The joy of reading isn't just in following an interesting narrative or collecting useful information. Nor is it just in the technical quality of the writing. It's in the intimacy of entering into a dialogue with another living soul. The twisting and turning of his mind as he works out the details of an argument, the whole constellation of subconscious premises and feelings--built up over the course of a life--that leads to this choice of phrase over that one, the struggle and joy of turning the material of his mind into a coherent assemblage of words--all of that living and breathing humanity is on the page, and that's half the pleasure of it. So it doesn't matter how well your AI mimics your thought process or style; it's only mimicry, not the real thing. There is a page full of words, maybe good ones, maybe interesting ones! But YOU are not really there. Do you not care enough about your subject to sit and write about it for a couple hours? Do you not care enough about your readers to sit and talk to them? Do you not care enough about your own soul to sharpen and define it through the act of self-expression? If your friend purchased a perfect robotic copy of themselves--with the same body, the same mannerisms, way of speaking, habits, etc--and sent it in his stead to have dinner with you, is that friendship? Are you getting to know each other? Learning the art of friendship? Growing through the act of relating to another person? Of course, maybe you also hire your own robot copy. Now your robot and his robot are having dinner and sending you an AI summary of the conversation. Maybe the author's AI writes the essay, and our AI reads it and give you a summary. Maybe my AI matches with her AI on Hinge and they go on our first date to see if we're a good fit--I wouldn't want to "waste time" on the wrong person, after all. Maybe we'll have a whole world of this sort of thing: AIs living our lives for us and sending a summary for our impoverished souls to consume secondhand. And maybe we'll all be ok with that. More time to bed rot. Technologists have an obsession with giving us an easier world, a "frictionless" world. And this is certainly all much easier, much more frictionless. But friction is a metaphysical property of life. A perfectly frictionless world is a dead world. And it seems that’s where we’re heading.

Really appreciate the city of Austin letting me know that I was imminent danger from the rain at 2am, 4am, 530am, and 6am!

few know this, but the poor actually had access to rockets and electric cars for free until Elon Musk decided to hoard them all for himself

Economic freedom creates more honest societies. In one study measuring Germans’ willingness to cheat at a dice game, people with East German (communist) backgrounds were significantly more likely to cheat than those with West German (capitalist) roots. humanprogress.org/why-free-e…

Can you interpret this as anything other than shamelessly malicious resentment?

My city. 🏙️

Here @Connorpoleary and I take apart @Pontifex for his primitive, malicious, and frankly ridiculous encyclical on AI.

I have always found this a truly bizarre sentiment. Even if you believe the climate issue is this dire, your choice in the face of it is...just let the human race die out? Something has gone deeply spiritually wrong with anyone for whom these could be genuine questions. The first question suggests a fundamental despair, a profound vital exhaustion. The second suggests something even worse: an actual desire (conscious or unconscious) for humanity's extinction--as if we were a plague upon the pure and spotless earth goddess.

At some point we have to ask: Are Houston and Dallas cities? Or are they freeway-mediated petro-exurban-suburban conurbations.

Zoomers don’t know this, but coffee that didn’t taste like boiled dirty socks used to be so rare in America that latte was just a slur for liberals.

No thanks, I want my MD jacked up on steroids. This is RFK Jr.’s America

Texas sun

It's astonishing how anti-AI the average person is, and it isn't a partisan thing. I know leftists and religious conservatives all repeating the same anti-AI tropes about evil billionaires and the end of humanity. It's as if everyone you knew suddenly thought vaccines were a Bill Gates population control conspiracy. A major difference is that the people working on AI have played a massive role in stoking this paranoia by spreading visions of paperclip apocalypses and permanent underclasses. It's as if Bill Gates were on Twitter everyday going, "So...there might be microchips in the vaccines and they might...possibly...I don't know...sterilize you. I don't know for sure. It could be really bad honestly. But we have to do it anyway because of my possibly-sort-of-ironic-but-also-sort-of-totally-sincere belief in the vaccine-God."

Funny that both Claude and Chat chose characters that represent the authors

“Indians deserve their ethnic cleansing”. I assume this guy also thinks Jews deserved the holocaust. Vile.

Me: “I live downtown” Boomers: