LLMs
12 entries- Dec 26Essaynewest The Deep Dark Terroir of the Soul
This is the third and final part of the Thicket Series: Part 1: Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web Part 2: The Architecture of Resistance The history of the working subject might be best …
14 min - Dec 23EssayWorld Machines The Architecture of Resistance
The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive …
4 min - Dec 17EssayWorld Machines The Shelter as Epistemic Engine
This is a continuation of my ongoing exploration of places and spaces. Previously: We need homes in the delta quadrant, Thinking with places, Problems are places questions are spaces. Introduction: …
6 min - Dec 6EssayWorld Machines Four Early-Modern Tempers for a World That Can Summon Itself
This is a partial synthesis of the books read through 2025 in the Contraptions Book Club. We live in a moment when the whole of human culture has become strangely available, no longer just an archive …
8 min - Jul 28Essay Work or Play? Ludic Feedback Loops
In his substack post today, Venkatesh Rao wrote about reading and writing in the age of LLMs as playing and making toys respectively. In one part he writes about how the dopamine feedback loop from …
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