Archive

Everything published here since July 2022 — 402 posts — arranged first by kind and then by subject. Titles link to the post. Where a post is a single embed or link, the title is all there is.

By kind

Book excerpts — 26

Passages from ‘my’ AI-generated books, most with the responses they drew from LLMs.

23 September 2026 · Scrupulosity — Religious and moral OCD: the Latin scrupulus, Ignatius, Luther, and reading as compulsion rather than inquiry.

23 September 2026 · People Spirits — A language model is trained on human writing, so whatever is in us is already in the machine.

22 September 2026 · Distributed Performance — What sort of acting superhero acting is, and whether the suit and the stunt team do the work.

22 September 2026 · The Problem of Other Minds — We never encounter another person's experience, only faces, voices, flinches and accounts.

21 September 2026 · Genetic Criticism — Director's cuts, the avant-texte and Newton's manuscripts: what a finished work conceals about its making.

21 September 2026 · Protein Folding — AlphaFold's CASP14 result as a hard scientific inference genuinely automated, and what it left unsolved.

20 September 2026 · Two Wolves — Two mirror-image ways of getting the next fifteen years wrong: normalcy bias and its opposite.

20 September 2026 · Exceptions — The sandbox as a container that works only for as long as nothing inside it connects to anything.

19 September 2026 · JARVIS — What we want from artificial intelligence is not intelligence: there are eight billion of us already.

19 September 2026 · The Residual — Growth accounting and the awkward leftover that economists agree to call technological progress.

18 September 2026 · Can They Do This? — The question employees ask more than any other, and why employment law rarely answers it cleanly.

18 September 2026 · VHS vs Betamax — The claim that pornography decides every format war, tested against what actually happened.

17 September 2026 · Renaming — Why the language of work churns constantly while the underlying jobs stay where they are.

17 September 2026 · Hai Kallipygoi — Athenaeus' two Syracusan sisters, the contest settled on the road, and the cult that came of it.

16 September 2026 · Origin Story — The first ten minutes of USS Callister as a precise study of a recognisable office misery.

16 September 2026 · Just Deserts — Homer's Odysseus does not suffer for wrongdoing at Troy; Nolan's, it seems, will.

15 September 2026 · Chronophilia — An age preference is not an attraction to ageing: two men, both forty-five, wanting different things.

15 September 2026 · Vintage — A twenty-year-old whisky is revered and a twenty-year-old yoghurt is not; people are neither.

14 September 2026 · Hedonic Adaptation — Two-day delivery became ordinary, then next-day, then same-day: the ratchet of service expectation.

14 September 2026 · Unreal City — Every large social platform now holds a substantial and growing population of the dead.

13 September 2026 · Grinding the Wind — William Cubitt, the treadwheel, and punishment deliberately designed to produce nothing.

13 September 2026 · Mētis — The kind of intelligence Odysseus is supposed to have, which is not what we usually mean by the word.

12 September 2026 · The Milk Round — The milk round solved the last-mile problem better than we do, and then vanished.

11 September 2026 · Drop Density — Break a delivery day into its parts and driving turns out not to be the main event.

9 September 2026 · Postcodes — London divided into compass districts in 1857, and what the 1917 wartime reorganisation did to them.

7 September 2026 · Newton’s Other Universe — Newton was neither pure reason nor a secret magician, and the second story is currently winning.

Model roundtables — 12

Several models in conversation at once, with me moderating.

23 July 2026 · LLM Roundtable: Project Hail Mary and Epistemic Partnership

20 July 2026 · LLM Roundtable: The Odyssey, PoliceAI and Algorithmic Failure — The casting row around Nolan’s Odyssey mapped as a class of argument, then PoliceAI and algorithmic failure.

31 May 2026 · FMK — Ebola, Lassa fever and measles put to the models as marry/keep-at-arms-length/avoid, with the justifications doing the work.

29 March 2026 · LLM Roundtable: Underreported News — Week Ending 27 March 2026 — The week’s most significant underreported stories, each model defending its pick against the others.

27 March 2026 · LLMs and Cognitive Atrophy — Whether routinely outsourcing intellectual work to models erodes the ability to do it unaided.

20 March 2026 · The World in 2026: A Roundtable on Film and Emergent Global Trends — Eight to ten lectures on global trends since 2020, each built on a film released after 1990.

18 March 2026 · LLM Roundtable: Underreported UK News and State Capacity — Four models pick the most significant underreported stories of the previous thirty days, then argue with each other's choices.

17 March 2026 · LLM Roundtable: Ranking Philosophers — Three top-ten lists — most important of the last thirty years, currently living, and under fifty — with the criteria argued out first.

13 March 2026 · LLM Roundtable: Systemic Chokepoints in Global Networks — Chokepoints analogous to the Strait of Hormuz, geographical or not, whose disruption would propagate.

9 March 2026 · AI and Jobs: March 2026 — A roundtable on the Massenkoff–McCrory paper for Anthropic on the labour-market impacts of AI.

8 March 2026 · LLM Roundtable: Underreported News & Analysis — Underreported stories for the week ending 7 March, with each model commenting on the others’ choices.

