book
What Odysseus Saw the Fourth Time
A second viewing of Nolan’s The Odyssey makes the story less certain
ethics
book
How Can Odysseus Go Home?
Odysseus spends ten years trying to get home. Nolan’s film suggests the harder journey is becoming Odysseus again, long after war, memory, guilt, and time have made the old life impossible.
culture
The Reservation That Makes the Crowd
Reservations are supposed to manage crowds. They may also manufacture scarcity, turn intention into commitment, and teach us to want the very thing they make harder to get.
artificial intelligence
The Commons Is Not A Pre-training Subsidy
AI companies have treated the mathematical record as training material, benchmark, and marketing asset. The Leiden Declaration asks a harder question: what happens when systems extract from a public order of knowledge without accepting its standards of attribution, verification, and responsibility?
book
The Fine Print of Matrimony
Marriage was never merely a romance plot. Once women could own, earn, inherit, borrow, and leave, the old bargain lost its terror.
artificial intelligence
It's Never About Tech
The room was ready. One side had briefings, water, name placards. The other side had one chair. Dario walked in alone, thinking he could correct their technical understanding.
artificial intelligence
One Post-Train to Rule Them All. Not Quite.
I gave Gemini a URL it never read, a bait it never caught, and a paper about its own failure. It responded to all three with enthusiasm. This is the live recording.
artificial intelligence
The Landlord, The Exit, and The Ghost of Houston
The champagne is already in someone's hand. They're just waiting for the pop. The only question is: whose hand is it, and are you the one holding the door?
artificial intelligence
Open CloseAI
OpenAI is this company that always puzzles me. The more we know about it, the more puzzling it would become. I am not rooting against it. I am just doing the math.
artificial intelligence
The UBI Math Doesn't Work. The Math Was Always There. Now It's Arriving.
In 2018, I wrote two articles nobody wanted to think about. Eight years later, Elon Musk and OpenAI are proposing solutions. That should worry us more than it reassures us.
ethics
Chatting With The Oracle #3: The Ring Will Be Built
The ring has always been built. It has always been destroyed. What saved us was time. The question is whether we still have any, and whether we would know if we didn't.
artificial intelligence
Chatting With The Oracle #1: There Is No Hallucination. There Is Only the Oracle.
AI agents are being deployed to make real-time decisions, but they have no reliable sense of when they are and what they utter. That's not a minor bug. It's a fundamental problem for anything we ask them to do autonomously.