Finished reading: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 📚
Finished reading: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker 📚
Finished reading: Low Anthropology by David Zahl 📚
Finished reading: Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf 📚
Finished reading: America’s Theologian by Robert W. Jenson 📚
Finished reading: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders 📚
Finished reading: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne 📚
Finished reading: The Humans by Matt Haig 📚
Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 📚
Finished reading: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It’s a big book with diverse parts so I have big and diverse feelings about it. 📚
Finished reading: Saving Time by Jenny Odell 📚
Perhaps [‘the history of anarchism, almost alone among modern social movements, is one of unrelieved failure.’]; but its failures are different and less shameful than the failures of Marxism. There are many ways for a social movement to fail, and I prefer those that don’t result in the murder of tens of millions of human beings.
Maybe a good question for leaders of any social movement: how will you fail? Failure is guaranteed but not all failure is equal.
A great test for Large Language Model AI’s would be to remove some artist’s specific work and see if it could be anticipated based on the remaining work. I don’t think the nature of super large datasets would ever allow this, though.
Finished reading: Across the Everglades by Hugh Laussat Willoughby 📚
Finished reading: I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven 📚
The First Battleground of the Age of AI Is Art
Kottke says:
Like, just think about how powerful this is: normal people who have ideas but lack technical skills can now create imagery. Is it art? Perhaps not in most cases, but some of it will be.
My definition of art is “craft + courage.” I think it’s pretty clear that typing a prompt into a text box to make art isn’t an act of courage. So for now I’ll say that generating images using AI – especially in honing the prompts – is craft but not art.
Finished reading: The 2 Oz. Backpacker by Robert S. Wood 📚
Finished reading: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚
Finished reading: The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry 📚
Fences
Pirkei Avot 1:1 & English Explanation of Pirkei Avot 1:1:1 from the Talmud
Making a fence around the Torah is another principle of supreme importance in Judaism. There are many laws that are not strictly obligatory upon a person from the Torah, but rather were instituted by the Rabbis to prevent a Jew from transgressing a Torah law. An example is the use of money on Shabbat. The Torah itself does not prohibit using money on Shabbat. However, the Rabbis said one should not do so, lest one write, which is prohibited by the Torah (at least the midrashic understanding of the Torah).Prior to legalism, with which my theological background is very concerned, there is a purpose for rules – to keep us out of trouble. I like the image of the fence one puts up to keep others from coming into harm. Here, the Talmud means the ‘lesser laws’ which keep one from encroaching on the Torah commandments. But really, aren’t all the rules a fence? They try to keep us from coming into harm. Just because we are bound to fixate on the fence and abuse it doesn’t mean it wasn’t put up with gentle kindness in mind. Even when we are impaled on it.