The email that arrived at an antiquarian bookshop in Haarlem in the summer of 2026 listed 3,001 ISBNs. The bookseller, Pieter de Vries, assumed it was fraud. “Very unusual,” he told Fortune. “That's why I regarded the request as spam or phishing.” He deals in old and rare books, he explained, the kind that are expensive and exclusive, and nobody orders three thousand of those at once. When he later learned what such requests were widely believed to be for, his reaction was two words: “I was shocked!”

The detail that matters most about that list is the one least likely to survive a retelling. According to Fortune's account, the titles were mostly published in 2020 and 2021, and came from academic houses — Emerald, Elsevier, Wiley, Routledge, Oxford University Press. They were not incunabula. They were recent monographs, the sort of thing a university library buys and a secondhand dealer eventually inherits. The requesting party was 2077AI, which presents itself publicly as a Singapore-based non-profit open-data foundation building open datasets and benchmarks. It did not respond to Fortune's requests for comment.

This is the gap the story has been falling through since late July. There is a real, documented, court-evidenced programme of industrial book destruction carried out by a major AI laboratory. There is also a viral narrative about the last surviving copies of eighteenth-century texts being fed into shredders, which has almost no verifiable sourcing behind it. The two have fused into a single story, and the fusion is doing damage to both — it makes the real scandal easier to dismiss as hysteria, and it makes the hysteria harder to correct without appearing to defend the scandal.

So it is worth separating them carefully, because the actual cultural cost is not quite where the outrage has located it, and it is arguably worse.

What the Court Documents Actually Established

The foundational reporting is not from July 2026. It is from January.

On 27 January 2026, The Washington Post published an account, drawn from documents unsealed in copyright litigation, of an internal Anthropic initiative called Project Panama. An internal planning document put the objective without euphemism: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The same document instructed staff to keep it quiet. “We don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”

The mechanics, as described in the unsealed material and reported subsequently by outlets including IBTimes, were industrial rather than exotic. Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, formerly head of partnerships at Google Books, in February 2024, tasked according to internal documents with obtaining “all the books in the world”. Purchased volumes went to vendors who used hydraulic cutting machines to remove the spines, fed the resulting loose sheets through high-speed production scanners, and arranged for a recycling company to collect what was left. Vendor proposals reported by The Washington Post referenced converting somewhere between 500,000 and two million books over a six-month period. The company spent tens of millions of dollars on the stock.

None of this was a leak in the conventional sense. It emerged because the authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued, and discovery did what discovery does.

The reason the story detonated again in late July 2026 is a matter of coincidence and algorithm. On 20 July, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the Northern District of California granted final approval to the $1.5 billion settlement of the piracy claims in that case — a figure the Authors Guild describes as delivering roughly $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works. Six days later, on 26 July, an account on X posted a compressed summary of the whole affair. Elon Musk replied to it the following day. Within seventy-two hours, the story had been rewritten by dozens of outlets, many of them working from each other rather than from the January reporting or the court record.

That is how a January investigation into a 2024 programme became an August emergency.

The Ruling That Made Destruction the Prudent Choice

The legal architecture here is the part almost every retelling gets backwards, and it is the part that should worry people most.

On 23 June 2025, Senior District Judge William Alsup issued a partial summary judgment order that split Anthropic's conduct into three categories with three different answers. Training large language models on the books was, in his phrasing, exceedingly transformative, and therefore fair use. Downloading more than seven million books from Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror to build a permanent central library was not fair use, and was the conduct that produced the settlement. And the third category — the destructive scanning of lawfully purchased print copies — was fair use as a format change.

Alsup's reasoning on that third point deserves quoting rather than paraphrasing, because its logic has consequences. Every purchased print copy, he wrote, was copied in order to save storage space and enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.

Read that sequence again. The destruction is not incidental to the legal finding. It is load-bearing. What made the format shift defensible was precisely that no additional copy came into existence: the company that bought one book ended up with one book, in a different substrate. A firm that scanned non-destructively and kept the physical volume would have ended the process holding two copies where it had lawfully acquired one, and would have needed a different and less certain argument.

