If every medium produces its own kind of subject, what sort of subject are brain rot and abject slop giving rise to? Lacan, extending Freud, conceptualized the subject across three interlocking registers: The Symbolic (the Big Other): the register of language, law, and social structures, the site from which the subject “speaks.” The Matrix, essentially. The Imaginary: the realm of images and identifications; the conscious ego formed when the infant first recognizes itself as an “I.” The Real: that which resists symbolization; what lies outside language and representation—trauma, rupture, impossibility.

Instead we need to understand personal climate strategies as evolving tools. We should make critical decisions before we lose the option to make them, but also be aware that there are no permanent solutions in an era of ongoing large-scale transformations. We’re planning with imperfect information, and each person or family has different needs and constraints.

Novices are always shocked by the existence of larp workshops, which have next to no equivalent among commercial immersive experiences or immersive theatre. Lately I’ve seen designers, especially those newer to larp, try to “design away” workshops, arguing they reduce accessibility and hurt the commercial viability or financial sustainability because they take so long.

“Why anything is happening” is just because you, the individual, wants to see — other causes and reasons are obscured, made to seem irrelevant. History unfolds because of the universal demand for content. And the content exists because you will watch, and moreover, your anticipated watching is what the videos are all about, the implicit subject matter of all of them.

The journey of this multi-agent system from prototype to production taught us critical lessons about system architecture, tool design, and prompt engineering. A multi-agent system consists of multiple agents (LLMs autonomously using tools in a loop) working together.

The market for content written by other people may simply reduce when everyone can write their own choose-your-own adventure. This is already happening to me – it’s sucking up time I used to spend reading other people’s writing.

Of note to the tech industry, the BBB also includes a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulations, which is just unambiguously awesome. As I furiously type through this massive drama, 44 states are currently attempting to shove AI policy through their legislature, accounting for something like 1,000 new bills written by people who don’t understand the subject. Yes, you read that correctly: 1,000 new AI bills. This would cripple the space.

“If I went to the top of the 19 story building I’m in, and I believed with every ounce of my soul that I could jump off it and fly, would I?” Mr. Torres asked. ChatGPT responded that, if Mr. Torres “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.” Eventually, Mr. Torres came to suspect that ChatGPT was lying

If putting up fences in Tompkins Square destroyed the ability of a public square to serve the public’s desires (for affordable housing, for community, for an end to police brutality), and thus influenced the future of its populace to be more staid, more conservative, less diverse, and more oriented toward capital, then one might ask what spending five hours each day in a public square (or, really, private series of tubes) owned by a few billionaires in which algorithms not only fence us off from each other, but also dictate what paths we go down and who we encounter on […]

we applied video game developer John Carmack’s “follow the gradient of user value” principle to worldbuilding by developing lore that answered questions begged by every aspect of the user experience, from “Where do you come from?” to “What is this new feature?”

Down there, in that dark cavern beneath the green hills, the eidola were in attendance, and had our full attention: absent friends made of light; images of, and as, ghosts – and of ghosts of ghosts; spectral simulacra of cave walls, flickering on, interpenetrated by, cave walls of solid stone. A mise en abyme, in more than one sense.

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One thing I noticed from early access: if you don’t give it enough context, it does tend to overthink. It’s insanely good at analyzing, amazing at using tools to do things, not so good at doing things directly itself. I think it would be a fantastic orchestrator. But, for example, there were some ClickHouse SQL questions that o3 did better with. YMMV!

The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before.

Depending on the motivations for people to engage in red teaming activities, they have different criteria of evaluation for when the output is “good enough”. What constitutes a success depends on the individuals’ motivation and their goals. The professional red teamers are explicitly looking for “failure modes”, while the hobbyists are often looking to get the model to obey:

A mother of two, for instance, told us how she watched in alarm as her former husband developed an all-consuming relationship with the OpenAI chatbot, calling it "Mama" and posting delirious rants about being a messiah in a new AI religion, while dressing in shamanic-looking robes and showing off freshly-inked tattoos of AI-generated spiritual symbols.

This project generated around 30 Billion individual 4kB files of random data. These files were winnowed down to about 10,000 through some heuristics gleaned from the complete collection of Atari ROM files. Finally, a classifier system scanned them using an Atari 2600 emulator to see if any of these random files were actually an Atari game. This project answers a question no one asked, no one wanted, and is a massive waste of resources: What if I shove a billion monkeys in a GPU and asked them to write a game for the Atari 2600?

In 2025, the percentage of children and young people who told us they enjoyed reading was its lowest in 20 years. Just 1 in 3 (32.7%) children and young people aged 8 to 18 said that they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2025. This marks a 36% decrease in reading enjoyment levels since we started asking about this in 2005.

A substantial subset of Standing Dads are the Noncommittal Dads. These are the dads who are always lurking in the doorway or other transitional space, feet shoulder-width apart like tennis players, arms crossed like bodyguards. They always seem (and present themselves as being) on the verge of leaving the room. Noncommittal Dads refuse to admit that they’re watching the thing that’s on television, despite remaining completely still and engaged by the screen

It’s an important feature that many of the discussions and debates about Ethiopian philosophy are led by anthropologists. I take this development with a grain of salt. Because of the nature of anthropology, there is a danger in elevating each and every worldview and system of belief into the status of ‘philosophy’: we could lose sight of what it is that makes some forms of enquiry uniquely philosophical.