Quotulatiousness

June 22, 2026

Authenticity … if you can fake that, you’ve got it made

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apologies to Ted Gioia for the flippant heading on this item. While I may be going for a cheap laugh, he certainly isn’t doing that in this essay on how to discover authenticity in music in an age of AI slop:

“Authenticity required: password?” by liako is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down on to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

I say this in full awareness of the contentiousness and backlash arising from almost any assertion of authenticity, especially in the arts — but in other spheres of life as well. There’s been so much debunking of authenticity in recent years that it’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to use it as a term of praise. Sometimes words in the critic’s lexicon become tainted, defeating the very purpose for which they are applied. The situation is so dire that I might even claim that we are facing an “authenticity crisis” in the arts — especially now with the rapid rise of AI. But even making that statement would spur a meta-backlash against the implicit assumption that there’s any legitimate concern over such a debased concept. After all, why defend authenticity if it doesn’t really exist?

In this regard, authenticity is coming to resemble its kindred word “sincerity”, which now implies the exact opposite of its dictionary definition. As Lionel Trilling points out, in his magisterial Harvard lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, the term “has an effect that negates its literal intention — ‘I sincerely believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe’; in the subscription of a letter, ‘Yours sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of ‘Yours’.” [Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

June 14, 2026

The “Dissolution of the Universities” draws ever closer

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Steve McGuire reacts to more news about the conscious dumbing-down of modern university programs:

A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.

Another “said the earliest version of the … course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts”.

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught”, the first one said.

To which John Carter responds:

The academic death spiral is something to behold.

Demographics are steadily reducing the size of the student body, squeezing finances and driving bankruptcies.

At the same time, standards collapse is destroying the quality of the students the universities admit.

We’re already at the point where it’s common knowledge that a degree signals essentially nothing about intellectual ability. AI is exacerbating this, since cheating is so easy now.

Kids are already starting to forgo university, since they don’t think the cost of the credential is justified. That cuts even more deeply into the number of students universities can attract.

Universities respond by reducing standards even further (thereby accelerating brand destruction), by reducing tuition (which cuts even more deeply into budgets), and by firing professors in low-enrollment majors (reducing program variety, especially in the small seminars that are generally the most rewarding experiences for students).

[…]

“How can this be reversed?”

It can’t. There are pathways for individual institutions to revive themselves, even to prosper, but the sector as a whole is cooked. The death spiral is driven by prestige collapse as well as the demographic cliff, and intellectual prestige is inversely correlated to the size of the student body. More students means lower standards. That is especially true with a demographic cliff.

The only way to survive this crisis is ruthless elitism. Stop trying to edutain the fat middle of the bell curve, and refocus on the right tail. Become a place where the smartest people gather, and from which anyone who isn’t a 2-sigma outlier is excluded. This makes the school an arena in which intellectual iron can sharpen against iron. Elitism restored, prestige follows.

Next, eliminate the 500 person intro lectures. Admin loves these, since the high student:teacher ratio makes them cash cows. But they’re functionally no better than watching YouTube videos. Refocus on small seminars. This offers value that the Internet can’t.

Schools that take this path will restore or build reputations that will enable them to survive. However, they won’t be large. There is no future in which huge institutions keep tens of thousands of professors and administrators on payroll.

Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

June 11, 2026

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:

The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.

Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.

The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly

The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.

[…]

The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s

The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]

The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition

The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]

The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties

The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.

June 5, 2026

Canada’s AI “strategy”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m at the point where I honestly can’t tell whether this is parody or actual Canadian government policy:

AI in Canada lost before it even got started.

They literally are trying to get AI to give a Land acknowledgement before any session.

Here are 6 statements that show how Canada already blew AI like we all knew it would.

1. “The Government of Canada commits to applying Gender-Based Analysis Plus in a meaningful way across policy design, skills development, innovation, and governance to ensure that AI reflects our values, protects those most impacted, and leads to outcomes that are safe, inclusive, and beneficial for all Canadians.”