The first-sale doctrine does the rest of the work. Buy a book and you may burn it. Nothing in copyright law obliges a purchaser to preserve the object, and nothing obliges a purchaser to disclose to the seller what they intend to do with it.

The result is a legal regime in which the cheapest method of digitisation is also the safest method, and the method that preserves the artefact carries both a higher cost and a marginally higher legal risk. Whatever one thinks about the cultural stakes, that is a badly designed incentive. It is not that the law permits destruction. It is that the law, as applied, quietly rewards it.

What a Guillotine Removes

Destructive scanning is not a sinister technology. It is a boring one, and it is used every day by document bureaux digitising insurance files.

A hydraulic or guillotine cutter shears the bound edge off the text block, converting a book into a stack of loose leaves. Those leaves go through an automatic document feeder at rates that commercial operators quote in the thousands of pages per hour. The alternative — planetary or overhead scanning, where a bound volume rests in a cradle and a camera photographs each opening while a human or a robot turns pages — is slower, requires more expensive equipment, and produces images that need more correction for curvature and gutter shadow. Published price guides for digitisation services put the range across both methods at roughly ten cents to a pound and a half per page, with the destructive route sitting near the bottom of that band and bound-volume capture near the top.

So the trade is speed and unit cost against the survival of the object. On a two-million-book programme, that difference is real money. Against a training budget measured in billions, it is a rounding error — which is the substance of Musk's argument, and it is a good one.

What the guillotine takes is not the text. The text survives, in the sense that the words can be extracted. What it takes is everything about the copy that is not the text, and this is where rare-book librarians and bibliographers part company with engineers.

The guidance published by IFLA's Rare Books and Special Collections Section on planning digitisation projects is explicit that the physical object carries evidence the surrogate cannot. Provenance evidence — bookplates, ownership signatures, library stamps, booksellers' pencil codes, auction records tied to a specific copy — establishes where a book has been and who read it. Marginalia record what readers thought while they were reading, and constitute a distinct field of scholarship in their own right; the Early Modern Marginalia Research Network exists because annotations in the gutter of one particular copy are historical evidence of a kind nothing else supplies. Binding structures, sewing patterns, paper stock and watermarks date and locate production. Collation — the physical gathering structure — is how bibliographers distinguish issues and states of the same nominal edition, and how they detect made-up copies, cancels and substituted leaves.

A guillotine destroys collation evidence absolutely. It destroys the binding. It destroys the relationship between a specific annotation and a specific gathering. And a scan optimised for text extraction will not preserve any of it as a surrogate, because it is not trying to: training-oriented capture wants clean, legible, machine-readable characters, not colour-managed high-resolution page images with calibrated targets and structural metadata. There is no public evidence that Anthropic's scanning produced preservation-grade image files, and considerable evidence that it did not need to.

This distinction matters for a reason that goes beyond sentiment. A preservation scan is a surrogate that a future researcher can interrogate. A training scan is an extraction. When the extraction is done and the sheets have gone to the recycler, what remains is text inside a corporate storage system, and there is no public record of the correspondence between that text and the objects it came from.

Whether Anything Unique Was Actually Destroyed

Here is where the story needs discipline, because the most emotionally potent claim in circulation is also the least supported.

The claim, repeated across aggregator sites and social posts since late July, is that the last three copies of an eighteenth-century botanical text were shredded. I could not find a primary source for it. It does not appear in The Washington Post's January reporting, in 404 Media's investigation, in the Fortune piece, or in the Alsup order. It appears in commentary blogs and in downstream summaries, several of which cite each other. Until someone produces a title, an ISBN or accession record, and a holdings check, it should be treated as unverified, and outlets repeating it as fact are not helping.

The companies named have all denied the strong version. An Anthropic spokesperson has stated that none of its data acquisition programmes buys and destroys “rare” or “antiquarian” books, that it procures from mainstream commercial markets, and that it never bought from Zoom Books, the Canadian firm at the centre of the Australian and European bookseller complaints. Zoom Books, responding in May 2026 to accusations published by the Spanish outlet Demócrata, said that it acquires secondhand books and resells them intact, and that it does not digitise or destroy books for the purpose of training AI models, calling contrary claims inaccurate; it added, The Atlantic reported, that it did not to its knowledge sell books for those purposes. ISBNdb, whose marketing pages 404 Media exposed on 21 July, removed those pages nine days later and posted a denial stating that it has never purchased, scanned or sold a book, that it does not train AI models, and that the page was a test of market interest for a service never launched.