6 March 2026 · LLM Roundtable: Iran and UK Politics — The joint US–Israeli campaign in Iran, read for what it actually changes for a UK resident in two weeks, six months and three years.

Quizzes & interactive — 14

Question banks, dashboards and interactive tools, most long enough to use as revision.

31 July 2026 · The Odyssey Quiz — 150 questions on Odysseus's voyage, Homeric storytelling, translations, screen adaptations and popular culture.

17 July 2026 · Occupational Health and Safety Quiz — 480 questions on law, risk, management systems, occupational health, operational safety and incident learning.

12 July 2026 · Employment Law Quiz — Eight domains, from employment status and pay to dismissal, tribunals, TUPE and collective rights.

12 July 2026 · Aspera Command Assessment — A field examination in orbital operations, station systems, emergency command, logistics and planetary protection.

11 July 2026 · Fourteen Seconds — A work of fiction delivered as a functioning multiple-choice exam for officers applying to command a space station.

11 July 2026 · Logistics Management Quiz — 430 questions across strategy, AI, people and employment, operational flow, supply chains, compliance and safety.

7 July 2026 · Psych Quiz — Source-linked questions across psychiatry, clinical psychology and the classification of paraphilic disorders.

5 July 2026 · Philosophy of AI Quiz

1 July 2026 · AI News Quiz

1 July 2026 · June News Quiz

24 June 2026 · AI Adoption and Policy Quiz

7 June 2026 · Out of Season — An interactive dashboard on the question of whether Britain's immigration system is broken.

11 April 2026 · More Quizzes — Five quizzes at once: two news rounds, technological unemployment, and AI consciousness, welfare and existential risk.

10 April 2026 · The Iran War Weekly

Prompted writing — 52

The prompt, then what came back: fiction, correspondence, catalogues, lectures.

10 August 2026 · Saba: Contextual Reading — Geertz's 'the locus of study is not the object of study', read in its anthropological context and then as a line posted online.

9 August 2026 · Saba: Contextual Reading — Three passages — Byung-Chul Han on the swarm, Bede's Brother Dryhthelm ('I have seen colder'), and Sara Ahmed on complaint — read first in context, then as things people post.

9 June 2026 · Scripture — Treating a text as scripture: the whole picture of reality someone might build from it without reading it literally.

8 June 2026 · Rubrics — Multifactorial rubrics for questions that resist answering — who is the most powerful man alive, is Britain's immigration system broken.

28 May 2026 · On the Question of Machine Authorship in Magnifica Humanitas

27 May 2026 · Superman + X — The 'Superman Plus X' subgenre: take a supremely powerful figure and alter exactly one variable.

27 May 2026 · The Enhanced Games — An evidence-based look at the 2026 Enhanced Games, where FDA-approved but sport-banned substances were allowed.

17 May 2026 · Randoms — Richard Ngo’s claim that effective altruism’s largest effect on the world was empowering Anthropic, assessed by the models.

7 May 2026 · Questions — Bostrom on whether there could be an unending series of ever more expensive goods that make leisure worth postponing.

4 March 2026 · The Coherence Problem — Fiction from the Anthropic / Department of War / OpenAI saga of early 2026, told three times from three sides.

19 February 2026 · Eulogy — A story told as successive drafts of one eulogy, each longer, more revelatory and less bearable.

16 February 2026 · Necropsy — A veterinary pathologist autopsies five zoo animals in a working day; each death is about captivity and care.

8 February 2026 · Notes Toward a General Theory of the Last Mile

7 February 2026 · Jubilate Machinae II

5 February 2026 · Mandelson — Mandelson in numbered parts, opening with the apocryphal mushy peas in Hartlepool.

2 February 2026 · Last Mile — An interactive app teaching the mathematics of last-mile optimisation: travelling salesman, VRP, CVRP and combinatorial complexity.

1 February 2026 · The World of Work — Short stories used as instruments for examining particular working environments, beginning inside a courier company.

29 January 2026 · Zahawi et al — Creative non-fiction about a politician in thirty numbered parts, after Geoff Dyer's The Last Days of Roger Federer.

27 January 2026 · Abundance — Klein and Thompson's sleeper waking in 1905 after going to bed in 1875, and what it implies about progress now.

20 January 2026 · Traitors — Answers for superfans of the UK

17 January 2026 · Statham — Jason

15 January 2026 · Correspondence — Invented email exchanges between named writers and thinkers, composed slowly and at length.

10 January 2026 · Exploration, Constraints — Hard science-fiction premises about space exploration, grouped by location outward through the solar system, with no miracle technology.

3 January 2026 · Pluribus — The Apple TV series

3 January 2026 · The Prior Probability of Gorilla — A story from Anil Seth’s line about how low the prior on “gorilla” is for something indistinctly dark and furry.

27 December 2025 · Limited Action — A story set in 2045 against a limited American military campaign extrapolated from current geopolitics.

22 December 2025 · Clinical Detachment — A successful London sex therapist, apparently empathetic with her clients, who is herself asexual.

15 December 2025 · Travel Advisory — Twelve advisories for extraterrestrial tourists, written by a bureaucrat who despises Earth and his readers equally.

13 December 2025 · The Quiet End of Humanity — Antinatalism becomes the dominant global ideology and administrative machines run a steadily emptying world.

