I’ve been locked out of my Baylor accounts — I changed my password and now neither the new one nor the old one works — and I’m trying to decide whether that’s a bad or a good thing.
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The fourth and last post in my series for the Dispatch on the Second World War is up.
Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape:
How much time do you think we have collectively spent, as a species, convincing robots that we are not robots? By now, we must have wasted several millennia ensuring we have clicked all the various parts of a bicycle on a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, or sliding a jigsaw puzzle precisely into a pixellated hole, or clicking a box that says “I am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system. Listen, if we ever want to pretend to be robots, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by covering ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair.
The corrected and slightly improved paperback version of my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles is now available. I really do think it’s his masterpiece and highly recommend it to you. Back when the first edition came out I wrote a brief essay on it for the PUP website.
If you only listen to one Dolly song in memoriam, make it this one.
If there is not a National Day of Mourning for Dolly Parton, we will have failed as a country. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
Merlin’s Cave (1735)
Amy X. Wang on using Wispr Flow (as dictated to Wispr Flow):
We’ve been talking a lot about the so-called end of literacy, but the real problem isn’t that people don’t read — it’s that they do read and spend all day ferociously consuming words, but those words aren’t really...
Paul McCartney, early-to-mid 1980s:
One thing I’ll never forget at EMI was the “pop”/ “classical” switch on the right-hand-side of the console! And the control knobs were great big RAF things, that was the state of the technology then. We used to like them though, and...
An even-better-than-usual essay by the invaluable J. B. Crawford:
[Brigadier Martin Hotine’s] greatest memorial is an artifact of his work: squat concrete pillars surmounted by a triangular brass plate. Found atop mountains and hills throughout the United Kingdom, these "tr...
Ezra Klein:
This is, I guess, the point in the column where I should call for everyone to abandon X. I have not posted regularly there in years, and I’d urge others to limit their use as well. Nor have I taken up BlueSky or Threads. I find that much time spent on any of the...
Mark Helprin to the technocrats in 1996:
The revolution that you have made is indeed wonderful, powerful, and great, and it has hardly begun. But you have not brought to it the discipline, the anticipation, or the clarity of vision that it, like any vast augmentation in the...
Indie Web Is Punk — I am putting a link to this manifesto on all my sites, trying to spread the good news: You don’t have to live on the big platforms, suffering their relentless enshittification. You have a better option.
I think Radiohead are a brilliant band, but I can’t listen to most of their music for more than two or three minutes at a time without having to turn it off because it is painful to me to listen to. Their records are engineered in ways (especially the extreme compression) that I can’t physically handle. I have been frustrated by this for decades, and keep going back to their music to see if my response has changed, but so far: Nope.
My colleagues Davide and Colleen Zori keep discovering intact Etruscan chamber tombs. Remarkable.
Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667):
It is true, [the dead in Christ] envy not, and they lie in a bosom where there can be no murmur; and they that are consigned to Kingdoms, and to the feast of the marriage-supper of the Lamb, the glorious and eternal Bridegroom of holy Souls, they ...
Mail time! — two forthcoming books. The paperback edition of The Shield of Achilles has (thanks to my learned friends Tim Larsen and Adam Roberts) a few important corrections — you should therefore buy it in preference to the hardcover, even though it’s not as beautiful. (Still pretty nice, though. Also, you could always buy both.) And I was honored to write a foreword for Bonnie’s fine book.
Fragment of wallpaper, unknown maker, about 1820, England. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
A sample of the work of the great watchmaker George Daniels (1926-2011). I never travel to London without visiting the Clockmaker’s Museum, though I sort of miss its old rather obscure location at Guildhall.
Now that I live in central Texas, when I return to my native Alabama I am always thinking: Dang, the trees here are tall.
WSJ:
AI is trained in part on what people like, and people prefer the brown-nosing, says Myra Cheng, a computer-science Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University and lead author of a March study on agreeable AI. Participants rated sycophantic AI responses significantly higher in quality and, after interacting with a more obsequious model, said they were more likely to return to the AI.
This bodes ill.
The home of The Victorian Society was well chosen.
In 1968, [Kołakowski] was fired from Warsaw University for “forming the views of the youth in a manner contrary to the official tendency of the country,” banned from teaching and publishing entirely, and placed under constant police surveillance.
As I come to the end of my teaching career, I am bitterly disappointed in myself: I have never been formally charged with “forming the views of the youth in a manner contrary to the official tendency of the country.”
Angus taking a break from playing in the garden hose, which is his favorite thing to do that does not involve eating.
For my Buy Me a Coffee supporters I wrote a report from Mission Control.
How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!”
Via Ian Leslie, a beautifully designed page on ordinary abundance.