My thoughts are a little cracked here for a variety of unrelated life reasons--lovely to see my friend Anne here, enjoying but not trusting the nostalgia pangs of IM and B&W mac screenshots, reminder to resubscribe to Bookforum--but the Lakoff/Johnson frame here is helpful. I was teaching a library workshop on AI (wish I could strikethrough the term for more powerful effect; how about a 1990s-grad-seminar "under erasure" instead) a couple of weeks back and was deliberately attempting not to call it AI because I think a significant portion of our problem here lies in ceding the landscape to framing LLMs through the metaphor of intelligence. I'm enough of a crude historical materialist to know that winning the language battle won't necessarily stem the tide here, but omg how I would love to break that frame.
Your comment is so fascinating to read—I was thinking about "AI" versus "LLM" as terms a lot while writing! (And trying to use "LLM" as much as possible; it's more specific when talking about what people are using today.) I do think there is something…obfuscating about framing it as "artificial intelligence," and being really specific about the underlying technology (AI is the field that LLMs came from; "artificially intelligent" is the way we're narrativizing LLMs; but it's not totally clear that LLMs are "intelligent" by a conventional definition!)
I sometimes worry that being fussy about language/metaphor is just playing a semantic game…but I also think the semantic game is crucial in the stories we tell about technologies. Thank you for this really thoughtful reply!
Celine this was such an excellent read!! I was playing music while reading and now I am listening to no angels / ICU... so DREAMY!
whenever I'm in a slump and haven't read in a long time, reading your writing helps me to feel connected to the practice of reading again. THANK YOU!!! 📖💕 much to think about from this piece!!!
thank you!!! this is a really kind comment and I'm so happy that my writing can do that for you! also—if you're open to another music rec, I've been listening to a lot of Ela Minus today and she has a different kind of dreamy quality
such a well-written piece!!! i aspire to someday write in such a great way <3 i would also recommend a yt video by sarah davis baker named ‘the internet used to be a place’, i think it relates to this and covers a bit more of the history if anyone would like to look more into it !!!
thank you Jen!! this is really kind, and also tysm for the rec—the first few minutes of the video are really fascinating, and I love this description of how the internet has become omnipresent: "The internet lived in a room, and that room had a door. It took a long time to notice when the door went missing"
Loved reading this, thanks for writing it. It is so thought-provoking to notice that the conversation metaphor is 100x more potent/attractive/interesting than if chatgpt had been launched as a "text generator." we avoid all the terror, friction, highs and lows and anxiety of actual conversation in favor of the ghost of one!!
thank you Tiffany! and yes, I think the conversation metaphor is SO powerful and immediately tells you how to use ChatGPT (very useful) but also what kinds of interactions and hopes and dreams to project onto it (sometimes concerning…)
Celine - this is such a great essay - thank you for pulling all of this together. I have been working on a commission for a writing magazine about the impact of AI on writers and whether it is an existential threat. Now it's submitted, I have some regret I didn't read your piece or talk you about it before, but also, I am heartened that I had read a few of your sources.
One thing I love in your piece is about metaphor - I love how you speak of conversation - such a helpful frame when we think about interacting with LLMs.
An area that Chris and I have been thinking about is meaning and AI, but also in the effort of writing. What does it mean that an LLM can produce text, what does it mean for a human to write, and for the readers of both?
Bec—thank you!! I'm sure I must have told you this before, but the book you wrote with Chris Smith (Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts) was incredibly, incredibly helpful to me. So you commenting here really feels special.
This is sort of related to your question…but I've recently been thinking about how important it feels to encourage MORE people to write. I'm not against LLMs as an aid (and actually used Anthropic's Claude quite a bit to fact-check/clarify a few paragraphs of this newsletter)…
But I believe very strongly that writing—along with all other expressive/communicative/creative acts—is an inherently dignified and worthy human project, and part of the dignity comes from the effort it requires.
The whimsical way I have been phrasing this is: "it's your right as a human being to write badly and exuberantly"…because I think bad, conscious, effortful writing has immense value to the writer, and that value goes away if someone replaces their "bad" writing with superficially "good," polished ChatGPT writing. I wonder how many students, for example, rely on ChatGPT because they are afraid of falling short in their work, and they perceive that the end result (the essay, the grades) is valued more than the process.
