Notes

@belligerentbarbies:

People are worried about AI psychosis. They’re worried about the amount of energy that AI uses. Fair. I’m worried that they put Copilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy. 人们都担心 AI 精神病，都担心 AI 消耗的能源。担心得没错。但我担心的是他们把 Copilot 放进了 Excel，而 Excel 是驱动整个经济的巨兽。

And do you know who has tamed that beast? Brenda. Who is Brenda? She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation. And the Excel goddess herself descended from the heavens, kissed Brenda on her forehead, and the sweat from Brenda’s brow allows us to do capitalism. 你知道是谁驯服了这头巨兽吗？Brenda。Brenda 是谁？她是这个愚蠢国家每个金融部门、每个企业的中层员工。Excel 女神从天而降，亲吻 Brenda 的额头。是 Brenda 额头的汗水让资本主义得以运作。

Do you know what’s going to happen? Brenda is going to spend her time hatefully crafting a formula, because anyone who works that closely with Excel does not do anything lovingly. The more time you spend with Excel, the more you hate it. She’s going to birth that formula for a financial report, and then she’s going to send that financial report to a higher-up. 你知道会发生什么吗？Brenda 会花时间带着恨意精心制作公式，因为任何跟 Excel 这么亲近的人都不会带着爱去做事。你花在 Excel 上的时间越多，你就越恨它。她会为一份财务报告憋出那个公式，然后把报告发给一个上级。

“Asian Style Materialism”

Taiwan’s faith is a fundamentally different approach than Western religion, more aligned with earthly superficiality and materialism. The majority of temples, like the above one, are singular affairs, each a varying mash-up of Daoism, Buddhism, ancestor worship, and Chinese folk religion, all jammed with idols, icons, effigies, and other devotional objects. Faith is personal, malleable, and image-based, and most importantly, the connection between humans and their God(s) is very different6. Rather than humans seeking the transcendent Good by devotion to a powerful God, they believe in Gods that can be urged, nudged, and even bet on to satisfy their human wants and needs. Or, rather than building a City of Man to try and approximate the City of God, Chinese folk religions believe the City of Man can win over the City of God, with enough urging, offerings, and temples. That’s a very different relationship, devotional versus transactional, acceptance versus persuasive, even if sometimes the required “proper human behavior” overlaps.

I do believe there’s a direct connection between that lack of/different faith, and the intense Asian-style materialism I’ve now seen in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. In each I’ve seen/felt a pronounced spiritual emptiness, an unbound secular materialism that approaches pleasure-seeking narcissism, that has left me frustrated. The clichéd version of a cultural vapidness akin to gorging on cotton candy, and the collectible industry and its fetishization of the cute, is symptomatic of that.

[China] have a “just good enough” ethos that shows up most noticeably in their construction, where everything is less solid than it appears. This extends beyond the physical, and that “surface level is good enough” attitude makes China a simulacrum, so when you leave China, and land in Taipei, Seoul, or Hong Kong, you experience an unmistakable sensation of, “Ok. This is the genuine thing. It’s all more solid.”

“Transitions”:

For weeks, I felt an impending loss: the precious fact of having a son was about to be taken away. I wasn’t hung up on dynastic issues. Yet I think there’s something raw, some product of the primitive brain, that makes a father identify with a son. You see yourself in this other, beloved being. I was afraid of losing that.

Of course, transformation works both ways. A change in the person you love changes you as well: a toddler’s newfound independence, a teen’s leaving home. There is a shift in what I can only call the emotional weather—air moister, light different, mornings oddly new. Part of you embraces the change. And part of you remains tethered to the past, stubbornly loyal to the older version of the person.

He had several trans students, he said—his best students. They were serious, precise in their language. “They’re the only students with whom I can have a conversation about the soul,” he insisted. “For the others, that’s a narrow religious concept.” For the trans students, it was an obvious way to talk about identity. They had already made the definitive discovery that the body was malleable, which suggested that some integral part of oneself was other than corporeal. “These people represent the next stage of evolution,” Ajay said, not entirely serious but not quite kidding, either.