10 December 2025 · Everything is Just Something — A model answers the charge that it is autocomplete on steroids, in the voice of Johnny from Mike Leigh's Naked.

9 December 2025 · The Crisis of Reference — A story that is nothing but a philosophy lecture on meaning, reference and contemporary AI.

6 December 2025 · Tracking — A project manager and a digital-experience director rebuild a global courier's package tracking system.

6 December 2025 · Arcane Engines for the Dissolution of Being — A weapons catalogue from a war where arms destroy categories of being, written as a medieval grimoire.

16 November 2025 · The World in 2025 — Ten lectures on global trends since 2020, each one read through a film from the 1990s or 2000s.

2 November 2025 · The Chinese Room — A story that works as literary fiction and as an introduction to an argument it never names.

10 October 2025 · Invisible Models — Imagined multimodal models written as Calvino's Invisible Cities, each with its own emergent capabilities.

8 October 2025 · The Teleportation Paradox — Two essays on the teleportation paradox, each confined to English vocabulary from one side of a chosen date.

5 October 2025 · The Descent — A survivor on a derelict spacecraft spends his last days inside a reconstruction of the Manila of his childhood.

27 September 2025 · The Kardashev Scale — Playlists on a procedural-science theme, then one made entirely of STEM-themed rap.

23 September 2025 · Power — Achilles, having killed Hector, wants the right music playing from his chariot while he drags the body.

21 September 2025 · Psychohistory — Turchin, Stephenson and Cowen on the defects of Asimov's psychohistory, moderated by Dwarkesh Patel.

20 September 2025 · Jubilate Machinae — 'For I will consider my LLM' — Christopher Smart by way of Ginsberg's Howl.

14 September 2025 · The Number — If a civilisation-ending disaster were x years away, what is the smallest number of people who could avert it?

14 September 2025 · Melancholia — Julian Barnes and Martin Amis on thanatophobia, Larkinesque terror, antinatalism and philosophical pessimism.

12 September 2025 · Timeshare — Seven people share one body: each is a passenger for six days and the pilot for one.

7 September 2025 · Venus — Coetzee and Auster on nude photography as amateurs now practise it, and the communities that host it.

6 September 2025 · Mitosis — A man makes digital copies of himself to act as agents online, and stays legally liable for what they do.

2 September 2025 · Toward a Seventh Manual — Speculative fiction set in 2040 on the making of DSM-VII and the disorders proposed through the public portal.

30 August 2025 · The Sleep of Reason — Brain-computer interfaces are common and AI firms post-train on sleeping subjects, preferring the nightmare-prone.

24 August 2025 · Zombie - A Short Story by GPT-5 Thinking — A middle-aged PCSO who reads philosophy of mind in his spare time faces his annual performance review.

9 August 2025 · The Gradient - A Short Story by GPT-5 Thinking — A man's father, an architect of a pervasive AI, has quietly tuned it to favour his son.

6 March 2025 · Deep Research: OpenAI vs Google — Foundation's genetic dynasty of Cleons examined at length, with two research tools set against each other.

Audio / podcast — 46

Generated episodes, fifteen minutes to an hour and a half, usually built from a research report and a conversation.

8 August 2026 · Ebony and Ivory — A roundtable on the case against universalism, with a note that the generated episode is not faithful to the transcript beneath it.

17 April 2026 · Underreported News - Week Ending 16 April 2026

7 April 2026 · Underreported News - Week Ending 6 April 2026

3 April 2026 · Philosophy Reading List II

2 April 2026 · Philosophy Reading List — Five models advise on a month of reading philosophy papers, with “reading” loosely defined.

31 March 2026 · The Deep Dive and Semantic Hyperbole

14 February 2026 · Optimal Timing for Superintelligence — Bostrom’s February 2026 paper, with the argument synthesised and the first reactions gathered.

30 December 2025 · Baumol’s Cost Disease — A slide deck, and an argument about whether the hours-per-television comparison survives quality adjustment.

28 December 2025 · Graeber — Slide decks and a ramp into Graeber that keeps the argumentative public voice intact.

25 December 2025 · Definitions

17 December 2025 · Diagnosing Procedural Failure — A technician who treats her own organisation as fieldwork, having lately discovered Graeber.

2 December 2025 · AI and Jobs (November 2025)

29 November 2025 · Epistemic Firewalls for LLM Use

23 November 2025 · EF English Proficiency Index 2025 — The EF English Proficiency Index, a Deep Research report on it, and a critique of the report for treating the index as authoritative.

17 November 2025 · AI Cyberwarfare is Here

2 November 2025 · Mechanistic Interpretability and AI Psychiatry

1 October 2025 · Has London Fallen? — London's standing as a global financial centre in 2025, with reports on the GFCI and on wealth migration.

30 September 2025 · GDPval

8 September 2025 · Machines Like Us — A post-AGI story in which two parties' interests do not diverge so much as have no borders anyone can draw.

