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.
philosophy
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?
artificial intelligence
The Bitter Lesson Was Right. Then the Sun Got Involved.
The bitter lesson was most true in 2019. It is slightly less true today. And it will be less true still in the future. Not because scaling stopped working. But because the assumptions underneath it are quietly falling apart
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.
artificial intelligence
The Two and a Half People Who Understood
True understanding between people is rarer than we admit. Most connections are approximations. This is about what it actually takes to be seen, and why that's harder than it sounds, for humans and machines alike.
philosophy
Why Bostrom’s Simulation Argument Isn’t as Strong as It Sounds
So… Are We Really Living in a Simulation?
philosophy
Prisoners of Prestige
Columbia panicked. Brown calculated. And the rest were left negotiating from a position that Brown had already weakened. This is a textbook prisoner's dilemma. Nobody made the call.