Small-town Germany blessed us with a gorgeous double rainbow on arrival yesterday.

This whole thread is fascinating and might well change my priors.

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈@maxdubler.com · 3d ago

I think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.

Rapidly becoming my least favorite city to transit through, but the train station is beautiful.

Claude Code built something for me that I've wanted for a while. Introducing SourceMaster3000, for rough-reading sources in a language you're not so great at. If you use this to produce a "finished" scholarly translation, you deserve what's coming to you!

Our flight to Germany is canceled and we’re sitting around until tomorrow afternoon. Luckily no Finland days impacted, but less time with family in Germany.

Chris@multiplicityct.bsky.social · 4d ago

Counting down the hours until we get on a plane to our favorite place.

Counting down the hours until we get on a plane to our favorite place.

Moomintroll Character from Moomin

ALT: Moomintroll Character from Moomin

static.klipy.com

This is fascinating. Although spending hours a day talking to Claude Code warps my brain even when I'm typing every letter or speaking. It is so hard to avoid the phrase "load bearing" now. It just comes up unbidden.

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 5d ago

Fantastic paper demonstrating how LLM editing is gradually distorting our writing and the way we think to write: arxiv.org/abs/2603.18161

This describes such a broad range of philosophy of action and even philosophy of mind that you’d never guess what Noam is describing without following today’s Discourse.

noam@noamchompers.bsky.social · 6d ago

but i do find those moves to be ad hoc redescriptions to save a thesis, and it's more plausible to just take the phenomenon at face value and give up the intentionalist thesis

This resonates. I’m having a harder & harder time communicating and sharing what AI models can do with people who haven’t spent 2025-26 trial and erroring their way to new skills. It looks increasingly inaccessible to advanced chatbot users who aren’t bleeding edge enthusiasts.

The RSA has a beautiful piece in this quarter's journal about the Uffington White Horse, a work of art that exists only because centuries of unnamed, uncredited artists maintain and change the artwork year-by-year. I love this way of thinking about creativity.

Drawn together

Christopher Daniel, FRSA reflects on the annual chalking of the Uffington White Horse, a 3,000-year-old land artwork whose survival depends on repeated communal care. Joining volunteers from Long Now ...

thersa.org

I just cited The Sopranos in my dissertation, and I have Paul Faulkner to thank for it. I don't know why the rest of you aren't philosophers of trust, it's awesome.

I should lose my Midwesterner card for the ambrosia I made last night. I made my own whipped cream instead of using Cool Whip, which feels not in the spirit of the thing. Plus fresh pineapples instead of canned.

I am basically a continental philosopher, and yet I chose to interact heavily with an analytic philosophy subfield for my dissertation. If I have to type $\phi$ into my notes one more time, I may lose it. (I still love you, analytic philosophers of trust. Stop it with the $\phi$-ing, though.)

I'm still thinking about this and how now "cognitive surrender" is getting laundered properly into the discourse. I have done a couple of deception methods experiments in my day and showing that you can make people incorrect in the lab is simply not a basis for saying they're unable to think now

Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · 2w ago

I think this is the paper? it's a preprint osf.io/preprints/ps... The questions are media trivia questions, which aren't exactly judgment questions. Presenting "AI" that's forced to be incorrect basically just tests whether participants trust it to be a lookup tool which I think they do

“The greatest arrogance was the stealing of the sun. The second-greatest arrogance is running rivers backward. The third-greatest arrogance is trying to hold the Mississippi in place" vs "Flood control on the Mississippi is load-bearing" Full piece here: www.newyorker.com/magazine/198...

Atchafalaya

John McPhee on the struggle to control the Mississippi River.

newyorker.com

This is a very good essay. If doing philosophy doesn't implicate an actual philosopher/reader and challenge them, what are we doing. Heidegger wrote similar critiques of AI-less philosophy practice in the 1920s, though. Worth asking how often *university* philosophy w/ its incentives achieves this.

Lily Hu · Un-Doing Philosophy

Analytic philosophers in the United States are increasingly embracing AI, both by taking advisory positions at tech companies and by using large language models for their own research and writing. Som...

blnreview.de

Guess I'm rooting for England all the way now.

Three crows at our pool have identified two kids who are in the pool. The crows are currently stealing all their pizza. The kids ran them off once, then made the mistake of getting back in the pool. The birds are back. Quote of the night: “They stole a whole piece of pizza, bro!” (For a start.)

I'm trying to get my running Claude Code instance to check whether the repo is clean so I can have GPT-5.6 take a run at it. And Anthropic was limiting requests to Claude. Clever.

I think this is better than when she told her teacher, “I deserve points back because my dad is a philosopher, and he says writing IS a technology.” Not sure why I think that.

Barbara Montero is always good, but when she writes satire -- yikes. This is razor-sharp. She's even friendly to the idea that artificial agents could be conscious, someday. But the claims in the recent Anthropic reports bend that word all out of shape. And rest on the methods lampooned here.

No, Humans Are Not Conscious - The Philosophers' Magazine

Barbara Montero satirizes recent arguments that LLMs are not conscious.

philosophersmag.com

Ow, this hit hard.

austin (e/accordion 🪗)@thebadcode.com · last mo.

i understand why everyone is doing it, but creating your own persistent agent right now feels like those maniacs who got their hands on x-rays in the 30s and started pointing that shit at everything just to see what would happen

This is surprisingly fun. I am easily amused. Those sentences may be related.

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · last mo.

Fable: "you need to build a game that is coherent, fun and story driven. There are precisely two controls. A slider, one side is labelled Maximum Potato and the other is Formalware, there are four positions. The other is a dial that goes from Monet to Drive-Thru" a-potatos-evening.netlify.app

Me watching the USMNT, every time:

Cant See Hiding

ALT: Cant See Hiding

static.klipy.com

Every time I listen to "Jolene" (the album), I get surprised by Dolly's "I Will Always Love You." Without taking anything away from Whitney, this is one where the songwriter has the edge. Top 10 song ever.

"Consciousness" is a stupid word, but the human version of it -- what we mean when we say "I am conscious" -- seems to *require* stakes and commitments that cannot be paused or thrown overboard. A bag of bits that comes together in an instant, does work, and disappears again cannot be conscious.