Zoom's qualifier matters: the 2024 destruction is documented in court records; this year's bulk orders are not attributed. Investigating for The Atlantic in early August, Alex Reisner found the surge real but the end buyer unconfirmed: some Zoom orders shipped to PrepFort, an Amazon and Walmart logistics firm that declined to discuss its clients. Reisner judged it very possible the books were bound for AI companies, but not certain. A Houston bookseller, Charlie Becker, read his own orders as Amazon arbitrage: underpriced books bought to relist at a markup.

One strand has since been traced: on 17 August, 404 Media reported that an AirTag hidden in a bulk order had ended at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas where, an anonymous former worker said, spines are cut and pages scanned. Amazon said only that it “purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.” That links one order to one company, and no more.

Denials are not proof. But nor is their absence, and there is currently no documented instance of a specific unique or near-unique title being destroyed by an AI training programme. What is documented is the destruction of millions of ordinary in-copyright books, and bulk purchase requests for recent academic monographs.

Anthropic's denial is less tidy than it sounds. Unsealed emails reviewed by Snopes show Turvey telling Wonder Book, a bulk bookseller, in August 2024 that “less common books are a great place to start.” Asked to clarify, Anthropic distinguished “rare and valuable” books from harder-to-find professional and reference titles. That distinction concerns price, not how many copies survive.

The counterweight comes from library science, and it complicates both sides. Research by OCLC on what its authors call the collective collection has repeatedly found that scarcity in print holdings is the norm rather than the exception. In one analysis of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation's shared print collection, roughly three-quarters of titles were held by three or fewer member libraries. In work on the collective collection of Research Libraries UK, close to ninety per cent of print book publications were held by fewer than five libraries in the group. Across large mega-regional aggregations, at least three-quarters of titles sat in five or fewer institutions.

Two conclusions follow, and they point in opposite directions. The first is that “rare” is close to meaningless as a category boundary, because thin holdings are ordinary. The second is that thin holdings are precisely what makes bulk destruction risky: if most titles survive in only a handful of institutional copies, then the secondhand market is not a reservoir of redundancy. It is a thin layer over a thin layer.

Deposit systems provide a partial floor. Under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom must be deposited with the British Library, with five further libraries entitled to request copies. Comparable regimes operate in most publishing nations. Anything published commercially in a country with functioning legal deposit almost certainly survives somewhere in an institutional collection, regardless of what happens to the secondhand stock.

The categories that fall outside that floor are the ones nobody is checking: self-published and small-press work, regional and community publications, non-commercial technical and trade literature, foreign-language material published in jurisdictions with weak deposit enforcement, and the enormous grey zone of items that were deposited but never catalogued into any union catalogue searchable today.

Which brings us to the actual finding, and it is not the one either camp wants. Nobody knows whether a unique copy was destroyed, because nobody kept a manifest. There is no published, title-level record of what went through the cutters. No holdings check was performed. No threshold was set. The absence of that record is not a side issue; it is the centre of the case. A programme that destroys books at industrial scale without logging what it destroys has made its own claim of innocence unfalsifiable, and has simultaneously made the accusation against it unfalsifiable too. That is a choice, and it was Anthropic's to make differently.

Whether the Paper Was Really Necessary

The demand-side justification, as ISBNdb marketed it to prospective clients, is elegant. “The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” the pitch read, describing books as curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate — dense, edited, authoritative. And the pages carried a candid aside that 404 Media quoted and which has since done more reputational damage than anything else in the story: the optics problem is real, because “AI company destroys two million books” is not a headline that generates sympathy.

The underlying scientific worry is genuine. Ilia Shumailov and colleagues published a paper in Nature in July 2024 showing that generative models trained recursively on their own outputs degrade, losing the tails of the distribution and converging on blandness — the phenomenon popularised as model collapse. The paper received an author correction in Nature in 2025 and remains widely cited. If the open web is progressively filling with synthetic text, then pre-2022 print is a supply of guaranteed-human material, and its scarcity value rises with every model release.