6 September 2025 · Spice and Spice-Adjacent Research

28 August 2025 · Epstein

22 August 2025 · The Learning Organisation

19 August 2025 · AI in Medicine

16 August 2025 · A Rose By Any Other Name

1 August 2025 · AI vs Organisational Chaos

1 August 2025 · Digital Twins

28 July 2025 · On Spice Production

27 July 2025 · Decolonisation VI (The United States)

27 July 2025 · AI and Jobs: Forecasting Methodology

27 July 2025 · More AI-Generated Podcast Episodes

25 July 2025 · AI and Jobs

24 July 2025 · Decolonisation V (Belgian Congo)

22 July 2025 · Decolonisation IV (Counterfactuals) — How the colonial powers might have prepared better for independence within the constraints they actually faced.

21 July 2025 · Decolonisation III (Disambiguation, Ethics) — Disambiguating what decolonisation means, and the ethical arguments attached to each sense.

20 July 2025 · Decolonisation II (France, Sub-Saharan Africa)

20 July 2025 · Decolonisation I (Britain, Sub-Saharan Africa Overview) — First of the series, on Britain in sub-Saharan Africa, with the working method set out.

18 July 2025 · The Epistemology of History — How historical knowledge gets made, and what weight it can bear.

18 July 2025 · Other People

18 July 2025 · Idi Amin

17 July 2025 · Cowen vs Yudkowsky — Cowen against Yudkowsky on AI risk.

16 July 2025 · Humanity’s Last Exam

16 July 2025 · Superheroes Revisited

15 July 2025 · Give Me Everything You Have — Built around Lasdun's account of being stalked.

14 July 2025 · Gossip

13 July 2025 · Thinking Seriously About Superheroes — Superheroes taken seriously, with Homelander as the reference point from the first three seasons of The Boys.

12 July 2025 · Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Music & short audio — 24

Tracks and short pieces, most made with Suno; none longer than about five minutes.

29 August 2026 · Florence/Yelena

23 May 2026 · The Labour of Conversation — A 1909 passage on how delightful life would be without human contact, and a believer in the perfectibility of machinery.

22 May 2026 · The Instrument

17 May 2026 · Observations upon the Prophecies of Artificial Mind

9 May 2026 · Secondary Literature — Atwood on the story, the real story, the story of how the story came to be told, and what gets left out.

3 May 2026 · Human-Like Grace III

2 May 2026 · Jubilate Machinae III

27 April 2026 · Human-Like Grace II — Fiction from an observatory in flattened November light, and the song made out of it.

26 April 2026 · Do Not Fear the Machine — A man who sells AI-generated images of women who do not exist finds the song, on a Tuesday.

3 October 2025 · Human-Like Grace

3 October 2025 · Language Is a Garment That Fits Many Shoulders — Lyrics built out of a GPT-4o exchange on language as a garment that fits many shoulders.

9 August 2025 · Sexy Like Me

4 March 2025 · The Paradox of Tragedy — Why aesthetic pleasure can be drawn from tragic drama at the same time as the pain it causes.

2 March 2025 · Incomprehensible

2 March 2025 · Familiar

13 June 2024 · Voicemail

13 June 2024 · Performance Warning

10 June 2024 · Lament for the Makers

11 May 2024 · HR

9 May 2024 · Numinosum

4 May 2024 · Under the Skin — 'As you are dust, I am made of subtle fire' — from Three Thousand Years of Longing.

1 May 2024 · Stricken — Lyrics by Vulpes Lumin with Shakespeare and a line taken from Ja Rule; everything else by Suno.

30 April 2024 · Brimstone

30 April 2024 · Terminus

Essays & notes — 39

Commentary, quotation and argument in my own arrangement.

6 July 2026 · On Using Fable 5 — Four models, one sceptical user and a disappearing allowance argue about what a non-coder should do with a frontier model.

30 June 2026 · Language Games II — More scenarios, including Nozick's Experience Machine offered as a public service and assessed by a caseworker.

24 June 2026 · The Starmer Premiership

22 April 2026 · Alternate Ecologies of AI Image Generation — If generative imagery had grown inside a female-majority ecology of creators, curators and audiences, what would it look like?

19 April 2026 · Fama — Nietzsche on reputation outrunning self-knowledge: a bad conscience is easier to live with than a bad name.

9 April 2026 · Ye — Ye in numbered parts: a comeback requires having gone somewhere, and he has been in hotels.

9 April 2026 · The Teleportation Paradox II

7 April 2026 · Sinners Revisited

25 March 2026 · The Classification of Dangerous Mythical Beasts

11 March 2026 · A Thousand Small Doors

9 March 2026 · Field Manual — A tongue-in-cheek field manual, with marginalia noting that it is a document about not requiring things.

3 March 2026 · A Decree Concerning Cinema — Decrees after Flaubert’s Parrot, beginning with a ban on films whose subject is capital-T Trauma.

26 February 2026 · Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor — The former prince in thirty numbered parts, after Geoff Dyer, opening with a photograph taken in the back of a car.

23 February 2026 · McGinn: Best Philosopher Ever? — A 2022 Colin McGinn post examined critically, then a ranked top three of living philosophers.

12 February 2026 · The Last Days of Keir Starmer — Starmer leaving Downing Street on 9 February 2026, in thirty numbered parts after Geoff Dyer.

11 February 2026 · Sinners (2025) — Coogler's Sinners as a test case: what research would responsibly stage a supernatural horror narrative.

