Excellent piece. The choice of words used to describe events has a significant and lasting impact on how those events are viewed. Deciding to use - or not use - certain words in the context of partner violence sounds like a small thing, but it's a powerful idea that could help reframe such impacts.
What a great story with a marvelous and happy conclusion!
The Empire in "Andor" had better damned procedures in place when Ulaf died on the prison planet. This is nauseatingly bleak and inhuman.
100 percent - love it!
Additional "awesome" points for correcting "furthest" to "farthest" - love that you self-edit your delivery for grammatical correctness!
This is such a good read. I've already read it a couple of times, and it's worth revisiting regularly.
This is such a good read. I've already read it a couple of times, and it's worth revisiting regularly.
Beat me to it!
I've also encouraged her not to get her news from places like Instagram. I think her reliance on that took a hit after she saw a recipe that looked great but turned out to be - most likely - AI-generated slop. She made it and was deeply disappointed in the results.
I regularly fact-check any news my Mom tells me about, and will send her links to reliable sources when it's mis/disinformation.
"That floor is gone. Quality is a relic now. Nobody wants it. Nobody pays for it. Nobody measures it. The metric is velocity. The metric is percentage of code generated. The metric is how fast you can ship a 3,167-line function that burns a quarter million API calls daily & call it 100% AI-written."
"My grandfather was an electrical engineer. He told me: do it well, or don’t do it at all. Simple rule. It guided how I built teams, how I shipped software, how I evaluated every project for 13 years. Quality wasn’t a feature. It was the floor." With Claude Code, the floor doesn't even exist.
Excellent! So pleased to discover I'd already been following all but two of these. That's now been rectified. 😊
Sometimes a thought you love pops into your head and you scramble to open a blank email or your notes app or even grab a piece of paper to jot it down before it flies away. These moments of inspiration aren’t just a result of fishing in your pool of existing knowledge; they include a little bit of magic. A sprinkle of the unidentifiable zest that makes your writing something that only you—not the ‘you’ processed and interpreted by a machine—could create. Your words are a product of a specific moment in time, and that’s what makes them distinct. (I originally used the word “special” and then I changed it to “unique,” ultimately landing on “distinct” because it felt right. That’s the process.)
This part too. The idea of using so-called "AI" for brainstorming is unthinkable to me because a shortage of ideas is never a problem. It's the effort and time required to bring an idea to life - to review and revise until you've found just the right phrasing - that makes a written work meaningful.
Excellent! These sentences in particular really resonated with me: "The process is the purpose. You don’t have to always like or enjoy the process, but if you don’t respect it enough to do it yourself, there is no purpose. "
The failures are the curriculum. The error messages are the syllabus. Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work. There is no shortcut through that process that doesn't leave you diminished on the other side.
Love this:
The real monster is not the homunculus, but the one who gave form to the assemblage and imbued it with life. The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology. If generative models are monstrous—and I remain convinced they are—its masters are the enemy of those who wish to end their march.
And this:
There's a fundamental problem with these tools beyond the capacity of any deployment strategy to solve: the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? There are no shortcuts; there is only continuous hard work and dedication. I was once told of writing, great writers learn how to break the rules in new and ingenious ways by first learning the rules.
This was such a deep, well-reasoned, and HUMAN read - thank you! So many great observations like this one.
Great piece, and much needed. I have gone back to that Hofstadter work so many times over the years - an evergreen reference.
The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war. The algebra of the war makers will have been flawless. But what they cannot read, they will not have reckoned with.
"Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war."
Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.
And this:
What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.
So many good passages in this piece:
For me, it's Kamarinskaya as the credits roll at the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel.
My approach is like the character Michael Bolton in the movie Office Space. When a co-worker suggested going by the name Mike instead of Michael to avoid the endless ribbing about sharing a name with a certain singer, he said, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.” AI is the one that sucks.
It's gorgeous!
And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing? And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.
Such a clearly laid-out and thorough assessment of this war. As you note, it's hard to see how this ends with upsides for anyone. So dumb.
What an excellent read.
Modern strategic thinking struggles precisely at this point. It is highly effective at measuring what can be quantified: economic decline, protest frequency, military capability, political rhetoric. But it struggles to account for what cannot be easily measured—the accumulated weight of collective experience, the cultural and historical frameworks through which societies interpret events, and the ways in which populations respond not mechanically, but adaptively, to external pressure.
Excellent piece. This comment applies to many things in life today (I'm thinking in particular of the tech bros): the focus on "metrics" ignores a world of meaning that can't be measured.
💯
"People are still making decisions in that sense. Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces a thousand targeting decisions per hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an “AI problem” gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide."
Excellent piece. Thoroughly sums up how and why we've arrived at this point.