Tag: Books
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The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s…
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From ChatGPT based on “Pyramid of Capitalist System,” Nedeljkovich, Brashich, & Kuharich, Industrial Workers of the World, 1911. Of course, for America at least, what you’d like to visualize is that every layer actually plays a part on “shareholder,” just a small part. Maybe there’s some stock certificates and cash that trickle down in pneumatic…
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The coming AI backlash: capital is not here to make friends
[O]ur fears of what AI will do to us are really just our fears of what capitalism is already doing. And: the threat isn’t so much that AI is inevitable as that the ongoing—and likely expanding—immiseration of workers is unstoppable. This is the subtext of the strange and conflicted messaging that we get from the…
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If you’re wondering how cold fusion produces pollution, let alone a lot of it, don’t worry, this is explained in a chapter by one teenaged prodigy tennis player to another, wherein the latter is wearing a blindfold to improve his other senses but can’t find a bathroom, so he asks the other player for help,…
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Best review of The Sound and The Fury, in Mad Men, s2e11: “Sex is good. This book is just OK.”
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Relative to your interests, Saturday morning
The Draw Boy – Remove a bottleneck (usually humans), and supply can meet demand. New demand is created, people but more, new things are invented, people but those. New roles are often created to handle the new businesses. It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines –…
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For a long time I foolishly scorned George Orwell. I think the prejudice is common among people of my generation (well among people of my generation who care about such things). Orwell is viewed as a fetish of boomer columnists – the types of people who sit in their houses in Hampstead being paid six…
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Relevant to your interests, Monday
The Revenge of QA: How AI Code Generation Is Exposing Decades of Process Debt – “AI isn’t revealing new problems – it’s exposing decades of process debt we’ve been carrying all along.” / One bottleneck after another… Morally judging famous and semi-famous people – “spending real time and energy morally judging famous and semi-famous people…
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I suppose it can be said that I’m an absent-minded driver. It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it. Glenn Gould
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“cradle-to-crematorium biography” The best non-fiction to read this year
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Keep the thesis in mind. ‘Writers must […] constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it?’ 🔗 Notes from “On Writing Well”
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Books added to the To Read List: The Savage Sword of Conan (2024-) #1, The Making of Prince of Persia, The English and Their History, The New Diary: How to use a journal for self-guidance and expanded creativity, The Land Trap.
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Books: Stubborn Attachments
Stubborn Attachments is a weird book. Perhaps because it was published in 2018 it has an out of time agenda that no longer seems to need arguing for. The book obsesses over a “we can all agree on cheese” argument: it’s desirable to be more prosperous in the future than today. We can all agree…
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I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch? And: We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls…
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“Yes, a book about parking can be fascinating.” 2025 in Review: Reading and Writing Highlights
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Another writer said he “was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m.” From Rebels of Reason
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“It’s a birth scene, not a boss scene.” ChatGPT 5.2 analyzes The Spider-God’s Bride.
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”Betty’s boyfriend-to-be is a dog-chef called Bimbo, who serenades her on a duck that transforms into a guitar, while the restaurant clientele and staff include a fantastical menagerie of animals.” It was a different time.
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