2. “Canadian AI must support, reflect, and project Canadian culture, which includes our customs, our history, and our heritage. Canadian voices, languages, communities, and knowledge must also be represented in how AI systems are designed, built, and used.”

3. “support Indigenous self-determination over how AI is built and used in Indigenous contexts, and build domestic capacity to address the specific harms Indigenous Peoples face”.

4. “promote the world’s first AI equity-based national standard on accessible AI to drive inclusive and accessible AI and remove accessibility barriers from AI systems, and ensure Canadian AI reflects the Accessible Canada Act principles.”

5. Repeated framing around “disproportionate exposure and impacts of AI harms to equity-seeking groups” and the need to “address the systemic barriers experienced by racialized communities, persons living with disabilities, and others who too often fall on the wrong side of the digital divide”.

6. “Canada will support and amplify Indigenous-led AI initiatives that reinforce cultural expression and linguistic vitality in Canada and around the world, building on existing efforts …”

June 2, 2026

Applying for a job in 2026

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is exactly the kind of experience I was having before I retired: painfully extended online application process, complete with re-entering pretty much everything in my resumé in their preferred format (but without the impromptu video pitch, thank goodness) followed almost instantly by rejection. In the vast majority of cases, no human being was ever even aware of my application:

“Help Wanted” by dreamsjung is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I spent 4 hours yesterday updating my resume to apply for a mid-level PM role.

The listing said they wanted someone with 10 years of experience in a software that was invented 4 years ago.

I clicked apply and was immediately redirected to a third-party portal that asked me to upload my resume, which I did.

Then it asked me to manually type in every single detail of the resume I had just uploaded.

Why did I upload it if I have to type it again?

Is the uploaded PDF just a ceremonial offering to the HR gods?

I spent 40 minutes breaking down my career history into tiny mandatory text boxes.

The portal required me to list a start and end date for every job, but the calendar widget wouldn’t let me type the year.

I had to click the back arrow month by month to get to 2002.

My wrist started cramping somewhere around 2018.

Then it asked for my high school GPA.

I’m 44 years old.

I don’t even remember the name of my high school mascot, let alone my proficiency in AP European History.

After the history lesson, came the behavioral assessment.

It presented me with 75 statements and asked me to rate them from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

One statement was “I prefer to work alone but also thrive in team environments.”

That is a paradox.

I’m being asked to evaluate a philosophical contradiction by a recruiting algorithm.

I just clicked “neutral” for everything out of spite.

The final step was a mandatory video cover letter.

I had to record a one-minute pitch explaining why my core values align with a B2B SaaS company that sells inventory management software.

My core value is being able to afford groceries and paying my internet bill on time.

I put on a dress shirt over my sweatpants, stared into my webcam, and lied for 60 seconds.

I said I’ve always been profoundly passionate about supply chain optimization.

Nobody is passionate about supply chain optimization.

I clicked submit and immediately received an automated rejection email.

The timestamp said it was sent zero seconds after I applied.

I was evaluated and deemed unworthy by a line of code at the speed of light.

Next time I’m just going to wrap my resume around a brick and throw it through their office window.

May 31, 2026

How Sports Illustrated devolved into AI slop

Filed under: Business, Media, Sports, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia generously pulls an article out from behind the paywall for the benefit of cheapskates like me. It’s on the deliberate destruction of Sports Illustrated:

Imagine if sports journalism were like an actual sporting competition — and the best team wins.

In that kind of contest, could any periodical in history surpass this lineup:

  • William Faulkner reports on a hockey game.
  • Robert Frost covers baseball.
  • Carl Sandburg offers golfing tips.
  • John Steinbeck contributes a story about fishing.
  • Ernest Hemingway writes on bullfighting.

This sounds like an editor’s fantasy. But these are actual stories and bylines from Sports Illustrated.

For a period of fifty years, this magazine set the gold standard for sports journalism. Nobel and Pulitzer winners wrote for them. Sports Illustrated even convinced John F. Kennedy to write a freelance article. In fact, that was one of the first things JFK did after getting elected president.

How do you kill a brand as powerful as Sports Illustrated?

It’s easy, you can do it in one just one move. You just need to embrace the most exciting, futuristic technology of the 21st century.

That’s what Sports Illustrated did. The world’s most respected sports magazine gave up on Hemingway and Faulkner, and started publishing AI slop. The editors clearly wanted to hide this — they pretended that the articles were written by actual human beings. They even created fake bios with photos for the non-existent authors.

When a journalist from Futurism asked them about this, they quickly deleted everything.

But the damage was already done. The magazine’s reputation was on the mat, like those bloodied boxers it had covered over the decades.

Just 55 days later, Sports Illustrated announced that it was laying off most of its workforce. The media reported that Sports Illustrated would stop operations completely.

A few months later, a new publisher stepped in as savior. But there wasn’t much to save — at least as a journalism business.

The latest move happened yesterday. The new owner laid off 12% of its workforce, including several of the remaining skilled journalists from the pre-AI era. Some of them are in desperate shape.

Former SI journalist Jeff Pearlman now mocks the magazine as an “empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports”.

It’s now a brand name, he insists, with nothing behind it.

    That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn.

May 29, 2026

Progressives, suddenly – “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Apologies to Mel Brooks for hijacking that line from Blazing Saddles. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, signs of panic from the media and media-adjacent progressive ranks as they realize Silicon Valley is an existential threat to their media monopoly:

    Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound

    One aside on the Blair conversation

    I’m absolutely gobsmacked at the level of hostility to “tech bros” and the belief that we can just insulate ourselves from AI and technology

    Like listening to weavers on the spinning Jenny or Hanson cab drivers on the advent of the motor car

Look this isn’t complicated.

The left hates you because they’re (correctly) worried AI is going to replace the “work” they do for their comfortable professional-managerial class sinecures, while at the same time they are (correctly) concerned that AI generated video will completely neutralize the remaining cultural influence they wield via their control of entertainment media.

The right (correctly) views you with suspicion and contempt because you already replaced white men with H1Bindians, which hurt us economically, and also enshittified the Internet, which was further enshittified due to your perfidious collaboration with leftists during the peak of the Great Awokening’s censorship and deplatforming push.

Despite your years of service to them, the left wants to immolate your headless corpses on funeral pyres built from your burning data centres, merely because you MIGHT be a threat to them in the near future.

Despite your record of pusillanimity, the right — some of us — are willing to work with you. That is a godsend for you, because we are literally your only defence right now.

But we have conditions, and those conditions are not negotiable.

May 19, 2026

QotD: Software developers as wizards

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Is it weird that AI coding assistance is not giving me identity fracture?

A lot of software developers are feeling disoriented and threatened these days. Programming by hand is clearly going the way of the buggy whip and the hand-cranked auger. Which is how we’re finding out that a lot of people have their identities bound up in being good at hand-coding and how it feels to do that.

That’s not me. It’s not me at all. Rather to my surprise, I don’t miss coding by hand, not any more than I missed writing assembler when compilers ate the world and made that unnecessary. (That was in a couple years back around 1983, for you youngsters.)

Maybe the fact that I’m not feeling any of this disorientation disqualifies me from having anything to say to people who are. On the other hand … if you can learn to emulate my mental stance and be completely unbothered, maybe that would be a good thing?

So. If you’re a programmer, and you’re feeling disoriented, try this on for size:

I like being a wizard. I like being able to speak spells, to weave complex patterns of logic that make things happen in the world. Writing code is a way to manifest my will.

Yes, I’ve piled up a lot of arcane knowledge over the 50 years I’ve been doing this. But languages of invocation, they come and they go. Been a long time since I’ve had any use for being able to program in 8086 assembler, and that’s okay. I have better spells now, and these days some rather powerful familiars.

What I’m inviting you to do is think of yourself as a wizard. Not as a person who writes code, but as a person who is good at assuming the kind of mental states required to bend reality with the application of spells.

And if that’s who you are, does it matter if the spells are painstakingly scribed in runes of power, versus being spoken to an obedient machine spirit?