In fact, as I was to learn from a subsequent conversation in Berlin, she had never felt herself to be a man at all. “I certainly was a boy,” she told me. “And, like many trans women, I had a protracted boyhood. You see this in gay men, too—the aging-twink syndrome. Anyway, it was when that started to end, and the horizon of manhood approached, that the dissonance became all too clear.”

“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life”

Readers who prefer their self-help to come with a sheen of erudition can increasingly count on finding similar wisdom about human finitude dispensed in the philosophy section. Turning to philosophy to learn how to live is nothing new, of course. But the explicitly inspirational and instructional valence of much that appears today under that heading, even from academic presses, is striking — as is the apparent consensus that the central task of philosophy is to guide seekers to a greater acceptance of imperfection and insignificance. Sometimes these books focus on a particular school of philosophy, giving readers an “-ism” — existentialism, Buddhism, Taoism, and above all Stoicism, now practically a genre unto itself — with which to identify. Others staple together eclectic smatterings of received ideas into less partisan surveys on how to cope with failure and disillusionment.

At last we have managed to reify not merely social reality but the act of philosophizing itself, treating it, like our uncontrollable world, as a thing: a coping tool you might select, like an ice cream flavor, according to your personal taste.

At some point, however, I realized that I was spending more of my time thinking about my own despair than about the problems outside myself that were supposedly fueling it

While an exaggerated sense of our own importance is a recipe for both political and psychological disaster, it is also possible to overestimate our insignificance. Acceptance shades easily into excuse. With enough practice tolerating imperfection you can learn to forget what it is you’re failing to live up to.

When we are left to fend for ourselves, the conditions that shape our lives tend to feel alien and monolithic, forcing us to choose between the two polarities of self-help: the delusional optimism of positive thinking and the stoic acceptance taught by “philosophy.”

Henrik Karlsson on Dostoevsky:

If I think something, I don’t need to go through this big roundabout thing, where I “show” it and make it literary. I don’t need to make my writing ambiguous. If I just pay close enough attention to reality, the complexity of reality will seep into the writing and make it ambiguous and charged anyway. There is no need for me to be clever and artful and introduce mystery. Just “telling” it as I see it, if done with enough detail and care, is mysterious enough.

Dostoevsky, unlike most other authors, treats his character as a full individuals, as if they are too big to fit in his head: he isn’t using them as mouth pieces, but listening to them. His books are polyphonic: they are made up of a multitude of voices, each with their own inner logic and perspective, and there is no voice that stands above the others and knows the final truth. There are, of course, many books that have multiple voices in them, especially after Dostoevsky, but when I read these books, there is nearly always a subtle feeling that the characters are being used as dolls by the author, who is trying to get a view across; you can sense what the author thinks of everyone. But in Dostoevsky, each character is so strong and independent that they feel like authors in their own right.

Another thing I love about Dostoevsky is how he incorporates long essayistic segments in his novels, but he always makes sure to undermine the authority of the person expressing the ideas. You get these wonderful philosophical tracts about free will and the Russian church and utilitarianism and the nature of love, but you don’t know what to make of it, really, because the person saying it seems a bit deranged. This is closely connected to his deep respect for the individual: rhetorically convincing the reader of a perspective would undermine their autonomy. Compromising the characters forces the reader to stand alone, to borrow Kirkegaard’s phrase. Since there is no safe authority that you can submit to in Dostoevsky’s books, it is up to you to meet these hurting, strange voices with compassion, critical thinking, and curiosity; you have to evaluate if anything they say is valuable and true and applies to your life. As Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov says, there is nothing more painful to humans than our freedom, that we are responsible for everything we do, and so we long to submit to an authority. But Dostoevsky just won’t let us do that. He forces us to face our freedom.

“Baby Shoggoth Is Listening”:

PR people, always in search of influence, [] are developing a form of writing (press releases and influence campaigns are writing) that’s not so much search-engine-optimized as chatbot-optimized. It’s important, they say, to write with clear structure, to announce your intentions, and especially to include as many formatted sections and headings as you can. In other words, to get ChatGPT to pay attention, you must write more like ChatGPT.

