Linked List: August 2026
Tuesday, 25 August 2026
- The Truman Show ✶
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It’s a visually stunning, spiritually powerful conclusion. It is the point of The Truman Show that we don’t know what world he is stepping into, and can’t follow him to see what happens next. This is about more than just turning off the TV, or setting down a smartphone; it’s about someone making the difficult choice to be himself outside the context of what others see and expect of him.
What a strange time we live in. Keep bringing more graphite, paint, and paper, musical instruments, and non-phone cameras to life.
Via Jank.cool
Saturday, 22 August 2026
- ♫ Just in Time ✶
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Nina Simone live at Casino Kursaal, 16th June 1968. Remembered this one while thinking about the Before trilogy of films.
Friday, 21 August 2026
- Self-playing games ✶
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Games that play themselves are like using AI for writing, drawing, and thinking, or, at the risk of making many people angry, watching others playing with balls on TV instead of playing yourself and rediscovering the pleasure of physical movement.
Wednesday, 19 August 2026
- AI hysteria’s effect on global decision making ✶
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Hoping it ends soon 🤦
Tuesday, 18 August 2026
- Writing using large language models, artificial intelligence (AI) ✶
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If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?
This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice.