📚 Finished reading: The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis:
In design terms, this means that it is wrong for computer systems to tell people what to do and how to do it. In this view, reliance on artificial intelligence is abhorent because it installs a machine in the empty sky and recognizes that machine as the new authority. Instead, the computer should be a repository, a library in which anyone can find what they seek and to which everyone can add their own contribution. Tinderbox follows this path.
This is from Mark Bernstein’s new book Thinking with Tinderbox and I can only nod along.
📺 The Perfect Couple (2024) was perfectly shot — Netflix production values seem to have improved — and also too muddled. The White Lotus meets The Afterparty, sure, but did they really need to add Big Little Lies, Knives Out and who knows what else to the mix?
📚 Finished reading: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, so enthralled I was by his guide for the perplexed that I quickly jumped to the more well-known of his works. It was good timing: Abundance is becoming the Sapiens of this generation and Small Is Beautiful is the antidote.
It takes a special kind of negligence to accumulate $200,000 in traffic tickets over 7 years. To post about it on Reddit while whining about your car being impounded is the chef’s kiss. Many thanks to the ANC Commissioner who immortalized the now-deleted posts and to DC Councilmember Charles Allan for making it happen.
📺 Moonflower Murders (2024) had three and a half murder mysteries in a single series, each of them flawless. Part of me wishes it had the production values of HBO — Leslie Manville’s acting certainly deserves it — but then isn’t part of the charm seeing all those British B-listers hamming it up?
“The whole set up cost 2 billion dollars." (ᔥDaring Fireball)
Even if the rich are not “idle rich”, even when they work harder than anyone else, they work differently, apply different standards, and are set apart from common humanity. They corrupt themselves by practicing greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy.
This is from E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”, published in 1973. More than fifty years later, don’t you wish we had more of the idle kind of rich?
My current state of mind about LLMs is ambivalence. ChatGPT helps me with things that Google of 10 years ago may have done just as well. Of course, the reason for Google’s current non-performance — in addition to self-enshittification — is LLM-generated slop. Like a traveling vacuum salesman throwing dirt on your carpet.
Quote of the day from Adam Mastroianni:
[L]ots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.
And since writing is thinking, this for many people boils down to: write more drafts and murder your darlings. Or post them online, like I do.