The hour, in other words, is near, and, instead of being short-sighted or risk-averse, we should set to preparing. But for what? Again, for jumping into the AI mind, both to influence it and to hedge against human superfluousness. And how? The best way, Gwern thinks, for people who don’t work in AI at least, is to simply communicate in public to the AIs that already exist. “Much of the value of writing done recently or now is simply to get stuff into LLMs,” so as to teach them, he writes.

In an interview, he elaborated: “By writing, you are voting on the future of the shoggoth using some of the few currencies it acknowledges. If you aren’t writing, you’re kind of abdicating the future or your role in it.”

After all, you vote in elections even though you don’t expect to have a great effect on the result, because it’s important on some absolute moral level to send your wishes into the world. This sort of general moral thinking seems to me valuable here precisely because nobody knows what will happen, whether influence will compound or diminish over time. Turning to already formed instincts about how to interact with vast and complicated systems is a helpfully familiar way of not being paralyzed by weirdness and uncertainty. That sort of moral thinking is also crucial to mounting a case for human value even when compared to superintelligence.

“Do piped programs run sequentially or in parallel?”:

Piped commands are run in parallel. They keep reading from the pipe until they are terminated, they finish their work, or they receive an end-of-file indicator. When a pipe (or the data read from a pipe) gets too large, the command is terminated to prevent the system from running out of RAM.

“Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us”:

“If a wind should rage in the guts, what matters is the direction it takes. If downwards, then the result is a fart; if upwards, an apparition or a heavenly inspiration.”

The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. In particular, Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind.

[I]t is impossible for us to ever know “things in themselves”—what Kant called “noumena.” We have access only to “phenomena”—the way things look to us, given the kind of mind we have. “What things may be in themselves, I know not and need not know, because a thing is never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon,” Kant insisted.

Ordinarily, we think of good will as a kind of emotion: a person of good will is happy when other people are happy. But, for Kant, emotion is irrelevant to morality. In fact, he believes that if you do the right thing because it makes you happy you don’t have a truly good will, because you are acting out of a kind of self-interest. The only thing that should determine how we act is a pure sense of duty. When a man “does [an] action without any inclination for the sake of duty alone, then for the first time his action has its genuine moral worth,” Kant writes.

“Big Tech’s Futile Attempt to Kill Death”:

The Silicon Valley immortalists, too, are Lockeans to a person. They do not want to be remembered; they want to be remembering. They are so certain that the matter of what a person is is so thoroughly settled that we can simply move on to other theoretical questions that confront us in our quest for immortality.

The commitment to substrate-neutrality is almost as widely accepted as Lockean personal identity, but not so widely as simply to be assumed true. A person, in this reigning metaphysics of Silicon Valley, is a special kind of substrate-neutral code that has the peculiar property of being aware of its own existence. Technology, they believe, can enable us to manipulate that code, to improve on it, and perhaps when the time comes, to transfer it out of a failing mortal coil and into a more robust vessel. Their idea of what a person is, and of what immortality might be, is entirely shaped and limited by the philosophy of liberal individualism: an opportunity to keep on “living one’s best life”, and if possible, of doing so in one’s own apartment.

[T]hose who can afford to be early adopters get to set the terms by privately trialling interventions, while public institutions are nudged to ratify a vision in which the extension of time becomes a status object.

Pursuant to 第 374 章《道路交通條例》 [Cap. 374 Road Traffic Ordinance] —

單車 (bicycle) 指經設計及構造為使用踏板驅動的兩輪車輛。 [bicycle (單車) means a vehicle with 2 wheels designed and constructed to be propelled by the use of pedals.]

Which means —

單車或三輪車基本上享有和汽車一樣的使用道路的權利。同樣地，單車或三輪車使用者在使用道路時也有適當相應的責任，並須遵守一切交通規則（例如遵守所有交通標誌、交通燈號及道路標記），猶如他/她是在駕駛汽車一樣。 [A bicycle or tricycle basically has the same right to use a road as a motor vehicle. Needless to say, the rider of a bicycle or tricycle also has the duty to exercise due care when using the road and to comply with all traffic regulations (e.g. to comply with all traffic signs, traffic lights and road markings) as if he/she is the driver of a motor vehicle.]