Roman Muradov wrote an excellent newsletter this spring that touches on this: "Original work often happens when you figure out your own solution…There’s this moronic vision that we all have our great ideas, and simply need to find a suitable outlet for it. By that logic, the work that goes into learning to draw or write is nothing more than an obstacle to the art, but it’s not an obstacle—it is the art itself." https://dadaissues.substack.com/p/strife-is-life
- unwrapping how metaphors can obscure aspects of technology that are true, but don’t make as much sense in the context of the metaphor
- an encouragement to see LLMs as a tool, just a tool, just like all these other tools we have learned how to use
Even I, a person working at a company with a prominent AI product, only learned recently that what we get from Claude/ChatGPT is simply an aggregated collection of statistical “most likely” probabilities. Really tipped my frame of reference on its head from thinking about AI “reasoning” or “thinking”.
thank you Elliya!! and yes—I am really not stringently against AI or against using LLMs (even for writing), but there's so much obfuscation about how they actually work and therefore what their outputs "mean"
Mike Midnight is a friend of mine!! Though I moved cities, and it's many years since we spoke - I used to book him for events (DJ) all the time and he was clearly very special even way back then. Also amazing to see Roman mentioned here, very very funny - singular illustrator. Terrible Father is so good, everything he touches is. Great read once again Celine! : )
amazing—this is such a great small world/small internet moment!
I ❤️ Roman's illustrations and I'm really looking forward to my copy of his book! and thank you for reading—always appreciate getting a comment from you
Such a wholesome 'small internet' moment haha. That's nice of you to say re: the comments. I look forward to your writing always. Some good recs on your last 'What I Read' missive.. you introduced me to Tom McCarthy, Satin Island next on the last.. after i finish Hill House.. tragically behind on the Halloween reads ha-ha..
This clarified and informed my thinking about AI to a remarkable degree. Full disclosure: I’m old enough to have bought an early Mac (which I used as a souped up typewriter) and read Piaget in college. Thanks a million!
Have you read "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" by Ted Chiang. It's about a machine to raise kids 'rationally' without the messiness and inconsistency of human emotions.
I don't think I can mark spoilers in a Substack comment so I won't spoil how it ends but I think it's how a child raised on conversations with chatbots would end up. It's a pretty short story in the "Exhalation" anthology.
But you should write your own short story as well! We'd appreciate it.
Thank you for reminding me of this Chiang story! I read Exhalations years ago, so I don't remember much (though I remember being very emotionally affected by "The Lifecycle of Software Objects"). I'll have to revisit it.
I do think Chiang is unusually brilliant at taking technical/scientific topics and turning them into human stories…really wish I had that skill
This was excellent, thank you as always for writing! I read another newsletter this morning by Tara Isabella Burton (link below). Reading both these pieces has made me feel more hopeful about keeping my head in these times when most comments on anything tech-related tends towards the pessimistic. I'm not ignorant of the problems but I do think people are thinking more seriously (and joyously!) now about what they really value. Pieces like this are an object lesson in how to pay attention to the world in all its inevitably online but mostly offline glory.
This is an amazing post—thank you for sharing!!! So beautifully written, and I very much relate to her approach of treating the internet as a social space, and as a positive social space in particular…I think people get a little too cynical about all the bad social outcomes that emerge from the internet (which are often, I think, just accelerated versions of the bad social outcomes that came from pre–internet culture), and forget about how special it is that it gives us access to a lot of other people—potential friends, lovers, mentors, collaborators—unrestricted by geography.
I loved this, and it feels very much in the same ethical/moral universe as what I wanted to communicate with the end of my own newsletter:
"The particularity of the individual—which is, as Kat Dee has so often written so well, among the Internet’s greatest sources of fascination—is the greatest tool we have available to us to to resist the flattening nature of AI slop: which by design seeks out middling patterns, common denominators, surface similarities. Whatever similarities chatbots serve us are not universal truths so much as generic banalities—a sea of Instagram faces. The only way to resist them, I think, is attention to the specifically weird, which means paying loving attention to as many bizarre people as possible. You can do it on the New York subway, at two in the morning. You can do it on Reddit. Either way, you’re opening yourself up to the teeming nature of otherness. Either way, you’re letting other people change you. You’re interrupting the linearity of your own thoughts in favor of the revelations only otherness can provide.
That should be done with care. There are times where letting your thoughts carry on to the end of the line is the only way to come to terms with their implications. But it’s also, I think, one of the primary responsibilities of personhood. Discerning when and how to be open to people and experiences and things outside ourselves and when to cloister ourselves inside our own interior castles, is one of the most vital ways we exercise moral responsibility."