But the literature is less apocalyptic than the marketing. A response by Ali Borji argued that the reported behaviour is a general statistical consequence of repeatedly fitting a distribution and resampling from it, rather than a novel property of language models. More consequentially, Matthias Gerstgrasser, Rylan Schaeffer and co-authors demonstrated in 2024 that collapse follows from replacing real data with each generation's synthetic output, and that accumulating synthetic data alongside the original real data avoids collapse — a result they showed across model sizes, architectures and hyperparameters, and reproduced in diffusion models and variational autoencoders. Nobody in the industry is deleting their pre-2022 corpora. The realistic scenario is accumulation, which is the regime in which collapse does not occur.

Scarcity of human text is also a softer constraint than the pitch implies. Epoch AI's analysis puts the effective stock of human-generated public text at around 300 trillion tokens, with a wide confidence interval, and projects full utilisation somewhere between 2026 and 2032 — an estimate that has already been pushed back once by improvements in data efficiency and repeated-epoch training.

Set the numbers side by side and the arithmetic is instructive. Take the upper end of the vendor proposals reported by The Washington Post — two million books — and assume a generous average of around 100,000 words per volume. That is on the order of 260 billion tokens: roughly a tenth of one per cent of Epoch's central estimate of the total human text stock. The case for print therefore cannot rest on volume. It rests entirely on a claim about quality weighting — that an edited monograph is worth some large multiple of an equivalent quantity of web text — and no laboratory has published the numbers that would let anyone outside evaluate that multiple.

This is the point at which the trade-off in the original question becomes difficult to state honestly. Is a unique book worth an incremental improvement in model performance? Nobody has quantified the improvement. The industry is asking the public to accept an irreversible cost against an unspecified and unaudited benefit, which is not a trade-off so much as a request for trust.

And the trade-off is in any case a false binary, because destruction was never required to obtain the text. Google Books digitised more than forty million volumes using predominantly non-destructive camera rigs. The Internet Archive scans non-destructively and then, rather than pulping, maintains a physical archive in Richmond, California, storing volumes in modified shipping containers held at controlled temperature and around thirty per cent relative humidity. Both organisations solved the engineering problem of mass digitisation without solving it by disposal. The difference is cost per unit and, in Anthropic's case, the legal convenience of ending up with exactly one copy.

What the Booksellers Are Objecting To

The booksellers' complaint is not a legal complaint, and pretending otherwise weakens it.

In Australia, Guardian reporting recorded a pattern that dealers found unmistakable once they saw it. John Sainsbury of Sainsburys Books in Melbourne described a run of orders from Zoom Books for titles with no relationship to one another — engineering, cycling, poetry, local history — placed with apparent indifference to price. Delfina Manor of Good Reading Secondhand Books in Benalla, Victoria received an order in May large enough that fulfilling it became an ordeal: “It was just driving me nuts.” A German dealer reported orders arriving between three and five in the morning. Booksellers quoted by The Guardian described the practice of cutting spines and discarding the remains as horrific. The Telegraph's Chris Stokel-Walker headlined his 30 July piece with the phrase cultural barbarism. A seller quoted anonymously by 404 Media captured the ambivalence better than either: the buying benefits him financially, but “I don't like the end-use, and I don't like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

Under first sale, none of this gives rise to a cause of action. A buyer may destroy what they own and need not explain themselves. If the objection were simply that destruction is wrong, it would prove too much: the book trade already pulps enormous quantities of unsold and unsellable stock, and remainder destruction is a routine part of publishing economics.

The objection rests on three narrower things, and they are stronger for being narrow.

The first is deliberate opacity. ISBNdb's withdrawn marketing did not merely offer sourcing; according to 404 Media's reporting it offered anonymity, positioning buyer confidentiality as a feature and naming the reputational reason. Anthropic's own planning document recorded that it did not want the work known. Concealment of end use is not fraud, but it is a considered decision to prevent the counterparty from exercising a judgement they would otherwise have exercised. Booksellers are not claiming a right to control what buyers do. They are claiming that they were placed on the wrong side of an information asymmetry that was engineered on purpose. Routed through confidential intermediaries, the 2026 orders leave sellers unable to tell whether a parcel ends in a scanner, an Amazon relisting or a recycler.

