This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.

Besides quotes it's been fun to just open up and try out random phrases/concepts in there. Feels like jotting something on scratch paper - lightweight, maybe the connections jog more thoughts, maybe not.

Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it. If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

Roland Barthes

나는 모든 일이 조금씩 늦게 도착한 세계에 살고 있다.
사람의 얼굴도, 말의 온도도, 빛의 방향도
항상 한 박자 느린 그림자로 다가온다.
정확한 순간은 아무도 보지 못한다.
우리는 모두 도착하지 않은 것의 외곽선을 더듬을 뿐이다. 때때로 나는 그 지연의 표면에 손가락을 대본다.
아무것도 잡히지 않지만,

We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

A good creative tool should let people make ugly but unexpected things, I think. Any new capability that yields only beautiful things is a subtle kind of tyranny.

Cosine lets you embed any piece of text and see its nearest neighbors. Each text is embedded only once. If you add a text someone has already added your action and any note you add are recorded along with anyone else who added that text. Is it a quote book? Is it a weird contest to see if you can get the top neighbor spots? Maybe. It is an attempt to strip things back and make embeddings the focal point of the system, rather than just a piece.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.