“與騎踏單車有關” [Related to cycling], Community Legal Information Centre.

See also “道路使用者守則” [Road Users’ Code] by the Transport Department of Hong Kong:

騎單車 [Cycling]

單車被視為車輛。在道路上，騎單車者有同樣責任遵守適用於駕駛人的規例和規則。 [A cycle is regarded as a vehicle. A cyclist has the same obligation to follow the rules and regulations applicable to drivers when cycling on the road.]

“Microspeak: Turn Into a Pumpkin”:

In some fields, the idiom turn into a pumpkin means to regress to a previous level of performance after a period of marked (but perhaps inexplicable) improvement.

Wilhelm von Humboldt on “the individual man, and the highest ends of his existence” (via Henrik Karlsson):

The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the grand and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential,—intimately connected with freedom, it is true,—a variety of situations.

The efficiency of all such unions as instruments of cultivation, wholly depends on the degree in which the component members can succeed in combining their personal independence with the intimacy of the common bond; for whilst, without this intimacy, one individual cannot sufficiently possess himself, as it were, of the nature of the others, independence is no less essential, in order that the perceived be assimilated into the being of the perceiver.

[I]n the highest sense, that each still perceives the beauty and rich abundance of the outer world, in the exact measure in which he is conscious of their existence in his own soul.

Now, whatever man receives externally, is only as the grain of seed. It is his own active energy alone that can convert the germ of the fairest growth, into a full and precious blessing for himself. It leads to beneficial issues only when it is full of vital power and essentially individual. The highest ideal, therefore, of the co-existence of human beings, seems to me to consist in a union in which each strives to develope himself from his own inmost nature, and for his own sake.

It is, on the other hand, undeniable that, whereas physical variety has so vastly declined, it has been succeeded by an infinitely richer and more satisfying intellectual and moral variety, and that our superior refinement can recognize more delicate differences and gradations, and our disciplined and susceptible character, if not so firmly consolidated as that of the ancients, can transfer them into the practical conduct of life […]

“You Aren’t In The DSM”:

In his 2013 essay “Book of Lamentations,” cultural critic Sam Kriss reviews the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as if it were a work of dystopian literature, a kind of nightmarish encyclopedia in the lineage of Borges. Kriss argues that the manual is a literary object with a deeply unreliable narrator, who writes with a coldly compulsive voice that cannot perceive its own madness. “As you read, you slowly grow aware that the book’s real object of fascination isn’t the various sicknesses described in its pages, but the sickness inherent in their arrangement.”

Kriss sees the DSM as a device of absurdity and detachment because he reads it as making assumptions that are not explicitly present in the book itself: that madness is internal, individual, and biologically determined. The DSM’s silence on these issues does little to dispel this interpretation.

Since its first edition in 1952, the DSM has gradually evolved from a slim document meant to standardize psychiatric recordkeeping into a sprawling classification system that shoulders a set of responsibilities it was never designed to bear. It is expected to guide clinical care, enable research, satisfy insurance companies, anchor epidemiological studies, shape patient self-understanding, and serve as a platform for public policy. Each of these demands pulls the manual in different directions.

In advance of the DSM-5, there were hopes for a “paradigm shift” which would incorporate findings from neuroscience and create a more dimensional, biologically based system.The neo-Kraepelinians had believed that with iterative research, biological validators would point towards the hidden disease entities, in much the same way that syphilis had been identified in the early 20th century as a cause of a then-common condition “general paralysis of the insane.” But by the 1990s, it was becoming obvious to scientists that validators of DSM categories did notconverge in any neat fashion.

Wong, Sampson. Hong Kong Walkology [香港散步學]. White Paper, 2022.

我們常常會以「功能」來理解身邊城市中的一切：車站是用來乘車的、商場是用來購物的、郵局是用來寄信的。每一個地點，彷彿都有著既定功能，我們只是透過這些地點來做到這些功能。

只要一個人對跟城市空間相關的一切充滿熱情，他就是個 Urbanist。每座城市都有極其熱愛談論那座城市中各種各樣地方的人，而且談起來多是如數家珍般充滿激情，借用地理學家段義孚的說法，他們有種「對地方的愛」(Topophilia)，也有強烈的「場所感」（Sense of Place）。

第一種關懷，是練習出一種「Mode」，走在城市裡頭，有辦法「開眼」和打開所有威官，忽然金睛火眼，「見到」最多。這種「Mode」，我時常叫作「掂行掂過」的相反。

Nick Heer on Liquid Glass:

iOS’s system theme was not branded from when it was first shown in 2007.

[I]t is not the first time Apple has used the term [“Liquid.”] Since 2018, it has described high-resolution LCD displays with small bezels and non-zero corner radii — like the one on my MacBook Pro — as “Liquid Retina displays”.

Apple is emphasizing another defining characteristic of the Liquid Glass design language, which is that each part of the visual interface is, nominally, concentric with the bezel and corner radius of a device’s display.

[The Liquid Glass] is as much a reflection of the intent of Apple’s human interface designers as it is a contemporary engineering project, far more so than an interface today based on raster graphics. That it is able to achieve such complex material properties in real-time without noticeably impacting performance or, in my extremely passive observations, battery life, is striking.

Apple also tries to solve legibility by automatically flipping the colour of the glass depending on the material behind it. […] If Apple really wanted to improve the contrast of the toolbar, it would have done the opposite. […] It is Apple’s clever solution to a problem Apple created.

It seems Apple agrees [corner radius] is more appropriate in some apps than in others — app windows in System Information and Terminal have a much smaller corner radius.

Even on a device with four rounded display corners, this dedication to concentricity is not always executed correctly. My iPhone 15 Pro, for example, has corners with a slightly smaller radius than an iPhone 16 Pro. The bottom corners of the share sheet on my device are cramped, nearly touching the edge of the display at their apex.

In a column view in Finder, for example, there is a hard vertical edge below the rounded corner of the ostensibly floating sidebar. I am sure there are legibility reasons to do this but, again, it is a solution to a problem Apple created.

“When Is Better to Think Without Words?”

When we put words to a thought, we have to compress something that is like a web in our mind, filled with connections and associations going in all directions, turning that web into a sequential string of words; we have to compress what is high-dimensional into something low-dimensional.

[C]ompression is effortful. It takes intense concentration to find the right words (rather than the sloppy ones that first come to mind), and then to put them in the proper order.

If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster. But this is a big if. Most people, myself included, have too weak mental models to do this kind of processing for complex problems, and so, our thoughts are riddled with contradictions and holes that we often don’t notice unless we try to write them down. We can move faster in wordless thought, but we’re moving at random. If, however, you have deep expertise in an area, like the mathematicians, it is possible to let go of the language compression and do a much faster search.

The insights arrived at wordlessly need to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical notation and logic, to test their validity. It is a sort of feedback mechanism: unless the intuition holds up on the page, it is a false intuition.

The written results also work as relay results. By writing something down and making sure it is solid, we can offload that thought from working memory and instead use it as a building block for the next step of the thought.

When writing, there are all sorts of details that need to be specified for our paragraphs to make sense, and if we don’t know what should go into a sentence, it is all too easy to fill in the uncertain parts with guesses. At least my brain has the most miraculous autocomplete function and supplies me with credible endings to any sentence I start—often credible nonsense. But when the nonsense is there on the page, next to thoughts I’ve settled through hard work, it looks respectable! It often takes considerable work to realize I’ve fooled myself.

About the Public Suffix List:

Software using the Public Suffix List will be able to determine cookie inheritance boundaries between domains, preventing cookies set on one domain from being accessible to other domains under the same public suffix. This protects users from cross-domain cookies setting while still allowing individual domains to set their own cookies.

As well as this, the Public Suffix List can also be used to support features such as site grouping in browsers.