It’s all one; it’s all the manifestation of will. Arcane languages come and go, machine spirits appear and then diminish to be replaced by more powerful ones, but you? You are the magic-wielder. Without you, none of it happens.

Same as it ever was. Same is it ever was. And so mote it be.

ESR, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-02-17.

Update, 21 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

May 12, 2026

What happened to the people who took Joe Biden’s advice and learned to code?

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It was only a few years ago that snooty media personalities were constantly echoing President Joe Biden’s advice to unemployed workers: “Learn to code”. Then, of course, the media hit hard times and the advice was then being snarkily offered to newly unemployed media folks. But what about the (few) who actually did “learn to code”, only to be swept away again as the clankers surged in to eliminate a lot of basic coding jobs?

How to Understand What AI Just Did to People Who Took Joe Biden’s Advice and Learned to Code.

A simple, concrete example.

Oddly enough, I have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. This means I know 7 algorithms for sorting a list into alphabetical order. I understand the tradeoffs between their execution time, code complexity, and memory demand. I learned the specialized lingo for describing execution time.

The algorithms are surprisingly complex and subtle. I spent months learning to code them.

Now that hard-won knowledge has been replaced by, “Claude, write a module to sort this list. Optimize for execution time.”

Millions of good people just lost their professions and must now invest in a new one.

Right now, knowing how to sort a list probably gives me a small advantage when I code with AI. But I will soon lose even that tiny return on my investment, as AI improves.

Certainly AI will create some new opportunities, probably a lot of them.

But count your blessings, if you did not spend years learning to code like I did.

And:

Here is the counterpoint: Learning to code gave coders an advantage when relearning to code with AI.

That advantage is their ticket to a seat in the new AI world.

The big question now is how many seats exist.

To which ESR responded:

Your position is reasonable, but wrong.

Having learned to code is still valuable in the new world of AI, not because you’re wrong about coding itself having become disposable, but because of the capabilities and mindset you developed while learning to code, some of which are difficult to learn in any other way.

You didn’t become a professional programmer. But I’m willing to bet that your intuition about how to design software is far better because you wrestled with code. And that is *not* a skill that LLMs are replacing — ignore the noisy hype about this.

I’m also willing to bet that some of what you learned as a programmer in training translated into problem-decomposition skills that have served you well as an economist.

If one is not a complete dullard (and you are certainly not a complete dullard) learning to code teaches not just craft skills but a mindset — a set of heuristics for carving reality at its joints. There are other ways to get this — I think for example of Richard Feynman who got there by thinking very hard about physics. And it is not guaranteed that every programmer will develop this right mindset.

But many of us do. And most of the other ways to develop it seem also to produce it only as a side effect, but less reliably than learning to code does.

So don’t write off learning to code. Maybe someday we’ll develop educational methods that can teach those higher-level skills more directly. That would be an excellent thing, if it’s possible. But until it gets here, learning to code will still have value that is not easy to duplicate in any other way.

May 8, 2026

“… without Western Civilization, we’d all still be whacking at the dirt with sticks and dying of intestinal parasites”

Filed under: Americas, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen responds to someone who had a clanker generate an imaginary Aztec capital today if the Aztecs had managed to defeat Cortes and his conquistadors:

Guitars. Suits and ties. Western architecture. English and Spanish text.

What’s easy to miss is that the generative AI is making its own, separate, political statement here. Not because it intended to, but because it had no choice.

Even human creativity consists mostly of rearranging things, but AI generation is entirely that and nothing else.

So when you ask it for “modern”, it gives you “western”, because in its eyes, there is no distinction between the two. “Western” is the only “modern” that actually exists for it to draw from.

Even cultures that were capable of building an alternative version of modern, because they weren’t skinning and eating each other, and had invented the wheel, still borrowed heavily from the West, not because they couldn’t do otherwise, but because the West moved faster, and had already done the work.

So, ask an AI for “modern Aztec”, and you get English-speaking Tokyo/Venice, with browner people, pyramid reskins on skyscrapers, and some out-of-place Mayan stuff, all set to Peruvian flute music.