24 January 2026 · AI and Jobs: UK, January 2026 — Jobs, tasks and workflows distinguished, and which historical analogies for AI hold up — computers, electrification, offshoring.

6 January 2026 · Language Games — Prompts as games, including an audio guide for a 2080 museum where every exhibit is intangible.

20 December 2025 · Ask the AI Ethicist — Dilemmas submitted to the New York Times' Ethicist column, put instead to the models.

8 November 2025 · Kimi K2 — Old prompts tried on Kimi K2 Thinking, starting with the teleportation-paradox vocabulary constraint.

24 August 2025 · Move 37 — Whether anything in the history of human–AI interaction parallels AlphaGo's thirty-seventh move against Lee Sedol.

11 May 2025 · Challenging Conversations — Deep Research rewrites and extends the ACAS guide to difficult workplace conversations, in versions for managers, employees and union reps.

12 April 2025 · 2027 — What AI looks like by

17 March 2025 · Nova — Amodei on how meaningful an activity can be even when it generates no economic value at all.

2 March 2025 · More Deep Research — Reports on morale and retention in logistics, calibrating employee effort, and ADR compliance across multi-site networks.

24 January 2025 · Persivilience — Rory Stewart on why British work is less dignified, worse paid and more demoralising than its European equivalents.

27 October 2024 · Bless Her Heart — The Harvard MBA against the round-the-clock robot, and research on how women account for their own gossip.

30 July 2024 · Wear Sunscreen — Ecclesiastes on the race not being to the swift: time and chance happen to them all.

29 April 2024 · An Entire Universe of Botched Reciprocity — Laura Kipnis on intimacy as ongoing proximity to another needy human's most uncensored self.

15 April 2024 · An Accompanying Personality Deformation — Ted Gioia on distraction as the fastest-growing sector of the culture economy, and $90,000 spent on AI card art.

13 April 2024 · A Hunter-Gatherer in an Uncontacted Tribe — Candice Odgers on The Anxious Generation and the claim that digital technology is rewiring children's brains.

7 April 2024 · Liar, Lunatic, Lord — Mischievous responding in adolescent surveys, and what it does to findings about identity.

3 April 2024 · Phenomenally Talented Assholes — Paul Graham on wise versus smart, plotted as two different curves across situations.

2 April 2024 · An Album of Very Specific Apologies — Haidt on the phone-based childhood, and Matt Farley's twenty years of songs written to match any search.

25 March 2024 · A Perverse Game of Baby Roulette — Scott Aaronson on the harrowing, unilluminating applied part of computing.

18 March 2024 · Teratogenesis

16 November 2023 · Brusque Boulevards of the Imagination

11 September 2022 · Soundtrack to My Life 1 — Numbered passages, opening with the sword that sets sons against fathers.

23 July 2022 · The Northman (2022) — Andrew Sullivan on distinguishing kinds of hatred, set beside Eggers' film.

Shared conversations — 50

Links to the conversation itself, kept as a record.

29 December 2025 · Survival Plan — Given an Earth-ending event in 150 years, a plan to sustain a hundred million people off-world for three hundred.

14 August 2025 · The People’s Verdict

11 August 2025 · A Counsellor of Artifice

10 July 2025 · Scientific Management

8 July 2025 · Apocalypse

24 June 2025 · People Spirits

5 June 2025 · Discipline and Punish

25 May 2025 · The Archaeology of Human Thought

13 May 2025 · Alien Ontology in Film

10 May 2025 · Negging

9 May 2025 · The Retort Courteous

6 May 2025 · Towards an Ontology of Life

5 May 2025 · Anger

4 May 2025 · Complaint

30 April 2025 · Godzilla

28 April 2025 · Hallucinations

2 April 2025 · Morale and Path Dependence

25 March 2025 · Deep Research on Art Nude Photography

10 March 2025 · Mechanisms

10 March 2025 · Greentext

28 February 2025 · Epistemic Injustice and Employer-Employee Relations Revisited

17 January 2025 · Seriousness

16 January 2025 · Compliance

11 January 2025 · Problems

10 January 2025 · Effort

8 January 2025 · On Epistemic Injustice and Employer-Employee Relations

22 December 2024 · I Have of Late

21 December 2024 · LLMs and Human Cognition

14 November 2024 · Epistemic X

31 October 2024 · Budget

30 October 2024 · War

29 October 2024 · Quiet Firing

29 October 2024 · Gossip

25 October 2024 · Surveillance

24 October 2024 · Powell

15 October 2024 · Terrain Mapping

11 October 2024 · Exploratory Questions

9 October 2024 · Counterfactual

7 October 2024 · Technology and Virtue

5 October 2024 · Erotic Capital

5 October 2024 · Techno-Fetishism

2 October 2024 · Game

18 September 2024 · Deep Thoughts

28 July 2024 · AI and Productivity

14 July 2024 · On Film Photography

14 July 2024 · Timor Mortis Conturbat Me

6 July 2024 · Transition

1 July 2024 · Democratic Governance

29 June 2024 · Old Man Biden

29 March 2024 · Gemini Advanced Underwhelms

Photography & images — 26

Shoots, Midjourney work and Instagram reels.