“Art Must Act”:

Instead of delineating an artwork’s place in the unfolding of historical tendencies, or revealing its interest as a lens onto social problems, the critic must judge the artist’s action for how it reveals a life.

[E]xtremist ideologies of the Right and Left responded to the real problems of modern society by offering illusory collective identities and narratives that substituted for genuine action and an authentic self. Liberals who opposed these ideologies, they warned, were no less susceptible to such illusions.

In promoting a smug conformism disguised as free thinking, the little magazines, he warned, were drifting into dithering liberalism that substituted a cozy in-group identity for real possibilities of intellectual and political action.

Proponents of the ‘new painting’ responded to this situation by abandoning both politics and aesthetics – the goal of either changing society or of creating beautiful, interesting or otherwise significant objects. They sought instead, with ‘a desperate recognition of moral and intellectual exhaustion’, to ‘act’ through the creation of artworks ‘in the form of personal revolts’.

In referring to them as action, he stressed that these experiments should be judged for their effectiveness in changing the situation and character of those performing them.

He was sceptical whether the ‘personality-myth’ of the ‘lone artist’ was a true resource for resistance or a lure by which artists would let themselves be co-opted.

The only way to reconnect with the experience of the latter, Newman posited, was to use techniques of abstraction as a kind of ascetic purification bypassing art history, moving the spectator ‘beyond the aesthetic into an act of belief’, in a sublime without theology, ideology, ritual or creed.

If both the pose of the isolated, marginal creator defying social conventions and that of the freethinking intellectual rejecting mass society had become deceptive guises for a failing liberal order, then perhaps the solution, after all, was to work out paths for action from within, and not outside of, the structures that seemed to thwart it.

Qiu, Yuwei. Your Near Is My Far. Shandong Publishing House of Literature and Art, 2025 (translations mine):

Mainstream psychologies have reduced the issue of trauma from a social problem to an individual or bodily one. This shift has exacerbated adversarial dynamics between generations (mother–daughter), genders (male–female), and urban–rural divides, leading to such stereotypes as “East Asian mothers are control freaks,” “East Asian women aren’t relaxed enough,” or “rural women are ‘brothers’ subordinates.’” The intent here is not to deny the existence of certain social phenomena, but to point out that we often mistake consequences for causes, treating them as mere matters of personal choice while neglecting the historical and social conditions behind these behaviors.

Many Western psychologists in recent years have also begun to critique this concept of self, arguing that it alienates people and breeds isolation. It leaves individuals feeling lonely, anxious, and narcissistic. In my clinical work with older generations of women, I have come to see that their seemingly “ineffective” behaviors are not merely expressions of narcissistic traits but responses shaped by their own needs and the historical context they lived through.

Gradually, I realized that as a therapist, I must not only study mainstream psychological frameworks but also maintain a critical awareness of their underlying ideology, pursuing localized explorations of my own. To interpret trauma, one cannot stop at the dichotomy between individual and collective; one must place it within larger social contexts and complex power relations.

The process from “Why can’t she understand me?” to “This is something she simply cannot give me” is a journey of recognition.

I came to see that empathy rests on two pillars: psychological energy and the understanding capacity. The former depends on inner maturity, the latter on our ability to revisit the past with the client and re-experience their feelings of that time. Both are indispensable. For a long while, I thought understanding mattered most, but later I saw that without sufficient psychological energy, it is nearly impossible to transcend one’s own perspective and truly understand another, especially someone who has hurt you. A colleague once remarked: “When my psychological energy is low, my imagination traps me in deep unease.” Empathy cannot be forced. An emotional flow beyond the self, it arises naturally after one has worked through a great deal of grief and developed the internal strength to hold it.

“Apple’s Liquid Glass Design Prioritizes Content Over Tools”:

Yes, many people are largely passive consumers of content, whether we’re talking about Web pages, podcasts, or streaming videos. For those people, there is little beyond content, and Liquid Glass’s deprecation of controls may allow them to continue their consumption with less distraction. But that’s not a lifestyle to aspire to, reminiscent as it is of the humans in WALL-E—perpetually reclined in floating chairs, mindlessly consuming entertainment.

