the story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending. “we should be wary of the mischievous demons of our own age – that is ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence – and to renew our trust in the Noble Professions who hold the old knowledge and skills: librarians, archivists, cataloguers, and indexers.”.

The Middle Voice by Han Kang and the associated discussion, both appearing in Jan/2023 issue of The New Yorker’s. Exquisite.

The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality, by Hanno Sauer (AB). Long (-winded at times), nuanced and mostly good. The title is a misleading, the subtitle is more acccurate. Heard Sauer at Emirates Literature Festival and the talk was qually good.

LocalSend, share files to nearby devices. Free, open-source, cross-platform. Looks nice!

Folklore is philosophy, by Abigail Tulenko, a PhD student in philosophy at Harvard University. Fascinating subject. Great piece of writing too.

Le Meraviglie (The Wonders), not as strong as the others, in the loose triology by Alice Rohrwacher. 3.5/5

ToS about! – “Many companies today take advantage of their users. (…) They write long, legally binding contracts (i.e. Terms of Service, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, and more) that nobody reads. (..) We try to fight back using the very technology they use to reduce, and justify their reduction of, our rights.” Interesting concept.

Humanity’s Last Exam – “we introduce Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. (…) these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting.”

Recent interesting reads on DeepSeek - DeepSeek FAQ from Stratechery and The Short Case for Nvidia Stock by Jeffrey Emanuel.

Neil deGrasse Tyson in discussion with Laurence Fishburne on “The Science of the Matrix” and Richard Dawkins on “Science, Religion & Evolution”.