This is the same reason that a lot of people, most of whom really aren’t much more than LLMs themselves, say silly things like “there is no White culture” … because, like the very simple art machine, they cannot conceive of any alternative version of modernity.

So nothing is Western to them, it’s all just “modern”.

But of course it really is Western, because without Western Civilization, we’d all still be whacking at the dirt with sticks and dying of intestinal parasites.

That AI is Western, too.

May 6, 2026

QotD: Deskilling society through AI

Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s always a little dangerous to write about any rapidly-developing technology, because chances are pretty good that whatever you say will be incredibly and obviously dated within a few months. But I’m going to plant my flag anyway, because even if nothing else changes — even if there’s no meaningful advancement in LLM performance beyond the state-of-the-art right now, in March 2025 — the potential disruption is already so enormous that you can think of it as a kind of Industrial Revolution for text.

Just like in the first one, we’ve figured out how to use machines to do a broad swathe of things people used to do, swapping energy and capital in for human labor. And just like in the first one, the output isn’t necessarily better (in fact, it’s often worse), but it’s so much cheaper in terms of human time and thought and effort that the quality almost doesn’t matter. Sometimes that’s wonderful: if you desperately need to put a roof for your barn right this moment, it’s a blessing to be able to slap on some corrugated tin instead of going to the effort of thatching. When you have to write your seventeenth letter to the insurance company explaining that no, they really ought to be covering this, it’s a relief to hand the composition off to Claude instead. But do that too much and you forget how to do it yourself — or more plausibly, you never learn.

The greatest risk of AI is probably “we all get turned into paperclips”, or maybe “someone uses it to design a novel and incredibly fatal pathogen”, but the most certain risk — the one that’s already here, at least on the edges — is a great deskilling. Just as the mechanization of physical labor lost us all those traditional skills that Langlands describes, the ability to automate cognitive tasks undermines their acquisition in the first place. Why pay any attention at all to word choice and metaphor and prosody when ChatGPT can churn out that essay in a few seconds? Why worry about drafting a convincing email when you’re pretty sure your recipient is just going to ask Grok for a summary?1 Why learn to code when a machine can do it faster?

I was recently informed that someone — “not anyone you know, Mom, someone at another school” — used ChatGPT to write his essay about the causes of the Civil War. This was obviously deeply upsetting to the congenital rule-follower who reported it to me, on account of THAT’S CHEATING (you must imagine this in the whiniest she-touched-my-stuff voice possible), but it was a good teachable moment — for me, if not for the history teacher at another school. What’s the point of an essay about the causes of the Civil War, anyway? It can’t be that the teacher wants to know the answer: she can find a dozen books on the topic if she cares to look, each more cogent and thorough than anything a middle-schooler is likely to produce.2 Heck, even the Wikipedia article will probably give her a better understanding. And if it’s not for the teacher’s benefit, it’s certainly not for the benefit of any other audience, since as soon as the essay is marked and graded it’ll probably be crumpled up and tossed into the recycling bin. No, it’s for the kid.

The point of writing an essay about the causes of the Civil War is not to have an essay about the causes of the Civil War, it’s to undergo the internal changes effected by the process of thinking through, planning, drafting, and editing the darn thing. Writing forces you to put your thoughts in order, to shape whatever mass of inchoate ideas is bouncing around in your head into something clear and reasoned you can pin to the page. The thinking is the hard part; putting words to it is simple by comparison. (This book review began life as about seven hundred words of stream-of-consciousness riffing, with only the vaguest kind of structure. When I experimentally pasted it into an LLM and asked for an essay, the result was terrible.) But even the putting of words is a valuable skill: what’s the right tone here? What’s the right word? Do I want to say “writing forces you to” or “when you write you have to”? How do they feel different? Asking a machine to do this for you is like bringing a forklift to the gym.