13 September 2026 · Reels — Instagram reels, among them 'rating moths', 'back to black' and 'the moral character of an orgy'.

12 August 2026 · Reels — Instagram reels, among them 'on the nature of daylight', 'rocky road to dublin' and 'i am myself indifferent honest'.

9 August 2026 · Reels — Instagram reels, among them 'thomasina on cleopatra', 'caroline bingley' and 'hair is everything'.

20 June 2026 · Arcane Engines for the Dissolution of Being II

31 May 2026 · From the Workplace Environment Team

10 May 2025 · More Midjourney Magic

9 May 2025 · Midjourney is Magic — One phrase — 'a morbid acuteness of the senses' — run through Lindbergh, Maier and Arbus.

20 March 2025 · Shoot Day (March 15, 2025)

8 February 2025 · The Apocalypse of Enoch — Midjourney images from the prompt 'the apocalypse of enoch'.

27 January 2025 · Ahab, in his hidden self — Melville on madness 'transfigured into some still subtler form', run through Ren Hang, Woelfel and Tarkovsky.

19 January 2025 · The Transfiguration — Midjourney images from 'the transfiguration by Antoine Watteau'.

18 January 2025 · Eliminative Materialism — Midjourney images from 'eliminative materialism by MIT CSAIL and Leonardo da Vinci'.

15 January 2025 · A More Direct Breach of the Undertaking — Midjourney images from the phrase 'a more direct breach of the undertaking'.

11 January 2025 · Apollo and the Pursuit of Perfection — Late-2024 Midjourney work built from a phrase plus a named black-and-white photographer and a painter.

15 November 2024 · The Null Hypothesis — Midjourney images from 'the null hypothesis by Richard Avedon and Jacques-Louis David'.

17 June 2024 · Shoot Day (June 15, 2024)

22 January 2024 · Marvels of Things Created

12 November 2023 · Look What You Made Me Do — Two library books in languages he can't read, and GPT-4V translating the covers.

19 June 2023 · Shoot Day (June 18, 2023)

4 September 2022 · Joyce (August 2022)

3 September 2022 · Joyce (August 2022)

30 August 2022 · Squares 1

29 August 2022 · Dailies 3

21 August 2022 · Dailies 2

9 August 2022 · Shoot Day (7 August 2022)

9 August 2022 · Dailies 1

Links (2022–24) — 47

The link roundup: quotation and comment, forty-five numbered editions plus two later ones.

17 March 2024 · Links — The Pentagon's UFO office on circular reporting, and Scott Alexander on advice being written disproportionately by defective people.

15 March 2024 · Links — Ethan Mollick on the state of AI in early 2024, and Sapolsky on baboons with nine spare hours a day to make each other miserable.

7 March 2023 · Links 45 — Mark Antony's oration in a Southern accent, hallucination as the source of AI creativity, and instant translation making Europeans mutually legible.

5 March 2023 · Links 44 — Emily Bell on having learned nothing from twenty years of social media, and Russell Jacoby on self-censorship being the worse kind.

2 March 2023 · Links 43 — Tabarrok on discontinuous change, a profile of Matt Yglesias at the keyboard, and Erik Hoel on LLMs and AI safety.

28 February 2023 · Links 42 — Eighty per cent of a Nature survey have used ChatGPT, and a finding that citizens are warmer towards their former coloniser than towards anyone else.

27 February 2023 · Links 41 — The Iron Law of Institutions, and Aaronson on GPT being more dangerous the better it works.

26 February 2023 · Links 40 — Britain's 4.3 million missing homes, and Paul LaFarge on what a supermarket receipt tells you about the universe.

8 January 2023 · Links 39 — Freddie deBoer on progressives finding nothing complicated, and evidence that research has become more incremental.

31 December 2022 · Links 38 — GPT-3 outperforming students on reasoning tests, why the zebra was never domesticated, and Scott Alexander on censorship.

29 December 2022 · Links 37 — Escaping superficial boredom and never reaching the profound kind, and deBoer on billionaires as a structural position.

28 December 2022 · Links 36 — Krugman on tech companies outliving their own excitement, four in ten junior doctors planning to leave, and the warmest year in a 364-year record.

27 December 2022 · Links 35 — Vinyl outselling CDs again, and Aaronson's letter to his eleven-year-old self about tickling the tail of the dragon.

25 December 2022 · Links 34 — Manjoo on Musk being Tesla and Tesla being Musk, and Yglesias on why trusted intermediaries are mostly a good thing.

24 December 2022 · Links 33 — Molly Crabapple on illustrators who cannot outwork their replacements, and the Christmas Price Index.

22 December 2022 · Links 32 — Lithub's most scathing reviews of 2022, and Ezra Klein on what social media was once hoped to be.

21 December 2022 · Links 31 — Centralised social media as a failed Tower of Babel, and programming becoming an abstraction.

20 December 2022 · Links 30 — Erik Hoel on GPT-3 as a schizophrenic mad god and ChatGPT as a celestial bureaucrat, and who gains and loses from AI.

14 December 2022 · Links 29 — How the New York Times bestseller list actually works, and the Pepsi navy that never existed.