This was a wonderful read that highlights many of the consequences of misunderstanding LLMs - both at the individual and societal levels. Product designers and managers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies should really take on the challenge of creating better conceptual models that enable mindful interactions with LLMs. The chat interface was a great starting point, but I think we’ve now seen enough iterations to understand its trade-offs, and it might be time to move on.
Perhaps this isn’t directly about “demystifying” LLMs, since that would involve describing the nature of their emergent behaviors (a difficult task in itself). But we can at least adopt more mechanical ways of reasoning about them. Personally, I like to think of them as a kind of lossy (image) compression as described here (https://lendl.priv.at/blog/2025/01/22/llm-as-compression-algorithms/). It’s not a perfect analogy, but it offers a mechanical starting point rather than an anthropomorphic one.
Oh! Also meant to say that I actually have Otmar Lendl's post open in a tab…I meant to read it and somehow synthesize it into my newsletter, but then decided that done is better than perfect and I should just send it out…
But I'll go back and read it now—thanks for the reminder!
I'm really curious what will happen in the next 1–2 years of LLM interfaces. A lot of products will default to chat still (and also default to a little star icon to indicate "AI feature!"—designers will frequently turn a single successful example into a trend, and then a standard UI pattern).
I think more purpose-built UIs (like the ones Amelia Wattenberger proposes at the end of https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/boo-chatbots) are really interesting to experiment with, but they require more work, I think…you have to design a specialized UI + specialized feature/prompt/way of using an LLM, and it's possible that every version bump for the LLM will lead to slightly different behavior. I wonder if that unpredictability is encouraging engineers and designers to play it safe—and simply default to the chat UI, because it's less opinionated (and so may not need a huge redesign).
Yeah even for chat interfaces, I think intentionality just carry a different kind of weight. Somehow OpenAI design feels very generic and lack of intentionality. For example, in the context of learning design, I particularly enjoy this talk/demo from Andy Matuschak (https://andymatuschak.org/hmwl/) because it's very purposeful. The chat interface is situated within a holistic perspective that delineates which parts require deliberate human judgement and which parts can be scaffolded away. It doesn't have to be the one-stop shop for all needs (which I think is what OpenAI aims for) but it should be opinionated. I'm optimistic that there's more to be done, but at the same time acknowledge that business needs may triumph over what's good for users in the end.
Aside from conversational interfaces, another thing to watch out for is how LLMs can be integrated into other creative medium. There's this demo from tl.draw (the company & the tool) that illustrates a glimpse of what the future looks like(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C2TdPkj6aQ&t=907s).
Looking more broadly on how this might impact product development, I believe it can set the foundation for malleable software - the kind that us end users/consumers can creatively design for our own purposes (and optionally share with others). I'm not too interested in the vibe coding hype, but I do believe it's a step towards this malleable software vision (https://notes.alexkehayias.com/malleable-software). Personally, that's what got me hyped up!
It's also had a huge influence on me—I've been trying to write about the book for a while, and just never found the right container for it!
I haven't read Seiobo There Below—just The Melancholy of Resistance—but I was talking to a friend recently about how masterful the perspective shifts are between each chapter of that book, and it made me want to reread it. (And probably read more Krasznahorkai?)
This was such a timely read for me, and I appreciate how measured and informative it is when so much content regarding AI seems aimed as inciting hysteria. Thank you!!
Loved your conversation on the design decisions when it comes to the internet and things that we interact every day with. As a huge fan of the book "The Dream Machine" it is nice to be reminded that every person computer interaction had to be thought of by someone before hand and to take nothing for granted! Side note I am trying to get through the first book of In Search of Lost Time and constantly refer to your Proust post to stay motivated. I wonder if I am approaching it wrong since it feels like a grind.
My thoughts are a little cracked here for a variety of unrelated life reasons--lovely to see my friend Anne here, enjoying but not trusting the nostalgia pangs of IM and B&W mac screenshots, reminder to resubscribe to Bookforum--but the Lakoff/Johnson frame here is helpful. I was teaching a library workshop on AI (wish I could strikethrough the term for more powerful effect; how about a 1990s-grad-seminar "under erasure" instead) a couple of weeks back and was deliberately attempting not to call it AI because I think a significant portion of our problem here lies in ceding the landscape to framing LLMs through the metaphor of intelligence. I'm enough of a crude historical materialist to know that winning the language battle won't necessarily stem the tide here, but omg how I would love to break that frame.