The second is role morality. Antiquarian and secondhand dealers do not generally think of themselves as retailers of interchangeable units. The trade's self-conception is custodial: a book passes through your hands on its way to the next reader, and part of the job is judging where it should go. That is a professional identity, not a legal entitlement, but it is the reason the reaction has been visceral rather than commercial.

The third is market structure. Price-insensitive bulk buying in a thin market does not merely remove copies; it distorts the pricing signals dealers use to allocate scarce stock, and it strips the mid-list and specialist tiers fastest, because those are where supply is thinnest and the buyer's indifference to price bites hardest. If a programme wants two million books and does not care which two million, the books it takes are the ones nobody else was competing for — which is another way of describing the scarce ones.

The Precedent That Should Have Settled This

None of this is unprecedented, and the precedent is close enough that its absence from most of the coverage is conspicuous.

In April 2001, Nicholson Baker published Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, expanded from a New Yorker piece of July 2000. Its subject was the mid-century programme under which American research libraries, including the Library of Congress, microfilmed newspapers and books and then discarded the originals, on the reasoning that wood-pulp paper was embrittling towards inevitable disintegration. Baker argued that the brittleness case was overstated, that the space savings were the real motive, and that irreplaceable runs of newspapers had been destroyed to produce surrogates that were often poorly made, badly filmed, and stripped of the colour supplements and physical evidence the originals carried.

The book was contested immediately — Richard Cox's response for the Society of American Archivists is the best-known rebuttal — and Baker conceded in his preface that it was not an impartial piece of reporting. Some of his specific charges were unfair to librarians working under genuine preservation pressures and real budget constraints.

But the structural lesson survived the argument, and it is precisely applicable. Surrogate-making organisations systematically underestimate what the original carries, because they define value in terms of the thing they are capturing. The loss is invisible until someone needs the original for a purpose the surrogate-maker did not anticipate. And by the time that purpose arises, the decision is unreviewable.

Apply that to a training scan. The purpose is text extraction. Everything defined as noise — the binding, the annotation, the paper, the collation, the ownership marks — is discarded twice: once when the capture is specified, and again when the sheets go to the recycler. If a future researcher, or for that matter a court in some later case weighing Alsup's reasoning, wanted to examine the physical objects, there is nothing to examine.

Musk, and the Limits of a Pledge

On 27 July 2026, replying to the X post that had propelled the story, Elon Musk wrote: “I've asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning.”

Two corrections are warranted, one to the sceptics and one to the enthusiasts.

To the sceptics: SpaceXAI is a real entity. CNBC reported that SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock transaction announced on 2 February 2026, valuing the combined business at $1.25 trillion, folding xAI, Grok and the X platform into SpaceX; the merged company listed on Nasdaq in June 2026, and the xAI name was retired in favour of SpaceXAI in July. Dismissing the pledge on the grounds that no such company exists is wrong.

To the enthusiasts: the pledge is close to unfalsifiable. It does not define “rare”. It specifies no holdings threshold, no catalogue against which rarity would be assessed, no verification, no audit, no reporting, and no consequence for non-compliance. It is a sentence on a social platform. Musk's associated observation — that the extra cost of careful scanning is trivial against budgets in the billions, and that slower capture still yields the training data while the book survives — is entirely correct and is the strongest argument anyone in the industry has made. But an argument is not a policy, and no published policy has followed.

That this is nonetheless the most substantive public commitment any frontier laboratory has made on the question tells you where the floor currently sits.

What a Serious Response Would Require

The useful question is not whether shredding is barbarism. It is what a competent regime would look like, given that mass digitisation of print is going to continue and that most of it is unobjectionable.

Six measures would do most of the work, and none of them is technically hard.

A destruction manifest, published at title level. Every volume destroyed, logged by ISBN or bibliographic identifier, with the log made public or lodged with a deposit library. This is the cheapest measure and the most important, because it converts an unanswerable argument into a checkable one. Its absence is why nobody can say whether the eighteenth-century botanical text ever existed.

