Plus: repayment avoidance, the death of “hello,” and a Cinderella story for the algorithmic era
#760: Gambling the future into existence
Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"
#783: The end of spoken conversation
Plus: Pandora Radio, birthday mania and the “perimenopause industrial complex”
Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse - Ian Duncan
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
Import AI 463: Self-improving robots; a 10k Chinese GPU cluster; and an elegiac essay for the human era
What eras bookend our interregnum?
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age | The Walrus
Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines
Plus: the physicality of data, the second coming of froyo, and the rise of "dopamine sites"
Import AI 472: DeepMind's cheating math agents; populist AI policies; and Forethought theorizes a nightwatchman
Plus, a machine hermeneutics story
Deconstructing the algorithmic sublime
This special theme contextualizes, examines, and ultimately works to dispel the feelings of “sublime”—of awe and terror that overrides rational thought—that much of the contemporary public discourse on algorithms encourages. Employing critical, reflexive, and ethnographic techniques, these authors show that while algorithms can take on a multiplicity of different cultural meanings, they ultimately remain closely connected to the people who define and deploy them, and the institutions and power relations in which they are embedded. Building on a conversation we began at the Algorithms in Culture conference at U.C. Berkeley in December 2016, we collectively study algorithms as culture (Seaver, this special theme), fetish (Thomas et al.), imaginary (Christin), bureaucratic logic (Caplan and boyd), method of governance (Coletta and Kitchin; Lee; Geiger), mode of inquiry (Baumer), and mode of power (Kubler). [Box: see text]
233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper
This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.
Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy
Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer
#766: An AI company you can wear without socks
Plus: Wedding Brain, news hustlers, the importance of talking to strangers and the best restaurant bread in America
The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can't escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI
Write Games, Not Engines
Blog of Agatha Mallett: This is a mirroring of "Write Games, Not Engines" by Josh Petrie.
#790: Sorry, you’re not notable
The humanities vs. brain rot, Wikipedia demotions and ACOTAR everything.
The Same Old Fantasies Behind AI and New Technology
A review of Adam Becker, “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity” (Basic Books, 2025).