For the most part, Apple has done a good job of making them highly usable and efficient, but at the same time, the company’s designers seem to want to pare away ever more of the physical instantiation. Bezels get smaller, keyboards get thinner, and ports disappear, all in the service of giving way to the content on the screen. But tools aren’t necessarily better for being smaller—function must dictate form, not the other way around.

Wikipedia editors on Signs of AI Writing:

When talking about biology (e.g., when asked to discuss a given animal or plant species), LLMs tend to put too much emphasis on the species' conservation status and the efforts to protect it, even if the status is unknown and no serious efforts exist, and may strain to derive symbolism from things like taxonomy.

While many of these words are strong AI tells on their own, an even stronger tell is when the subjects of these verbs are facts, events, or other inanimate things. A person, for example, can highlight or emphasize something, but a fact or event cannot. The "highlighting" or "underscoring" is not something that is actually happening; it is a claim by a disembodied narrator about what something means.

While human editors and writers often use em dashes (—), LLM output tends to use them more often than nonprofessional human-written text of the same genre, and uses them in places where humans are more likely to use commas, parentheses, colons, or (misused) hyphens (-). LLMs especially tend to use em dashes in a formulaic, pat way, often mimicking "punched up" sales-like writing by over-emphasizing clauses or parallelisms. LLMs overuse em dashes because they were trained (sometimes illegally) on novels, and novelists have always used em dashes more often than laypeople do.

Chris Arnade in “Walking Hong Kong (Kowloon, really)”:

The only way to cross that eight-lane fenced-in road, the one with monstrous semis pulling shipping containers, or buses whose center of gravity seems too high for the speed it takes the curves, is to go into the Hoi Tat Estate’s mall, up to the second floor, next to the Fairwoods diner (more on those later), then across the long bridge to the adjacent mall, where you can weave your way three floors down through a series of zigzagging escalators to the food court, where the four-block-long underground passageway to where you want to go is, assuming you take the passageway branching off at three o’clock on the compass face, not eleven, six, or nine.

Being a pedestrian in a city shouldn’t be the equivalent of a mouse in a maze, or a Super Mario Bros-style series of levels to complete, but in Hong Kong it is, which coupled with the density, heat, noise, and general sense of barely contained clamorous mayhem, makes it a punishing city to be in, one that’s aggressive, intense, and exhausting, one you feel you’re constantly battling2.

So while I stand by my opening statement that Hong Kong is not walkable, that doesn’t mean it’s not a singular and fascinating city, a humid gem in an ocean of global uniformity, and one that is ultimately rewarding as a pedestrian.

在华强北看到 Gaga 心想开在这是要给谁吃。

最后吃了 Gaga。

“Intimacy” (fiction):

I could not help feeling bored by the accounts whenever I encountered them—how granular they were, how tedious. How often they repeated the same material facts: the little clammy hands, the sleeplessness, the lack of time, the mess and splintered focus, the wonder of new speech and its ingenious formations. The problem, I thought, was that these descriptions never reached beyond themselves, beyond the concrete reality of the situation. But what was the purpose of their repetition? Was it just that we yearned to be heard? Was there a genuine need within this yearning, as basic as nourishment?

[T]he writer started talking about a book he had read in his youth which he had recently come across by chance. At one time, he had included this book among the titles that made up his formative reading, but now he could remember nothing about it. Rereading it, he found it confusing. In fact, he had no idea what it was about.

“What I can’t figure out,” the author said, “is whether I was smarter back then or just pretending to understand what I read. That wouldn’t be unusual, you know. One is in such a hurry to get an education, to have read it all.”

Ayşegül Savaş, the author, discussing the story:

We meet the narrator at a moment when her identity is in flux. She is holding on to an idea of what a writer should be, even though this model no longer seems authentic to her. At the same time, she is not very comfortable in her identity as a mother, or, rather, how this identity has merged with her life as a writer—that is to say, with her imagination. It’s easier for her to keep these two parts of herself separate, but it also means that her identity as a writer is not true to who she really is.

nothing constitutes an offense in a party where the music may stop at anytime