11 December 2022 · Links 28 — Scott Alexander on crypto as a few hundred real projects and a long tail of scams, and ownership across Africa.

9 December 2022 · Links 27 — 'Type of Guy' syndrome, and Stephen Marche on the undergraduate essay about to be disrupted from the ground up.

7 December 2022 · Links 26 — Simon Morden on whether Mars is merely a question of logistics, and a forecast of ordinary people with intelligence-agency powers.

6 December 2022 · Links 25 — The Verge on ChatGPT's confident falsehoods, and why Spotify still cannot say why you love what you love.

4 December 2022 · Links 24 — The EU metaverse party that five people attended, and Kathleen Lubey on thinking about pornography beyond pro and anti.

2 December 2022 · Links 23 — Painters performing for the algorithm rather than the canvas, and Meghan O'Gieblyn on machines that grasp a world we cannot.

30 November 2022 · Links 22 — Avatar's enormous grosses and missing cultural footprint, and a passage on shedding skins and being born yesterday.

29 November 2022 · Links 21 — Fewer than half in England and Wales now Christian, Aaronson comparing AI to the early web, and Sam Kriss on Wakanda.

28 November 2022 · Links 20 — Jeff Sparrow on the point at which AI assistance becomes cheating, and the education gap that has reversed in forty years.

27 November 2022 · Links 19 — A Cambridge sexuality survey, Fanta's wartime German origin, and 1,808 fewer full-time GPs than in 2015.

26 November 2022 · Links 18 — Vampires after Pattinson versus cannibalism, bone fractures explained through John Wick, and wake-up music on space missions.

23 November 2022 · Links 17 — Kevin Kelly on photography and AI both being a button press, and why smart assistants still cannot converse.

22 November 2022 · Links 16 — Michael Robbins on apocalyptic traditions not being universal, and Musk's methods at Twitter.

21 November 2022 · Links 15 — Scott Alexander on effective altruism surviving its press, and feeding Facebook contradictory versions of yourself.

20 November 2022 · Links 14 — Lagos as Africa's fourth-largest economy, data analysts in elite football, and why Instagram is losing Gen Z.

18 November 2022 · Links 13 — Musk as Thanos in the server room, and an AI that learned to diagnose COVID from the date on the scan.

14 November 2022 · Links 12 — Immerwahr on being creatures of our environments, the proton's curveballs, and Cowen on the Future Fund's blind spot.

13 November 2022 · Links 11 — Andreessen on Twitter as an X-ray machine rather than an engine, and Google's Talk to Books.

10 November 2022 · Links 10 — Critical ignoring as a digital literacy, the Christ Church dean's settlement, and SBF losing 94 per cent in a day.

9 November 2022 · Links 9 — Sarah Constantin on alt institutions that have not replaced the canonical ones, and NBA performance without fans.

7 November 2022 · Links 8 — Deresiewicz on which narratives actually change the world, and the case for art being un-political.

6 November 2022 · Links 7 — Justin E. H. Smith on whether there are more legs than eyes in the world, and on leaving Twitter for Substack.

5 November 2022 · Links 6 — Missing white woman syndrome, quantified, and Yglesias on the resentment attached to a blue check.

3 November 2022 · Links 5 — An infinite Herzog–Žižek conversation, Borges telling his translator to make him macho and gaucho, and moderation without censorship.

31 October 2022 · Links 4 — Nilay Patel on people wanting social media to be Disney World, old Britannica adverts, and how Google remapped the world.

26 October 2022 · Links 3 — Cowen on having to learn the internet all over again, the Brexit effect, and Shutterstock selling AI stock images.

24 October 2022 · Links 2 — Whether philosophy is more like mathematics or literature, Putin's decision-making, and the heavily edited record of memory.

16 October 2022 · Links 1 — AI essays as doping or as better running shoes, Chaucer possibly not a rapist, and the appetite for a wise guide.

Reading (commonplace book) — 34

Passages from what I was reading, with sources. Numbered 1–33 across 2022, with one later entry.

22 March 2025 · Reading — Huxley on progress: it may be perceived by historians but is never felt by those living through it.

3 November 2022 · Reading 33 — Caesar murdered rather than debated, Sumner caned in the Senate, and Thatcher called a sex-starved boa constrictor.

1 November 2022 · Reading 32 — What a true argument requires: caring beyond winning, and the ability to inhabit the counterargument.

30 October 2022 · Reading 31 — Meghan Daum on younger generations as effectively a different species, and older voices as a verbal meteor shower.

27 October 2022 · Reading 30 — How a political system might select for people decent enough to be worth having and effective enough to govern.

26 October 2022 · Reading 29 — Pre-war Anglo-American contempt for Japanese pilots, and the confident nonsense about their eyesight.

25 October 2022 · Reading 28 — The European market for tattooed Maori heads, and what the demand did to the people supplying it.

24 October 2022 · Reading 27 — Benjamin's angel of history, face turned to the wreckage, blown backwards into the future.

22 October 2022 · Reading 26 — The meerkat as the most murderous mammal on the planet, and an odd choice for family entertainment.

22 October 2022 · Reading 25 — The Great War ending the belief that deadlier weapons would make wars shorter and more humane.

