Tag: AI
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The Supermarket Is Playing James Taylor Again
Full disclosure: I have no ideological dog in this fight. If the machines deliver abundance, fine. The goods circulate by default and socialism arrives as a firmware update. If the weights go open source and the stack lands in common hands, also fine, that’s socialism by pull request, no tumbrils required. What I can’t manage…
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The Particularity Floor
Music got there first, so it’s tempting to read its collapse as a preview of what’s coming for writing. The instinct is sound. The mapping isn’t quite as clean as it looks, and the differences matter more than the similarities. Recorded music had real bottlenecks. Studio time cost money. Mastering required equipment and expertise most…
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The Predicate Was Already in the Subject
Immanuel Kant never left Königsberg and died in 1804, which means he never saw a railroad, a transformer, or a frontier. What he did see, with unusual precision, was the difference between knowing something and merely unpacking what you already assumed. He called this the difference between synthetic and analytic judgment. An analytic judgment is…
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The Mousetrap
The First Simulation In Hamlet, the play‑within‑the‑play—The Mousetrap—is not merely theatrical flourish. It is an early and remarkably precise form of simulation: a model constructed for the purpose of generating a controlled response from a system that cannot be directly interrogated. Hamlet’s epistemic problem is specific. The ghost’s testimony is unverifiable. Claudius will not confess.…
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The Wrong Room
This started as a Farcaster post. Halfway through writing it, I realized it didn’t really matter — not the ideas, but the channel. There’s something faintly ridiculous about posting a critique of abstraction layers onto yet another abstraction layer, as if the medium itself isn’t part of the problem. What exactly is the hoped-for outcome…
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The Cognitive Manhattan Project and Its Coming Boardroom Coup
The air in Davos smells of melting permafrost and panic-sweat. Venture capitalists whisper about AGI alignment like medieval monks debating how many angels might pirouette on a data center’s cooling fin. Meanwhile, in a windowless Virginia sub-basement, a task force plots its leveraged buyout of one of those boutique model shops out near the crumbling…
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Karaoke Singularity
Today’s “creators” often romanticize rejection as if it automatically equals innovation, drawing a flattering parallel to the Impressionists — without earning it. Consider the viral “AI artist” selling NFT glitches while citing Van Gogh’s ear as a brand ethos, or the startup founder pitching “disruption” with a crypto app that repackages 2017 blockchain tropes. These…
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Architectures of Contradiction
Let’s get one thing out of the way: the plagiarism debate is a red herring. It’s a convenient distraction, an intellectual sleight-of-hand designed to keep us arguing in circles while the real game unfolds elsewhere. Framing the conversation around whether AI “plagiarizes” is like asking if a vacuum cleaner steals the dust. It misunderstands the…
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Studio Ghibli Chat GPT
The thing with the Studio Ghibli ChatGPT images is a dead giveaway that someone can’t afford the real thing. The guys aren’t doing it because they’re cutting-edge. They’re doing it because they’re broke. Forget innovation; they’re dumpster-diving for Creative Commons scraps while the suits monetize their nostalgia. Social media forces everyone to look like…
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A New Glitch: The Googleplex Strikes Back
A Corso Savage Undercover Adventure Mountain View, California—The Googleplex, a gleaming, self-sustaining techno-bubble where the air smells faintly of kombucha and unfulfilled promises. A place where the employees, wide-eyed and overpaid, shuffle between free snack stations like domesticated cattle, oblivious to the slow rot setting in beneath their feet. I infiltrated the place with nothing…