In a small town (village, tribe, family) everybody knows everybody's business. The anonymity of large cities is a modern kind of rarity I think. There have been large cities for millennia but for most they were groups of villages, crowded together. The ideas of individuality and privacy for all are also much more recent, I think.
What's really new here is the scale, and the boundary erasing quality of it ("You aren't in my tribe" no longer applies). I suspect the first version of this will be the DOGE datasets. So, will the bathtub belong to humanity or to a paternal government? ie: who guides it, who governs it, who gets controlled, managed and monitored by it?
This helped tie up several recent articles. Each of those were on their way to somewhere that they didn’t quite get (for me), but the blurry bits laid the groundwork for the picture that emerged here. I get the sense that what’s here is also itself one part of the picture, but my eyes can rest here where they couldn’t before.
I think this is what you intend with your reflections specifically on your relationship to AI when writing. The slop articles help you think, as one offs they may be “lesser” than your AI-free past work, but the payoff of the additional thinking shows up eventually over a longer horizon of your words.
The blurred line between half formed and fully (enough) formed ideas is smoothing the essays. That makes some harder to read than others and there is less signal to guess beforehand (the closest being the slop headers, but it’s only okay at that). It is a bit like showing your work on math homework except that there is less distinction between the work and the answers.
"Two buckets of water into a bathtub."
In a small town (village, tribe, family) everybody knows everybody's business. The anonymity of large cities is a modern kind of rarity I think. There have been large cities for millennia but for most they were groups of villages, crowded together. The ideas of individuality and privacy for all are also much more recent, I think.
What's really new here is the scale, and the boundary erasing quality of it ("You aren't in my tribe" no longer applies). I suspect the first version of this will be the DOGE datasets. So, will the bathtub belong to humanity or to a paternal government? ie: who guides it, who governs it, who gets controlled, managed and monitored by it?
This helped tie up several recent articles. Each of those were on their way to somewhere that they didn’t quite get (for me), but the blurry bits laid the groundwork for the picture that emerged here. I get the sense that what’s here is also itself one part of the picture, but my eyes can rest here where they couldn’t before.
I think this is what you intend with your reflections specifically on your relationship to AI when writing. The slop articles help you think, as one offs they may be “lesser” than your AI-free past work, but the payoff of the additional thinking shows up eventually over a longer horizon of your words.
The blurred line between half formed and fully (enough) formed ideas is smoothing the essays. That makes some harder to read than others and there is less signal to guess beforehand (the closest being the slop headers, but it’s only okay at that). It is a bit like showing your work on math homework except that there is less distinction between the work and the answers.
Have you read Octavia Butler’s Patternist books? Recommended!