Coté

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.

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 of Nietzscheism today. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there is a venture capitalist telling himself he is the Overman because he is investing in an app that more efficiently separates sports fans from their money.

From “How I outgrew Nietzsche”

“Yes, a book about parking can be fascinating.” 2025 in Review: Reading and Writing Highlights

You can see the pattern and understand the root cause: ChatGPT can’t actually understand the rules of Lasers & Feelings (in the sense of having the words of the rulebook create a mental model that it can then use independent of the words) and, therefore, cannot truly use them. It can only generate a sophisticated pattern of babble, guessing what the next word of a transcript of Lasers & Feeling game session would look like based on the predictive patterns generated from its training data.

And:

It turns out that the GM’s primary responsibility is to create and hold a mental model of the game world in their mind’s eye, which they then describe to the players. This mental model is the canonical reality of the game, and it’s continuously updated – and redescribed by the GM – as a result of the players' actions.

From the grumpy DM.

For planning:

The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly clear. It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose. It is far easier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains. It is far easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield of furniture-grade timber. When two purposes must be served by a single facility or plan, the trade-offs become nettlesome. When several or many purposes must be considered, the variables that the planner must juggle begin to boggle the mind. Faced with such a labyrinth of possibilities, as Le Corbusier noted, “the human mind loses itself and becomes fatigued.”

Later, for organic systems:

A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level. “To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an airplane engine, the entrails of a rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are seen as systems of order, they actually look different.” At this level one could say that Jacobs was a “functionalist,” a word whose use was banned in Le Corbusier’s studio. She asked, What function does this structure serve, and how well does it serve it? The “order” of a thing is determined by the purpose it serves, not by a purely aesthetic view of its surface order.81 Le Corbusier, by contrast, seemed to have firmly believed that the most efficient forms would always have a classical clarity and order. The physical environments Le Corbusier designed and built had, as did Brasilia, an overall harmony and simplicity of form. For the most part, however, they failed in important ways as places where people would want to live and work.

From Seeing Like a State.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, North Texas edition.