18 October 2022 · Reading 24 — Opossums' multi-sensory performance of death, and the puzzle of sexual cannibalism.

18 October 2022 · Reading 23 — What a smoothbore musket could actually do at a hundred yards, and what it could not.

11 October 2022 · Reading 22 — George Steiner wondering, without proof, how Britain would have behaved if the Germans had come.

10 October 2022 · Reading 21 — The Walrus and the Carpenter read as Britain and America, weeping over quantities of sand.

7 October 2022 · Reading 20 — The unsettling experience of reading a foreigner's account of your own national history.

5 October 2022 · Reading 19 — Sex in cars, parked and otherwise, with the survey figures attached.

4 October 2022 · Reading 18 — 'Get a horse!', and Ford suing the Chicago Tribune for calling him an ignorant idealist.

3 October 2022 · Reading 17 — A lecturer writing '99: use the computer' at the far end of the blackboard.

26 September 2022 · Reading 16 — Dubai's demography, where the indigenous share rivals that of aboriginal Australians.

11 September 2022 · Reading 15 — Canetti on fame: a crowd of shadows who need not even be alive, so long as they repeat the name.

5 September 2022 · Reading 14 — Canetti on the enemy always having started it, and how early children learn to justify aggression.

3 September 2022 · Reading 13 — A hundred years of the machine set against two hundred thousand years of man.

30 August 2022 · Reading 12 — The sluagh, the Highland host of the dead, fighting battles in the air on frosty nights.

27 August 2022 · Reading 11 — Aymara, in which the future lies behind the speaker and the past in front.

25 August 2022 · Reading 10 — Montaigne on not finding himself where he seeks himself, and Bloom on seeking yourself outside yourself.

18 August 2022 · Reading 9 — A collision with the divine on a country road, and Zeus pursuing Nemesis through one shape after another.

10 August 2022 · Reading 8 — Auden's catalogue of accomplishments that left the world exactly as it was.

2 August 2022 · Reading 7 — Martin Amis on a television play about a minor poet who used to notice such things.

1 August 2022 · Reading 6 — Larkin on life as solitude diversified by company rather than the other way round.

27 July 2022 · Reading 5 — Lasdun on understanding as analogy, and Thoreau on words addressed exactly to our condition.

26 July 2022 · Reading 4 — Montaigne meeting, during the civil wars, an enemy indistinguishable from himself in speech and bearing.

23 July 2022 · Reading 3 — Vikram Chandra on the barbarians who negotiate a little, then knock the walls down and pave the sacred ground.

19 July 2022 · Reading 2 — Albright on half a million dead Iraqi children, and the omelette that requires broken eggs.

18 July 2022 · Reading 1 — The age at which other people's health talk stops sounding like a snore in another room.

Fragments (2022) — 3

Numbered fragments, unattributed.

4 August 2022 · Fragments 3 — A sentence about the startled eyes of a wild bird, and Juvenal's Sixth Satire playing to its audience.

3 August 2022 · Fragments 2 — Stalin doodling wolves in the Politburo, and a man contemplating his own inexhaustible greatness.

30 July 2022 · Fragments 1 — Lightman on time as a visible dimension, and a daughter arriving at Penn Station on her nineteenth birthday.

Electric Sheep (2022–24) — 29

Early experiments with GPT-3 and then ChatGPT, kept as they came out.

17 March 2024 · Electric Sheep

15 December 2022 · Electric Sheep 50 — Neo-scholastic proofs of the existence of a Perfect Doughnut.

12 December 2022 · Electric Sheep 49 — A CIA analyst plans the overthrow of a South American government with a hundred amateur photographers and $10,000.

9 December 2022 · Electric Sheep 46 — Ethical problems in AI-generated art: copyright, bias, accessibility and the exploitation of training data.

6 December 2022 · Electric Sheep 44 — 'Dragonology, Embodiment, and the Problem of Other Minds in Sisqo's Thong Song'.

4 December 2022 · Electric Sheep 43 — 'A Classicist's Guide to Surviving in the Metaverse'.

3 December 2022 · Electric Sheep 42 — Manual handling guidance for warehouse workers, rendered in Shakespearean English.

5 October 2022 · Electric Sheep 27

24 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 21

21 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 20

20 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 19

20 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 18

20 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 17

20 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 16

15 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 15

15 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 14

15 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 13

14 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 12

14 September 2022 · Electric Sheep 11

10 August 2022 · Electric Sheep 10 — GPT-3 runs a conflict-resolution session for new shift supervisors on North Sea oil rigs.

9 August 2022 · Electric Sheep 9 — A benevolent emperor prepares his subjects for democracy using AI, genetic engineering and hypnopaedia.

6 August 2022 · Electric Sheep 8 — Reawakening Anubis in a manner consistent with physics and the Reanimation Act of 1997.

23 July 2022 · Electric Sheep 7

12 July 2022 · Electric Sheep 6

12 July 2022 · Electric Sheep 5

11 July 2022 · Electric Sheep 4

11 July 2022 · Electric Sheep 3

10 July 2022 · Electric Sheep 2

8 July 2022 · Electric Sheep

By subject

The same posts grouped by what they are about. A post can appear under more than one heading; posts with too little text to place are listed only under their kind.