Used to have my email address on my home page, now links to this. I get *so much* slop cold email, and I think a lot of it is someone telling an agent "send personalized emails about my project to 100 relevant people". I'm curious whether this will change the volume.

Made a Printer Friend which quickly transcribes speech onto little slips of paper. Nice for card sorts, quickly capturing open loops, discursive notes in books, etc. The speed of thermal printers and their auto-cutters is so satisfying! And dedicated mechanical key! Mm!

Thanks to @left_pad and Robert Ochshorn for thermal printer inspo!

I want weirder representations of "readings"—the trace/artifact produced by a reader's interaction with text(s). Here playing with a cut-up "poster-ification". Cumbersome, in many ways, but interesting. Marginalia feel too subordinate to the text's structure. A separate precis feels too decontextualized. I want to see the whole, somehow, without leaving the parts behind. And a material I can work with over time, as my interpretation evolves. And, as this paper notes, ideally it can somehow represent my aesthetic experience.

U Chicago offers a great four-year program studying the "Great Books of the Western World". Meets weekly online for 3hr discussion-based seminars with some wonderful facilitators and ~12 peers. Registration open for a few more weeks: graham.uchicago.edu/program/… I recently completed the program. Some reflections: I can't tell you exactly why I signed up for this program. It sounded like a chance for ongoing encounters with beauty, I suppose. But also, some deep-down part of me harbored this delusion: "There are so many great classics I haven't read! So many great ideas I understand only shallowly. I can just sign up for this one program, and I'll end up checking so many metaphorical boxes!" In hindsight, I think I related to this mountain of books like a naive American tourist visiting Europe for the first time. I'll book a whirlwind guided tour to "check off" all the must-see sites! Then, in some sense, I'll be done with them! That frame is obviously idiotic, both emotionally and practically. After about a thousand hours of reading and discussion, I don't feel I've truly understood or mostly metabolized almost any of these books. Rather, I got something like that naive tourist would: initial familiarity and connection with a wide range of cultural touchstones. The list of authors and works, once an abstract index, is now vivid and personal. Once I'd visited the Sagrada Familia, the idea of "checking it off" some kind of touristic bucket list became absurd. Instead, now that I'm introduced, I want to return again and again, noticing more and deepening my connection to it. Having finished my whirlwind tour, I now know where I'd like to return and linger on future trips. (Lucretius, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche...) Programs like this call themselves "Great Books" programs, but I they're really more like "Great Ideas" programs. The selections and juxtapositions are designed to trace certain lines of Western thought: who should rule and how, the role of individuals in society, the shifting basis of morality, the meanings of virtue, knowledge, and justice, etc etc. I just loved following these arcs. They situate the texts in a web of humanity: rather than a grab-bag of independent texts, the selection was a series of unfolding conversations spread across centuries and continents. I found it plainly thrilling, for instance, to follow the beginnings of liberalism from abstract philosophical treatises up to the bloody stakes of the Declaration of Independence. Part of the thrill is: individuals made these things! You can read their words. You can bear witness, centuries hence, to the birth of Plato's Forms, or deontology, or the novel as a literary form. Yes, I'm willing to give due credit to their intellectual contexts, and to hang appropriate asterisks on "Great Man" interpretations of history. But still—just imagine being Darwin, writing that book. I get very inspired in my design work thinking about Mendeleev and Playfair and Viete, individual humans who created new representations of thought for science and mathematics. This pile of books helped me appreciate the miracle of individual human invention behind so much in Western thought. (photo from a classmate—alas, I mostly read digitally, which in hindsight deprived me of the physicality of this memory)

We might become grey goo, but before that, what about our spirits? "The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception… a world without heroes or glory… without myths, without men who rise above the rest…" That quote is from a Marco Rubio speech about communism, but as @GregoryConti19 points out, it may be more immediately pertinent to AI. compactmag.com/article/big-t… I find the language in this essay quite moving, both as it celebrates the spirit of human excellence and worries for its undoing: " [A] world in which there is no opportunity for individuals to distinguish themselves via skill and effort, because these things will have been rendered irrelevant … A world of boredom, idleness and mere consumption awaits us, for it is the machines that will henceforth solve all the problems we face." "The channels for the human mind to swim in will dry up, one-by-one… The opportunities for a man to feel the satisfaction of a "job well done" will disappear. … The awe that we feel in reflecting on an Einstein or a Dostoevsky, we will feel toward no one again… The whole concept of a "life's work" that belongs to a great progenitor of ideas is under threat." "Who cares if AI…generates reams of new historical writing but in doing so saps our ability to cherish and devote ourselves to history?" "Human beings weren't made to only have hobbies. We need, even more, to have vocations. The nature of the latter is that the pleasure comes not merely from the doing itself but from the idea that one is making a real contribution—in theological language, that God called you to it because your work there was necessary. But as soon as the machines can do what we do better than we ourselves can, the conditions for our having a vocation cease to exist. Instead, we will have only play, mere amusement" I don't draw conclusions quite so strong as Gregory's. I think he's right that many of these channels will be destroyed, and that this is a deep harm that AI advocates are not adequately considering. I think we'll now have the forced obligation (and, through new capacities, the opportunity) to create new channels for excellence—and that we'll succeed, though I'm not sure to what degree. And we've already retired some scholarly feats which would have once seemed inspiring and central, like accurately memorizing long texts, or rapid mental arithmetic. I don't think that machines which solve all our material problems would necessarily rob us entirely of "all that is good and noble". I like @Meaningness's definition of nobility as "the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others". There are lots of opportunities to do that in, say, the relational sphere, though as @clarabcollier has recently highlighted, that might feel awfully hollow if it's all we have. I'm unsure, too, about the boundary between hobbies and vocations. I generally think of design and research as my vocation, and a world where my ingenuity can contribute nothing there does seem dimmer. But I also spend a lot of time on my music hobbies. I'm not extraordinary by any means—many others have played anything I'm playing better. But when I play with others, it does feel like I'm "making a real contribution", to that moment together. Maybe the kinds of contributions I make will become mostly like that—situated, particular. If my life were nothing but that kind of contribution, it would be less rich, but not quite, I think, "small, flat, grey", etc. Meanwhile, in many ways, I expect life to become much more vivid. I already experience this in small ways: I have an idea for a prototype, and coding agents can help me explore the possibility space with much less meaningless grind; I understand more of what I'm looking at when I'm traveling; I'm able to spot more interesting connections across my journals over time. With the last few paragraphs, I'm qualifying Gregory's claims a bit, but that doesn't mean I think the situation is okay, at all. Leaving beside all globe-striding concerns about bio-risk, x-risk, etc, these are deep problems that are being imposed on me, and you, by others, without democratic participation. I think this is immoral, but I'm confused about that assessment, because of course I am myself a technologist—isn't my whole telos to create transformative change? Where's the line? Or, maybe more importantly, what's the acceptable rate of change of the line? And who gets to decide?