Escape the algorithm
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I’m listening to the Odyssey narrated by Dan Stevens. Odysseus gets lost. No one has made a workable map of the Mediterranean at this time. How do you get home?
We live in an age where everyone has a map. Even if you get lost without a phone, everyone near you has a map.
Hard to imagine the mental state of those sailors. The temptation to start a new life and give up must have been strong. The hopelessness and fear must have been overwhelming.
You notice the way a raven walks. The sun’s moving lances of light piercing the dark clouds. The unfurling white banners of the crashing waves. You notice these things because it’s in your nature to notice.
With a phone, you notice: Every injustice and every fear – real, imagined and exaggerated. You notice this because it’s in your nature to notice. And by noticing, you profit someone else.
…don’t think you can time it so that you reach the same second of the same day each year and end up on the same spot on the Earth in its orbit. The whole solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy at around an estimated 500,000 km/hr. Just one hour of moving 500,000 kilometers is a distance much greater than the Earth’s distance to the moon.
— Read on dgilesphd.substack.com/p/no-you-dont-want-to-time-travel
One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intelligence is seeing it as some kind of unbounded scalar stat, like height. “Future AI will have 10,000 IQ”, that sort of thing. Intelligence is a conversion ratio, with an optimality bound. Increasing intelligence is not so much like “making the tower taller”, it’s more like “making the ball rounder”. At some point it’s already pretty damn spherical and any improvement is marginal.
— Read on www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-will-more-intelligence-actually
..,your name has a good chance of breaking down into two parts in exactly the same way as a Homeric hero’s, especially if you’re a George, Philip, Richard, or Roger.
This pattern, grafting two meaningful elements together, is extremely ancient, and extremely widespread: you see the same pattern not only in Ancient Greek names like Tele-machus ‘Far-Fight’ but also in medieval Germanic names like Æþel-stān ‘Noble-Stone’.
— Read on www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/does-your-name-belong-in-the-odyssey-indo-european-names
He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much warrioring … Nolan makes the protagonist a likeable, all-American hero; Homer’s Odysseus wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory.
Emily Wilson listed some of the difficulties of translating Homer into English. Among them: “There aren’t enough onomatopoeic words for very loud chaotic noises” (#2 on the list), “It’s very hard to come up with enough ways to describe intense desire to act that don’t connote modern psychology” (#5), and “There is no common English word of four syllables or fewer connoting ‘person particularly favored by Zeus due to high social status, and by the way this is a very normal ordinary word which is not drawing any special attention to itself whatsoever, beyond generic heroizing.’” (#7).
— Read on conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/emily-wilson/
Writing is still as important as ever, and it should be you doing the writing, not your AI. Writing forces you to think clearly and confront gaps in your logic. What has changed is that writing is no longer the only way to make an idea tangible. Coding agents are compressing the time between defining the problem and having something real in our hands to evaluate. It is time to amend the way we think about the process that’s brought us this far. You will learn more in one evening of building than in two weeks of writing about what you think will happen.
— Read on www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/06/return-to-two-pizza-culture.html
And while he has been warned and tricked and occasionally even guided by the gods, he finds—as Nolan’s protagonists often do—that they are cold and distant. The responsibility to fix what is broken is his, not fate’s. Man is alone in an uncaring universe, but he can also be the master of his own fate. This is Nolan’s worldview, his Odyssey, as much as it is Homer’s.
— Read on reason.com/2026/07/17/with-the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-earns-his-place-as-hollywoods-great-liberal-humanist/
From the iPhone home page:
As part of our efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, iPhone 17 does not include a power adapter or EarPods. Included in the box is a USB‑C Charge Cable that supports fast charging and is compatible with USB‑C power adapters and computer ports.
We encourage you to use any compatible USB‑C power adapter. If you need a new Apple power adapter or headphones, they are available for purchase.
Gross.
We thought—I thought—the internet served to create new forms of social participation. As in the old joke, we thought it was an orgasm, but it was asthma. The internet’s true affordance has been the emergence and training of AI. The internet digitized all our knowledge and all our language, making them available to AI. Now digital orality is making all our speech available to AI. By talking digitally with one another and with AI, we show AI how to connect all meanings to all contexts. By helping AI actualize language into speech, we show it how cognitive structures work. AI needs our digital orality, and that is why we are becoming digitally oral.
— Read on therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-andrey-mir
Culture is not your friend. Ideology is not your friend. And ideology…some people think what we’re trying to do here is sort out good ideologies from bad. Should I be a Marxist? Should I be a deconstructionist? And the answer is: no, none of the above. All ideologies are viral infections of some sort, memetic infections that erode your functionability and your comfort with yourself.
— Read on www.secretorum.life/p/the-great-disembedding-repost
A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed.
— Read on www.secretorum.life/p/the-great-disembedding-repost
You are part of the universe.
You ask, “what am I?”
Better stated: A part of the universe asks, “what am I?”
Through its parts, the universe is capable of asking “what am I?”
The total of all these parts asking “what am I?” is the total awakened consciousness of the universe.
The universe is aware.
The dream of the democratisation of film-making is coming true. Now that it’s feasible for an individual artist to create an entire film on their own, it’s worth reflecting on what we have lost.
— Read on yakimenko.substack.com/p/on-the-decline-of-sumptuousness-in
Everyone would smell so good.
A manicured lawn and flowers would be indescribably beautiful.
A Patagonia jacket, rain shell and boots would give people superhuman powers.
People would be calm and orderly, more meditative. Much less alcohol.
A 50 year old would look indescribably young.
We are emergent phenomena — higher-level patterns and processes that arise from, but are not reducible in any simple way to, the lower-level physics and chemistry.
A human is:
• A far-from-equilibrium dissipative structure (physics)
• Built from self-replicating, metabolizing carbon chemistry in aqueous solution (chemistry)
• That has evolved nervous systems capable of generating subjective conscious experience, self-models, and complex behavior (psychology)
We are the universe temporarily organizing itself into a form that can ask “What are we?” — localized pockets of negentropy and information that have become self-aware through billions of years of chemical and biological evolution. We are both the product of blind physical laws and something that experiences those laws from the inside.
From Grok.
From fundamental physics, a human is a temporary, localized configuration of quantum fields (or particles and forces in the Standard Model plus gravity) that maintains a high degree of internal order against the universal tendency toward increasing entropy (the second law of thermodynamics).
From Grok.
Chemically, you are a vast, coordinated network of molecular machines running on carbon chemistry in water, powered by redox gradients, and capable of copying its own blueprint with high (but imperfect) fidelity.
From Grok.
“Golf feels maddeningly hard to learn because it’s a perfect storm of technical precision, unnatural movements, instant feedback on every mistake, and a brutal mental component—all in an unpredictable environment. Unlike sports where athleticism or hand-eye coordination can carry you early on, golf punishes small errors harshly and rewards patience and consistency over raw talent.” – Grok AI
Basement Whatever 