A holdings check before the cutter. Union catalogues exist. WorldCat, Library Hub Discover and national union catalogues can be queried programmatically. A rule that any title falling below a stated threshold of recorded holdings is routed away from destruction would be trivial to implement at the scale these programmes operate, and would cost a fraction of a per cent of the acquisition budget.

Deposit after scanning. Where a title clears the threshold and is destroyed anyway, the alternative for flagged items should be that the intact volume is offered to a deposit or research library, with the acquiring company funding carriage. Where the volume has already been cut, the loose text block should be boxed and offered rather than recycled: a guillotined block is not an artefact, but it is not nothing, and it preserves the leaves, the annotations and the paper.

Preservation-grade capture where destruction occurs. If a copy is going to be destroyed, the images taken from it should meet archival imaging standards rather than extraction standards, with the page images retained and escrowed rather than discarded after text extraction. The marginal cost of capturing at higher resolution during a pass you are making anyway is small. The marginal value, given that the original will not exist afterwards, is large.

Disclosure at the point of sale. A simple end-use declaration to the seller — this order is for digitisation and the volumes will be destroyed — resolves the consent objection entirely. Sellers who object can decline or price accordingly. Sellers who do not care can proceed. The only thing disclosure costs is the anonymity that ISBNdb was explicitly marketing.

A regulatory hook that already exists. Article 53 of the EU AI Act obliges providers of general-purpose AI models to publish a sufficiently detailed summary of training content; the Commission published its mandatory template on 24 July 2025, with obligations applying from 2 August 2025 and a 2027 deadline for models already on the market. The Commission has been able to enforce them, with fines, since 2 August 2026, and the Digital Omnibus did not delay them. The template covers data origin and curation. It would take no new legislation, only interpretive guidance, to establish that acquisition provenance — including whether physical originals were destroyed — falls within scope. That is the single most available lever anyone concerned about this has.

The Record of What Was Lost

So: does the permanent loss of a book that may exist nowhere else constitute an acceptable price for incrementally improving a model?

The question, posed that way, cannot be answered, and it is worth being clear about why. The loss has not been demonstrated — no unique title has been identified, and the most-repeated claim to the contrary has no traceable source. The improvement has not been quantified — no laboratory has published what two million books bought them. And the trade is false in any case, because Google and the Internet Archive have both demonstrated that the text can be obtained at scale without the destruction, and Musk is right that the cost differential is negligible against these budgets.

What can be said is narrower and, I think, more damning than the viral version.

An organisation set out to destructively scan, in its own words, all the books in the world. It recorded in writing that it did not want this known. It destroyed millions of volumes without checking, at any point, how many other copies of any of them existed. It kept no public record of what it destroyed. It captured those volumes to a standard suited to text extraction rather than preservation, ensuring that even the digital residue is a diminished thing. And the legal reasoning that blessed the arrangement did so partly because the physical copy was destroyed — meaning the destruction was not a regrettable byproduct but a component of the defence.

The cultural cost is therefore not primarily the books. It is the erasure of the record of the books: the fact that this transaction between the physical past and the computational present was conducted without a ledger, and that we are now reduced to arguing about botanical texts nobody can name because the only people who could settle the question chose not to write anything down.

Nicholson Baker's complaint about the microfilmers was never really that they preferred film to paper. It was that they made an irreversible decision on behalf of everyone who came afterwards, using a definition of value that suited their own project, and that they did it without keeping account. A quarter of a century later, with better machines and vastly more money, the same decision has been made the same way. The remedy has not changed either. Check the holdings. Keep the manifest. Offer the copy. Tell the seller.

None of that would have cost anything meaningful. That it was not done is the answer to the question.

