John Gallagher: States struggled to work out their role in these rapidly changing systems. Private mail presented different problems: should couriers working for state-funded postal services be allowed to carry post on behalf of paying customers? For the states that underwr...

On learning a lesson from ST:TNG.

I wonder how many U.S. court cases have already been decided by judges using chatbots to write their opinions in response to lawyers on both sides who used chatbots to write their briefs.

Robin Sloan:

It’s inter­esting and useful to imagine — really visualize — the chat­bots and agents in ten years or twenty … barnacled with gunk … locked in a per­ma­nent cat-and-mouse game with their adversaries … just as a plat­form like Google is today. In 2036, you send your AI agent out into the internet, and it returns battered, bedraggled, inex­plic­ably enthu­si­astic about a bar­gain flight to Bermuda.

Symmetries in Homer.

Lord Dunsany, from The King of Elfland’s Daughter:

There passed ten years over the fields we know; and Orion grew and learned the art of Oth, and had the cunning of Threl, and knew the woods and the slopes and vales of the downs, as many another boy knows how to multiply figures by other figures or to draw the thoughts from a language not his own and to set them down again in words of his own tongue. And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’s thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.

My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey: If there’s anything that could shake the confidence of the conservative warrior, it might be to consider what he’s sacrificing. I would put the question this way: what have you given up in fighting your political battles, in making y...