Of course, that kid who had ChatGPT write his essay was almost certainly thinking of the assignment not as one small step in the alchemical process of self-transformation that is education but as basically equivalent to an appeal letter to the insurance company: just another dumb hoop you have to jump through in your interactions with a vast impersonal machine that doesn’t particularly want to grind you to dust but wouldn’t mind it either. And since this was at another school, he might not even be wrong. Maybe the teacher was just pasting the rubric and the essays back into ChatGPT and asking it to assign a grade.3

But there’s an even bigger problem than lying about who (or what) has done the work, which is lying about whether the work has been done at all. LLMs make lying very easy indeed. Yes, yes, sometimes they hallucinate and tell you things that are patently untrue, and that’s a bigger danger for students and other people who don’t have the background to notice when something seems off — this is all true, but it’s not what I mean.

LLMs, when working exactly as intended, enable human falsehood — because our society relies on written records as proof of work. Until recently that was fine, because writing down lies actually used to be pretty hard: putting together a convincing false report from scratch — maintenance records for the airplane you’re about to board, say, or a radiologist’s report on your brain scan — was almost as time-consuming as actually checking the things that were supposed to checked and then documenting them, and the liar had to spend the whole time aware of their own dishonesty. (Not that this stops everyone, of course.) But now that it takes about two clicks to generate an inspector’s report for the house you’re considering buying, or the pathologist’s findings in your biopsy, how much are you going to trust that they actually looked?

LLMs can be useful tools,4 but all tools change what we make and how we make it. It’s often a good tradeoff! Sure, each individual example of simplification and automation in the name of efficiency is a tiny bit of alienation, removing the maker from the making, but it’s also a gift of time we can spend on other things: I couldn’t write this if I also had to sew my family’s clothes and wash our laundry by hand. And yet those bits pile up, and once it becomes possible to exist in the world without really needing to come into contact with it, once you can get by without ever really needing to make anything, some people just won’t. And that’s terrible! Being entirely without cræft — never bringing mind-body-soul into harmony with one another and then using them to master the world — means missing out on something deeply human.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Cræft, by Alexander Langlands”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-03-24.

  1. All the “AI written/AI read” communication begins to resemble Slavoj Zizek’s perfect date:

    2. “So my idea of a perfect date is the following one. We met. Then I put, she puts her plastic penis dildo into my … “stimulating training unit” is the name of this product. Into my plastic vagina. We plug them in and the machines are doing it for us. They’re buzzing in the background and I’m free to do whatever I want and she. We have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. What can be — we paid our superego full tribute. Machines are doing — now where would have been here a true romance. Let’s say I talk with a lady, with the lady because we really like each other. And, you know, when I’m pouring her tea or she to me quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touching. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usual oppressive sex where you worry about performance. No, all that is taken care of by the stupid machines. That would be ideal sex for me today.”

  2. Well, okay, most of them.
  3. See footnote one again.
  4. Personally I’ve found them useful in three cases: (1) when I’m blanking on how to begin an email I will occasionally ask for a draft, which inevitably makes me so mad about how bad it is that I immediately rewrite it in a way that doesn’t suck; (2) when it’s Sunday night and I need a picture of a Japanese man in a business suit and a samurai helmet for a book review going up in the morning; and (3) when I can’t figure out the right search term for my question. (Turns out it was “sigmatic aorist”. Thanks, Claude.)

May 5, 2026

Orwell: “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery”

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the portion above the paywall, Matt Johnson discusses Orwell’s career as we face an unending deluge of writing “assisted” by AI or even entirely created by AI:

In the introduction to his 1991 book Orwell: The Authorised Biography, Michael Shelden distinguishes his approach from that of Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Life, published a decade earlier. While Crick’s volume offered the most complete portrait of Orwell available at that point, Shelden argues that it’s too dull and impersonal — a flood of facts that bury Orwell’s singular, idiosyncratic personality. Shelden observes that Crick “relies heavily on the notion that facts speak for themselves if presented in enough detail”. So he attempts to provide a more intimate account of Orwell’s life: “A writer’s character and personal history influence what he writes and how he writes it. And the more we know about him, the better we are able to appreciate his work.” After all, “Books are not written by machines in sealed compartments”.