References

1. Fortune, “This Dutch bookseller thought a request for 3,000 copies was 'spam or phishing.' Instead, AI companies are scanning and destroying books to train AI”, 31 July 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/
2. The Washington Post, “Anthropic 'destructively' scanned millions of books to build Claude”, 27 January 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/
3. Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media, “AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop”, 21 July 2026. https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/
4. 404 Media, “Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage”, 30 July 2026. https://www.404media.co/ai-company-training-scanning-books-database-isbndb/
5. IBTimes UK, “Inside Project Panama, Anthropic's Secret Effort To Scan and Shred the World's Books”, 2026. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anthropic-secret-book-scanning-operation-1811155
6. Chris Stokel-Walker, The Telegraph, “Cultural barbarism: How AI companies are destroying the world's books”, 30 July 2026 (paywalled; text and citation recorded at Kip Currier, Management and Leadership, 30 July 2026). http://kipcurriermanagementleadership.blogspot.com/2026/07/cultural-barbarism-how-ai-companies-are.html
7. Outlook India, “Explained: Why Australian Booksellers Are Raising Alarm Over AI's Book Hunt”, 2 August 2026. https://www.outlookindia.com/international/explained-why-australian-booksellers-are-raising-alarm-over-ais-book-hunt
8. Publishers Lunch, “Zoom Books Responds To Accusations of Selling Books For AI Scraping”, 27 May 2026. https://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2026/05/zoom-books-responds-to-accusations-of-selling-books-for-ai-scraping/
9. United States District Court, Northern District of California, “Order on Fair Use, Bartz v. Anthropic PBC”, 23 June 2025. https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf
10. The Authors Guild, “Court Grants Final Approval of $1.5 Billion Anthropic Copyright Settlement”, July 2026. https://authorsguild.org/news/court-grants-final-approval-anthropic-copyright-settlement/
11. Elon Musk, post on X replying to @HedgieMarkets, 27 July 2026. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2081844165881594362
12. CNBC, “Musk's xAI, SpaceX combo is the biggest merger of all time, valued at $1.25 trillion”, 3 February 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/03/musk-xai-spacex-biggest-merger-ever.html
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14. Ali Borji, “A Note on Shumailov et al. (2024): 'AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data'“, arXiv:2410.12954, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12954
15. Matthias Gerstgrasser, Rylan Schaeffer, Apratim Dey, Rafael Rafailov and colleagues, “Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Data”, arXiv:2404.01413, 1 April 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413
16. Pablo Villalobos, Anson Ho, Jaime Sevilla, Tamay Besiroglu, Lennart Heim and Marius Hobbhahn, “Will we run out of data? Limits of LLM scaling based on human-generated data”, Epoch AI, 2024. https://epoch.ai/publications/will-we-run-out-of-data-limits-of-llm-scaling-based-on-human-generated-data
17. IFLA Rare Books and Special Collections Section, “Guidelines for Planning the Digitization of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections”, September 2014. https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/rare-books-and-manuscripts/rbms-guidelines/guidelines-for-planning-digitization.pdf
18. Brian Lavoie, “Reflections on Collective Collections”, College & Research Libraries / OCLC Research preprint, 2020. https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/2020/oclcresearch-reflections-on-collective-collections-preprint.pdf
19. Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, UK Public General Acts. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/28
20. Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Random House, April 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
21. Richard J. Cox, “Don't Fold Up: Responding to Nicholson Baker's Double Fold”, Society of American Archivists, 2001. https://www2.archivists.org/news/2001/dont-fold-up-responding-to-nicholson-bakers-double-fold-by-richard-j-cox
22. Alex Reisner, The Atlantic, “Someone Is Mysteriously Snapping Up Used Books Around the World”, 5 August 2026. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/ai-companies-buying-used-books-for-data/688167/
23. Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media, “We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility”, 17 August 2026. https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/
24. Anna Rascouët-Paz, Snopes, “Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?”, 3 August 2026. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/
25. Mayer Brown, “EU AI Act News: Digital Omnibus on AI, New Guidance on Risk Classification, GPAI, and Transparency Obligations”, 30 July 2026. https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2026/07/eu-ai-act-news-digital-omnibus-on-ai-new-guidance-on-risk-classification-gpai-and-transparency-obligations

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Chapter 1: The Answer You Almost Gave

The phone is warm against his ear when an old friend asks a familiar question. They have been talking about work, a leaking roof, and a neighbor who has been sick for months. Then the friend laughs and says, “You still think praying is a waste of time, right?” For years, the answer would have come easily. They had shared that opinion so often that it had become part of how they knew each other. But the man is standing in his dark kitchen, looking at the small notebook where he has been writing prayers that he barely knows how to say. He has not told anyone about the notebook. He is afraid his friend will laugh, but he is more afraid of hearing himself repeat words that no longer feel true.