Your comment is so fascinating to read—I was thinking about "AI" versus "LLM" as terms a lot while writing! (And trying to use "LLM" as much as possible; it's more specific when talking about what people are using today.) I do think there is something…obfuscating about framing it as "artificial intelligence," and being really specific about the underlying technology (AI is the field that LLMs came from; "artificially intelligent" is the way we're narrativizing LLMs; but it's not totally clear that LLMs are "intelligent" by a conventional definition!)
I sometimes worry that being fussy about language/metaphor is just playing a semantic game…but I also think the semantic game is crucial in the stories we tell about technologies. Thank you for this really thoughtful reply!
Celine this was such an excellent read!! I was playing music while reading and now I am listening to no angels / ICU... so DREAMY!
whenever I'm in a slump and haven't read in a long time, reading your writing helps me to feel connected to the practice of reading again. THANK YOU!!! 📖💕 much to think about from this piece!!!
thank you!!! this is a really kind comment and I'm so happy that my writing can do that for you! also—if you're open to another music rec, I've been listening to a lot of Ela Minus today and she has a different kind of dreamy quality
https://open.spotify.com/track/69XAj1JQEIsziJbLR8B7AD?si=585b094f381947b1
https://open.spotify.com/track/7npn0mfuaUUNcrrVBsOEib?si=5c80155f9a6448f1
I will listen INSTANTLY!!!!!!
such a well-written piece!!! i aspire to someday write in such a great way <3 i would also recommend a yt video by sarah davis baker named ‘the internet used to be a place’, i think it relates to this and covers a bit more of the history if anyone would like to look more into it !!!
thank you Jen!! this is really kind, and also tysm for the rec—the first few minutes of the video are really fascinating, and I love this description of how the internet has become omnipresent: "The internet lived in a room, and that room had a door. It took a long time to notice when the door went missing"
here's the link if anyone else wants to watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYlcUbLAFmw
thanks, i'm glad you're liking it!
Loved reading this, thanks for writing it. It is so thought-provoking to notice that the conversation metaphor is 100x more potent/attractive/interesting than if chatgpt had been launched as a "text generator." we avoid all the terror, friction, highs and lows and anxiety of actual conversation in favor of the ghost of one!!
thank you Tiffany! and yes, I think the conversation metaphor is SO powerful and immediately tells you how to use ChatGPT (very useful) but also what kinds of interactions and hopes and dreams to project onto it (sometimes concerning…)
I loved this one! Your commitment to intellectual honesty and care is so inspirational!!
thank you Shenai! really appreciate you reading and this compliment means a lot—I really aspire to write rigorously and carefully
Celine - this is such a great essay - thank you for pulling all of this together. I have been working on a commission for a writing magazine about the impact of AI on writers and whether it is an existential threat. Now it's submitted, I have some regret I didn't read your piece or talk you about it before, but also, I am heartened that I had read a few of your sources.
One thing I love in your piece is about metaphor - I love how you speak of conversation - such a helpful frame when we think about interacting with LLMs.
An area that Chris and I have been thinking about is meaning and AI, but also in the effort of writing. What does it mean that an LLM can produce text, what does it mean for a human to write, and for the readers of both?
Bec—thank you!! I'm sure I must have told you this before, but the book you wrote with Chris Smith (Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts) was incredibly, incredibly helpful to me. So you commenting here really feels special.
This is sort of related to your question…but I've recently been thinking about how important it feels to encourage MORE people to write. I'm not against LLMs as an aid (and actually used Anthropic's Claude quite a bit to fact-check/clarify a few paragraphs of this newsletter)…
But I believe very strongly that writing—along with all other expressive/communicative/creative acts—is an inherently dignified and worthy human project, and part of the dignity comes from the effort it requires.
The whimsical way I have been phrasing this is: "it's your right as a human being to write badly and exuberantly"…because I think bad, conscious, effortful writing has immense value to the writer, and that value goes away if someone replaces their "bad" writing with superficially "good," polished ChatGPT writing. I wonder how many students, for example, rely on ChatGPT because they are afraid of falling short in their work, and they perceive that the end result (the essay, the grades) is valued more than the process.
