: Studies are suggesting (I won’t bore you with a list of citations) that more and more people are beginning to demand more from writing.

Matthew Gasda: What must be preserved from the encroachments of the calculator are forms of writing in which excellence was always an uphill battle: the long-form essay, literary fiction, poetry, plays, memoir, as well as personal letters.

Charlie Warzel: Of course, I’m gonna be defensive about this.

And so I think that in all languages the word meaning virtue did not originally have any other meaning than strength, vigor (of mind or body or both, or some mixture of the former and the latter, but certainly first and foremost the latter).

David Shapiro: What really needs to happen, and what has happened many times throughout history, is that we need to integrate the new technology into society.

No phenomenon excites me more than waking up.

Venkatesh Rao: Starting with this essay, I will no longer be explicitly declaring AI use, or segregating my AI-assisted writing in a separate experimental section.

I’ve never considered what it would look like if someone made a connect-the-dots sociology book, but suddenly I have a clear image of it.

Derek Thompson: In my corner of the world, which is journalism and academia and writing in general, Pangram has become nothing less than a cultural force.

Daniel Oppenheimer: I’m not naive about why writers write what they write.

“I’m free from the walled gardens out here on the IndieWeb!

[B]ut in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cynicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the responsibilities of lif…