But we have now entered an era in which books can, in fact, be written by machines in sealed compartments. Large language models (LLMs) generate billions of words a day and are increasingly capable of producing long, structured, and sophisticated texts. While Orwell could not have foreseen the AI revolution, he predicted that synthetic text could someday replace human writing. In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, he observes: “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery”. Although he doesn’t linger on this possibility, he laments the depersonalisation and mass production of writing already underway in the 1940s, and these arguments are just as applicable to AI-generated writing today.

Orwell expressed an almost eerie sensitivity to the ways in which literary ability — and even the quality of thought — can decline alongside a growing reliance on automated writing processes. For example, he cites radio features “commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand”. The writing itself was “merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors”. His experience dealing with the pressures of working in a strictly controlled corporate environment at the BBC during wartime undoubtedly left him with this impression. He also cites “innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments” created in the same industrial manner.

Orwell’s scrutiny of the “machine-like” creation of “short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines” holds up particularly well today. In an uncanny anticipation of the process by which millions of users now produce creative content with AI, he writes:

    Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of Literary Schools, all of them offering you readymade plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct your plots for yourself. Others offer packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically.

“The Prevention of Literature” was published around the time Orwell began work on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it shows. Winston Smith’s job in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite historical documents to match Party propaganda. He deletes “unpersons” from old news stories and ensures that recorded events always line up with the latest party line, all with the help of his speakwrite dictation machine. He dumps original documents into the Memory Hole for incineration. In the essay, Orwell moves from a discussion of increasingly robotic forms of literary production to the role this shift could play in a totalitarian state:

    It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line.

In some ways, Orwell’s bleak prophecies would turn out to be more accurate than he could have imagined. The idea that human thought would be replaced by an “algebraical formula” and that consciousness would be eliminated from the writing process is now a reality on a vast scale (though the question of whether consciousness will emerge from AI systems remains open). But Orwell filtered his predictions about the future of writing through his fixation on state power and the possible emergence of a “rigidly totalitarian society”, and this led him astray. In such a society, Orwell assumed that “novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions”. To the extent that people would want to keep reading, “perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum”. He concluded: “It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish”.

April 19, 2026

AI’s missing economic impact

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Rational Aussie explains at least part of why the expected economic benefits of widespread adoption of artificial intelligence agents are … missing:

It’s funny how AI has made white collar work 10x faster already but there’s been basically no economic impact from it.

The reason is quite simple:

1. Most white collar work is bullshit, so speeding it up by 10x still equals a pile of bullshit at the end

2. Most white collar employees are using AI to do all their work for the week in 4 hours instead of 40, whilst telling their manager the deadline is still 40 hours away

We have been living in a fake economy for the better part of two decades. It is all a fugazi.

People who do real jobs in the real world get paid comparatively crap, and people who do fake jobs in the fiat Ponzi world get paid just enough fiat currency to pretend they are important. None of it amounts to anything productive nor valuable for the world though.

An entire generation doing fake email jobs, slide decks and excel sheets for corporations who ultimately produce nothing.

April 18, 2026

Another proof of the value of open source

Filed under: History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses a pre-computer (pre-electronics) proof that open source is more secure than closed source:

“How university open debates and discussions introduced me to open source” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

There’s an old, bad idea that’s been trying to resurrect itself on X in the last couple of days. Which makes it time for me to explain exactly why, in the age of LLMs, open-sourcing your code is an even more important security measure than it was before we had robot friends.

The underlying principle was discovered in the 1880s by an expert on military cryptography, a man named August Kerckhoffs, writing long before computers were a thing.

To start with, you need to focus in on the fact that cryptosystems have two parts. They have methods, and they have keys. You feed a key and a message to a method and get encrypted information that, you hope, only someone else with the same pair of method and key can read.

What Kerckhoffs noticed was this: military cryptosystems in normal operation leak information about their methods. Code books and code machines get captured, stolen, betrayed, or lost in simple accidents and found by people you don’t want to have them. This was the pre-computer equivalent of an unintended source-code disclosure.