Roman Muradov wrote an excellent newsletter this spring that touches on this: "Original work often happens when you figure out your own solution…There’s this moronic vision that we all have our great ideas, and simply need to find a suitable outlet for it. By that logic, the work that goes into learning to draw or write is nothing more than an obstacle to the art, but it’s not an obstacle—it is the art itself." https://dadaissues.substack.com/p/strife-is-life
CELINE!!! This is so, so well done. It is midnight here and I believe I will have more to say in the morning! Sending lots of love from SF 💕
I especially love:
- unwrapping how metaphors can obscure aspects of technology that are true, but don’t make as much sense in the context of the metaphor
- an encouragement to see LLMs as a tool, just a tool, just like all these other tools we have learned how to use
Even I, a person working at a company with a prominent AI product, only learned recently that what we get from Claude/ChatGPT is simply an aggregated collection of statistical “most likely” probabilities. Really tipped my frame of reference on its head from thinking about AI “reasoning” or “thinking”.
thank you Elliya!! and yes—I am really not stringently against AI or against using LLMs (even for writing), but there's so much obfuscation about how they actually work and therefore what their outputs "mean"
Mike Midnight is a friend of mine!! Though I moved cities, and it's many years since we spoke - I used to book him for events (DJ) all the time and he was clearly very special even way back then. Also amazing to see Roman mentioned here, very very funny - singular illustrator. Terrible Father is so good, everything he touches is. Great read once again Celine! : )
amazing—this is such a great small world/small internet moment!
I ❤️ Roman's illustrations and I'm really looking forward to my copy of his book! and thank you for reading—always appreciate getting a comment from you
Such a wholesome 'small internet' moment haha. That's nice of you to say re: the comments. I look forward to your writing always. Some good recs on your last 'What I Read' missive.. you introduced me to Tom McCarthy, Satin Island next on the last.. after i finish Hill House.. tragically behind on the Halloween reads ha-ha..
This clarified and informed my thinking about AI to a remarkable degree. Full disclosure: I’m old enough to have bought an early Mac (which I used as a souped up typewriter) and read Piaget in college. Thanks a million!
Thank you—I really appreciate you reading, and am really happy that this felt appropriately informative/thoughtful!
Insightful as always, Celine!
Have you read "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" by Ted Chiang. It's about a machine to raise kids 'rationally' without the messiness and inconsistency of human emotions.
I don't think I can mark spoilers in a Substack comment so I won't spoil how it ends but I think it's how a child raised on conversations with chatbots would end up. It's a pretty short story in the "Exhalation" anthology.
But you should write your own short story as well! We'd appreciate it.
Thank you for reminding me of this Chiang story! I read Exhalations years ago, so I don't remember much (though I remember being very emotionally affected by "The Lifecycle of Software Objects"). I'll have to revisit it.
I do think Chiang is unusually brilliant at taking technical/scientific topics and turning them into human stories…really wish I had that skill
This was excellent, thank you as always for writing! I read another newsletter this morning by Tara Isabella Burton (link below). Reading both these pieces has made me feel more hopeful about keeping my head in these times when most comments on anything tech-related tends towards the pessimistic. I'm not ignorant of the problems but I do think people are thinking more seriously (and joyously!) now about what they really value. Pieces like this are an object lesson in how to pay attention to the world in all its inevitably online but mostly offline glory.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thelostword/p/the-internet-is-a-city?r=3a7c2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
This is an amazing post—thank you for sharing!!! So beautifully written, and I very much relate to her approach of treating the internet as a social space, and as a positive social space in particular…I think people get a little too cynical about all the bad social outcomes that emerge from the internet (which are often, I think, just accelerated versions of the bad social outcomes that came from pre–internet culture), and forget about how special it is that it gives us access to a lot of other people—potential friends, lovers, mentors, collaborators—unrestricted by geography.
I loved this, and it feels very much in the same ethical/moral universe as what I wanted to communicate with the end of my own newsletter:
"The particularity of the individual—which is, as Kat Dee has so often written so well, among the Internet’s greatest sources of fascination—is the greatest tool we have available to us to to resist the flattening nature of AI slop: which by design seeks out middling patterns, common denominators, surface similarities. Whatever similarities chatbots serve us are not universal truths so much as generic banalities—a sea of Instagram faces. The only way to resist them, I think, is attention to the specifically weird, which means paying loving attention to as many bizarre people as possible. You can do it on the New York subway, at two in the morning. You can do it on Reddit. Either way, you’re opening yourself up to the teeming nature of otherness. Either way, you’re letting other people change you. You’re interrupting the linearity of your own thoughts in favor of the revelations only otherness can provide.
