Nate Anderson (my former student!) on how Reddit is trying to force people onto its app, employing the same enshittifying strategy that Substack does. This is why I’m on micro.blog. Manton makes apps for our convenience but never tries to force us to use them.
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When Ford rolls out a new pickup truck, the CEO generally doesn’t go around giving keynote addresses about how much more lethal it will make American highways. But the AI industry is selling a narrative — a mythos, if you will — as much as it’s selling a product, and that narrative is one of revolutionary, transformational power. “Our product can make your life a bit easier, although there are still a lot of kinks to iron out” is not a trillion-dollar sales pitch; “we’ve invented something so powerful that it has the potential to destroy humanity” is. The company that can end the world controls the future, and investors will spend big on that upside bet. After all, if the world ends, an investor’s losses won’t matter anyway.
I think I’ve mentioned that every morning — every morning without exception — I wake up with a different song in my head. Never know what the internal roulette wheel will serve up, whether something from fifty years ago or from last week. Anyway, this morning I got a banger.
Illustrations by Bruno Bamanti for an edition of Caesar's Gallic Wars: 
John Ruskin, The Kapellbrücke, Lucerne (1857)
Teri had a rather complicated surgery today and all went well — thanks be to God! One bright moment: her nurse — imagine a grizzled Jerry Garcia with a thick Texas accent — said to her, “You’ve probably had a good many more drugs today than you have in a typical day. I don’t want to rush to judgment, but your tooth-to-tattoo ratio suggests that you’re not a heavy drug user.”
the productivity gains from coding agents are not evenly distributed. they’re split along a k-shape: senior engineers are getting meaningfully more productive. junior engineers are, at best, treading water. at worst, they’re getting worse.
This is exactly what we should expect. You have to be experienced (as a coder, as a researcher, as a thinker) to discern hallucinations and fakery. Only experience will make that alarm bell ring in your head. Younger and less experienced coders/scholars/writers will uncritically accept whatever their preferred chatbot offers them, and that will all too often lead them into more and more profound errors.
I don’t usually do straight book reviews on my blog, but I made an exception for Simon Armitage’s marvelous new version of Gilgamesh.
If we remove phones without rebuilding the social architecture that once gave childhood meaning, agency, and joy, we risk leaving kids with less stimulation but not more formation.
TEXAS! (by Erin Newman-Mitchell)
How AI Swarms Are Disrupting Democracy: I’m wondering whether the emergence of these swarms will finally prompt people to ask whether social media platforms are appropriate sources of information. Probably not, but I’m grasping at straws here.
Finished reading: The Dark Bible: Cultures of Interpretation in Early Modern England by Alison Knight. A fascinating book, about which I hope to write when life is less crazy. 📚
Apple calls this OS version Tahoe because Lake Tahoe is on the Nevada border and you’re basically gambling with your computing life when you use this OS.
Just got my new Mac Mini, and, since it has Tahoe installed, I had to “upgrade” my MacBook to Tahoe in order to use Migration Assistant. I now have two shockingly buggy Macs. I’m on the newest version, and can’t quite believe how little Apple has done to fix bugs that have been reported since Tahoe came out.
I have a new piece at the Dispatch on the best writer about the Second World War, A. J. Liebling. I am told that if you use the promo code JACOBS at checkout, you’ll get 15% off a Dispatch membership.
We’ve tried over Christian history, in all sorts of ways and contexts, to imitate other kinds of militancy. And my feeling about that is: well that worked, didn’t it! I want to ask: how does Christ change things? One thing I think you can be fairly sure about in the New Testament is that he doesn’t use the techniques of available power systems. ‘This is how the kings of the gentiles work.’ What we do in our militancy for the faith, that is our committed and courageous attempt to witness to what we’ve been given and make it available to others, we do by lives of holiness — which means an awful lot of hard work for the vast majority of us who are nowhere near that level and who resort to shortcuts all the time.
My endorsement of this — and of his comments on the demonic in political life — is absolute.
The funny thing about Matt Taibbi's summary of Samuel Moyn’s new book — “Old People Suck and We Should Take Their Stuff" — is that it's 100% accurate. That is precisely what Moyn argues.
Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different — distant — light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free.
Currently reading: Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock. Bullock is obviously drawing on Plutarch — and the story of how widely read Plutarch used to be versus how completely unknown he is today is a story worth telling — but he also says this in his preface: “Looking back, I cannot think of a better preparation for writing about Hitler and Stalin than the familiarity I acquired at Oxford in the 1930s with Thucydides, Tacitus, and those sections of Aristotle’s Politics that deal with the Greek experience of tyranny.” If we today had the lessons of ancient history ready to hand we could have much more productive political debates. People who know only the present — i.e. almost everybody — have no means of comparative measurement and so live by the feels. 📚
Hank Green’s timeline of Artemis mission photos is great.
I’m getting a start on my critical edition of Auden’s Nones, and reflecting that one of the chief pleasures of doing this work is the requirement that I own and consult the original Random House and Faber editions of the volumes. I’m amassing an interesting collection.
It’s the bester Bleistiftspitzer.