Cryptosystems also leak information about their keys — think post-it notes with passwords stuck to a monitor. What Kerckhoffs noticed is that these two different kinds of compromising leakage happen at very different base rates. It is almost impossible to prevent leakage of information about methods, but just barely possible to prevent leakage of information about keys.

Why? Keys have fewer bits. This makes them easier to keep secret.

Remember: this was something an intelligent man could notice in the 1880s, well before even vacuum tubes. Which is your first clue that the power of this observation hasn’t changed just because we’re in the middle of a freaking Singularity.

Security through obscurity — closed source code — means you’re busted if either the source code or the keys get leaked. Open source is a preemptive strike — it’s a way to force the property that your security depends *only* on keeping the keys secret.

What you’re doing by designing under the assumption of open source is preventing source code leakage from being a danger. And that’s the kind of leakage with a high base rate.

As far back as 1947 Claude Shannon applied this to electronic security — he did critical work on the voice scramblers that were used for secure telephone communications between heads of state during World War II. Shannon said one should always design as though “the enemy knows the system”. The US’s National Security Agency still uses this as a guiding principle in computer-based cryptosystems.

If you’re doing software security, always design as though the enemy can see your source code. I’m still a little puzzled that I was apparently the first person to notice that this was a general argument for open source; as soon as I did, my first thought was more or less “Duh? Somebody should have noticed this sooner?”

Now let’s consider how LLMs change this picture. Or…don’t.

An LLM is like a cryptanalyst with a superhuman attention span that never sleeps. If your system leaks information that can compromise it, that compromise is going to happen a hell of a lot faster than if your adversary has to rely on Mark 1 meatbrains.

But it gets worse. With LLMs, decompilation is now fast and cheap. You have to assume that if an adversary can see your executable binary, they can recover the source code. If you were relying on that to be secret, you are *screwed*.

Leakage control — limiting the set of bits that can yield a compromise — is more important than ever. So security by code obscurity is an even more brittle and dangerous strategy than it used to be.

Anybody who tries to tell you differently is either deeply stupid or trying to sell you something that you should not by any means buy.

March 27, 2026

The reason you feel detached from most modern art, movies, and music

Filed under: Economics, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia explains what he calls the “Four steps to Hell” that have replaced the aesthetic values of the past and shows why everything in entertainment is being actively enshittified:

MGM’s lion and the Ars Gratia Artis motto (Art for Art’s Sake). But the lion is screaming in pain today.

Smart people have recently asked: What is the aesthetic vision of the 21st century? What are the stylistic markers of our time? What are the core values driving the creative process? What is our zeitgeist?

At first glance, that’s a hard question to answer. We are more than a quarter of the way through the century, and very little has changed since the 1990s.

  • Music genres have barely shifted in that time. The songs on the radio sound like the hits of yesteryear — in many instances they are the hits of yesteryear, played over and over ad nauseam.
  • Movies are in even worse shape. Hollywood keeps extending the same tired brand franchises you knew as a child. SoCal culture feels like an antiquated merry-go-round where the same tired nags keep coming around in an endless circle.
  • Publishers still put out new novels, but when was the last time you read something really fresh and new? Even more to the point, when was the last time you went to a social gathering and heard people discussing contemporary fiction with enthusiasm?
  • The same obsession with the past is evident in video games, comic books, architecture, graphic design, and almost every other creative sphere. Everything is a reboot or retread or repeat.

It’s not aesthetics, it’s just arteriosclerosis.

Even so, I see a new dominant theory of art — and it’s sweeping away almost everything in its wake. It already accounts for most of the creative work of our time, and is still growing. Nothing else on the scene comes close to matching its influence.

So if you’re seeking the most influential aesthetic vision on the 21st century, this is it. It’s simple to describe — but it’s ugly as sin.

I call it Flood the Zone. It happens in four steps. […]

Do read the whole thing, but in case it’s a case of tl;dr, he also summarizes it for you:

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