That should be done with care. There are times where letting your thoughts carry on to the end of the line is the only way to come to terms with their implications. But it’s also, I think, one of the primary responsibilities of personhood. Discerning when and how to be open to people and experiences and things outside ourselves and when to cloister ourselves inside our own interior castles, is one of the most vital ways we exercise moral responsibility."
This was a wonderful read that highlights many of the consequences of misunderstanding LLMs - both at the individual and societal levels. Product designers and managers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies should really take on the challenge of creating better conceptual models that enable mindful interactions with LLMs. The chat interface was a great starting point, but I think we’ve now seen enough iterations to understand its trade-offs, and it might be time to move on.
Perhaps this isn’t directly about “demystifying” LLMs, since that would involve describing the nature of their emergent behaviors (a difficult task in itself). But we can at least adopt more mechanical ways of reasoning about them. Personally, I like to think of them as a kind of lossy (image) compression as described here (https://lendl.priv.at/blog/2025/01/22/llm-as-compression-algorithms/). It’s not a perfect analogy, but it offers a mechanical starting point rather than an anthropomorphic one.
Oh! Also meant to say that I actually have Otmar Lendl's post open in a tab…I meant to read it and somehow synthesize it into my newsletter, but then decided that done is better than perfect and I should just send it out…
But I'll go back and read it now—thanks for the reminder!
I'm really curious what will happen in the next 1–2 years of LLM interfaces. A lot of products will default to chat still (and also default to a little star icon to indicate "AI feature!"—designers will frequently turn a single successful example into a trend, and then a standard UI pattern).
I think more purpose-built UIs (like the ones Amelia Wattenberger proposes at the end of https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/boo-chatbots) are really interesting to experiment with, but they require more work, I think…you have to design a specialized UI + specialized feature/prompt/way of using an LLM, and it's possible that every version bump for the LLM will lead to slightly different behavior. I wonder if that unpredictability is encouraging engineers and designers to play it safe—and simply default to the chat UI, because it's less opinionated (and so may not need a huge redesign).
Yeah even for chat interfaces, I think intentionality just carry a different kind of weight. Somehow OpenAI design feels very generic and lack of intentionality. For example, in the context of learning design, I particularly enjoy this talk/demo from Andy Matuschak (https://andymatuschak.org/hmwl/) because it's very purposeful. The chat interface is situated within a holistic perspective that delineates which parts require deliberate human judgement and which parts can be scaffolded away. It doesn't have to be the one-stop shop for all needs (which I think is what OpenAI aims for) but it should be opinionated. I'm optimistic that there's more to be done, but at the same time acknowledge that business needs may triumph over what's good for users in the end.
Aside from conversational interfaces, another thing to watch out for is how LLMs can be integrated into other creative medium. There's this demo from tl.draw (the company & the tool) that illustrates a glimpse of what the future looks like(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C2TdPkj6aQ&t=907s).
Looking more broadly on how this might impact product development, I believe it can set the foundation for malleable software - the kind that us end users/consumers can creatively design for our own purposes (and optionally share with others). I'm not too interested in the vibe coding hype, but I do believe it's a step towards this malleable software vision (https://notes.alexkehayias.com/malleable-software). Personally, that's what got me hyped up!
always appreciate ur perspective and writing on AI/LLMs.
thank you!!! for reading and stopping by to comment 💌
I can't wait to read what you have to say about László Krasznahorkai. I am reading Seiobo There Below now and think it's brilliant.
Thanks for this piece. Metaphors We Live By was a HUGE influence on my writing (about architecture and cities).
It's also had a huge influence on me—I've been trying to write about the book for a while, and just never found the right container for it!
I haven't read Seiobo There Below—just The Melancholy of Resistance—but I was talking to a friend recently about how masterful the perspective shifts are between each chapter of that book, and it made me want to reread it. (And probably read more Krasznahorkai?)
This was such a timely read for me, and I appreciate how measured and informative it is when so much content regarding AI seems aimed as inciting hysteria. Thank you!!
Loved your conversation on the design decisions when it comes to the internet and things that we interact every day with. As a huge fan of the book "The Dream Machine" it is nice to be reminded that every person computer interaction had to be thought of by someone before hand and to take nothing for granted! Side note I am trying to get through the first book of In Search of Lost Time and constantly refer to your Proust post to stay motivated. I wonder if I am approaching it wrong since it feels like a grind.