Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr (AB). A slow-paced take on the beauty of Rome. Beautiful meandering words. 3.5/5

Quincy, Netflix. Amazing initimate documentary of a legand. 4/5

“Humility, curiosity”, Nick Cave’s answer to “I find it pointless to pursue anything in this bizarre and temporary world that is so much against my values in every way possible.”

Why Read?, enlightening lecture by Eva Brann, 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir, by Margo Jefferson (AB). Abandoned. I tried, really did, but just could not relate enough nor get hooked into this one. -/5

“This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.” – Isaac Asimov on The Last Question

Jon Fosse’s Search for Peace, “The Norwegian author has spent decades producing a strange, revered body of work. But he still doesn’t know where the writing comes from.”

Three-Body Problem, Chinese TV adptation of the book with English subtitles.

Jonathan Rée on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, great conversation.

LavaRand in Production, details of the Cloudflare lava lamps that help with Internet encryption.

Prajapati - Tim Parks hugs the original. The English translator of Roberto Calasso’s “Ka” writes on the experience of translating this monumental work.

Some summer reads:

Sharvay by Mansi – 3.5/5. Interesting premise. Drags at several places. Writing and plot development are far from best but not too bad either.

The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism by A. L. Basham – 4/5. Compact summary of the author’s thoughts on his matter as a distillation of his other works. Not a review/comparison of other theories on this subject.

A Certain Ambiguity by Gaurav Suri, Hartosh Singh Bal – 4/5. The introduction to some of the concepts in mathematics is beautifully executed in the context of a ‘novel’, making up for most of the shortcomings in terms of story development and the idotic premise that Stanford undergrads not knowing some of the concepts being discussed.

No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 5/5. “We are the orhpans of our son.” Beautiful. One of the best last lines of any book I have read as well :)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 5/5. Relished every sentence and page of this book. “Fatality makes you invisible.”

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi – 5/5. Edgy, candid, enlightening.

Opens Wins, RSS and openess.

The Lessons of History by W & A Durrant. “Western History” would be a more apt title. Good distillation, some parts have not aged well but overall a lot of food for thought. 4/5.

Is it wrong to store passwords and one-time codes together? I really do not understand why 1Password wants to push for this. I don’t think people buy 1Password for the 2FA support. Downgrading 2FA to 2SV is just not worth the “convenience”. The “fairly negligible amount of security” that may be “sacrificed” is not that negligible.

Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing. When you hear from the editor of the likes of Rushdie, Gardner, Bradbury, Naipaul, Lessing, Carre, Morrison etc., you shut up and read with bliss even if it is tangential to your area of interest.

School is not enough. Argues for vocational training and projects – “modern education endlessly ushers them towards an often farther and more abstract future—one so far away and abstract that some children become infected with the opposite of agency”.

The Red Hand Files from Nick Cave. “Something curious is happening on the world wide web. Intimacy. And not of the more sordid kind with which you might commonly associate it.” (source). A treasure trove.

See this page fetch itself, byte by byte, over TLS, pretty cool and well explained.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - 5/5. “mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future.”

Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. “Copyright is a hot-button topic these days. Does information want to be free…or just reasonably priced? I discussed copyright at some length 25 years ago—a year before the first TCP/IP wide area network in the world went operational—two years before the first Macintosh went on sale!—in the following story. It won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.” Interesting short story and to think this was written so long ago and still relevant.

Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love by Salman Rushdie. “Many of Aesop’s little morality tales about the victory of dogged slowness (the tortoise) over arrogant speed (the hare), or the foolishness of crying “wolf ” when there is no wolf, or of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, seem positively soppy when compared to this Quentin Tarantino-like savagery. So much for the cliché of the peaceful, mystical East.”

Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die, by Carig Mod. Reading, books, contracts, attention monsters. Nice framing.

Stoicism As Symptom – “Stoicism is a symptom of a malaise, a problem in the modern world, rather than any kind of solution to its ills. (…) to opt out is a self indulgence the world cannot afford.” Some interesting discussionsions in the comments as well.

The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning and review of America Against America. Very interesting read on the work of “arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today”.

The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time by Richard Fisher. 4/5 Very interesting ideas, fluent read. A much needed book in this “time-blinkered” world.

ArchiveBox, a new find that looks promising – “powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view sites you want to preserve offline”.

We Have No Moat, And neither does OpenAI – A Google insider’s view on the rise of open source AI models and tools triggered by the leak of Meta’s LLaMA.

Never Split the Difference, (Audiobook) - 4/5. Piqued a bit by the overuse of the “blackswan” terminology towards the end but overall an interesting and practical discourse on the art of negotiation.

Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence. A study of long sentences. Beautiful.

Moloch: The Most Dangerous Idea, “Moloch is a strong candidate for the most dangerous idea. If we’re alone in this universe, it’s likely because of Moloch.”

The Fire That Never Goes Out, interesting article on the millennia-old Zoroastrian fire and the oft-neglected act of long-minded maintenance.

Algorithmic Black Swans – “Organizations building AI systems do not bear the costs of diffuse societal harms and have limited incentive to install adequate safeguards. Meanwhile, regulatory proposals such as the White House AI Bill of Rights and the European Union AI Act primarily target the immediate risks from AI, rather than broader, longer-term risks. To fill this governance gap, this Article offers a roadmap for “algorithmic preparedness””

More on AI and algorithms: Resisting Deterministic Thinking by danah byod, Will AI Obliterate the Rule of Law by Matthew Butterick, AI: Practical Advice for the Worried by Zvi.

The long-overdue-hence-long issue

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web – now, that I agree with.

“Computers enable fantasies” – On the continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings. An interesting read on the work of an individual who is even more relevant in the day and age of “dazzle” of AI.

Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together and a page of impressive things accomplished by small teams.

Do large language models understand us? Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Google’s AI group lead in Seattle) on what is means for language models to understand what they claim to be answering.

The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, long exhaustive profile in New Yorker and another good one is Quillette’s Words Are The Only Victors.