worth reading: july 11-august 3, 2023

“Sailing Boat Rescued by the Götheborg”
- Why: tfw you're rescued at sea by an 18th-century merchant ship
“‘A certain danger lurks there’: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI” by Ben Tarnoff
- Why: “There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code.”
“What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing” by Laura Hartenberger
- Why: the subjectivity is the point!!!
“It’s Bloodsicle Time” by Maggie Kloza as told to Dan Kois
- Why: sometimes it's nice to learn about something you've literally never thought about before.
“The ‘Scammer’ and the Scammed” by Tyler Foggatt
- Why: ok this is for a niche audience of maybe just me (e.g., people with Internet brain poisoning who are also fascinated by the act of memoir-writing)