He could say yes and keep the conversation comfortable. The friend would move on, and nothing about their relationship would seem to change. Yet the man would know he had made himself smaller to preserve an older version of their friendship. It is a quiet struggle, the kind that often goes unnoticed when people speak about dramatic changes in life. In the companion video about why you do not have to remain the person you were, the invitation to change sounds freeing, and it is. What we do not always admit is that freedom can make us uneasy when the people we love have learned to recognize us by the opinions we used to hold.

Perhaps the details of this man's experience are different from yours, but you may know the feeling. You once believed something with complete confidence, defended it at family gatherings, and made decisions around it. Now you are less certain. Maybe faith has become important to you after years of avoiding the subject. Maybe you have realized that the way you spoke about a particular group of people was unfair. Perhaps your understanding of forgiveness or success has changed after living through something you never expected. Making room for a changed heart and an honest life can mean admitting that you no longer agree with your own earlier words. That can feel embarrassing even when the change is good.

We tend to think consistency always means strength. People praise those who stand by their convictions, and sometimes that praise is deserved. There are truths worth holding to when they are unpopular. But a person who refuses to reconsider anything can confuse loyalty to the truth with loyalty to an old statement. If evidence, experience, prayer, and honest reflection have taught you something, repeating a familiar answer is not necessarily faithfulness. You may simply be afraid to let others see you learning. There is a humility in saying, “I thought one thing then. I understand it differently now.” The sentence does not erase the years before it. It allows those years to be part of a life that is still being lived.

I think about Nicodemus, who came to Jesus at night in John 3. He was a Pharisee, a teacher with a place in a religious community and a framework for understanding the world. He did not arrive with every question settled. He came because what he had seen and heard about Jesus demanded his attention. Their conversation was difficult. Jesus spoke about being born again, and Nicodemus struggled to understand what that meant. I find it moving that Scripture allows us to see a knowledgeable man asking questions he cannot answer. He has enough standing to defend what he already knows, yet he comes close enough to hear something that unsettles it.

We cannot know every reason Nicodemus visited at night, and it would be unfair to invent his private fears. But the setting invites us to recognize the vulnerability of an honest question. Nicodemus did not have to arrive with a polished testimony in order to speak with Jesus. He could come with confusion. Later in John's Gospel, he appears again, first asking whether the law judges a man before hearing him, and then helping with Jesus' burial. These moments do not tell us everything about his inner journey, but they show a man whose actions cannot be reduced to the first conversation we witnessed. Scripture makes room for an unfolding response rather than demanding that every important change be instant and fully understood.

The man on the phone is not living in first-century Jerusalem. He has a tired friend who expects a familiar joke, an unpaid bill on the counter, and a notebook he keeps behind the cookbooks. He may not be ready for a long conversation about belief, and he does not have to deliver one. He can answer truthfully without attacking the friend who still thinks differently. “Actually, I've been thinking about that,” he might say. “I don't see it quite the same way anymore.” His friend may be curious, amused, or uncomfortable. The man cannot manage that reaction in advance. He can only decide whether keeping the peace is worth saying something he no longer believes.

Of course, changing your mind does not automatically mean you have reached the truth. People can be persuaded by fear, pressure, or the desire to belong. That is why Christian growth requires more than following the strongest feeling of the week. We need Scripture, prayer, careful thinking, and the humility to listen to wise people who may disagree with us. First Thessalonians 5 calls believers to test things and hold fast to what is good. That is very different from demanding that we never question a conclusion we reached ten years ago. A faith that can ask honest questions is not necessarily weak. Sometimes a question is the beginning of learning to trust God more deeply.

There can also be grief in leaving an old certainty behind. You may miss the ease of knowing exactly what to say. You may worry that changing your perspective means you were foolish before, or that a friendship will no longer feel as effortless. Some relationships do change when our convictions change, and that can be painful. But we do not need to humiliate our former selves in order to grow. We can acknowledge that we acted on what we understood at the time, admit where we were careless, and take responsibility for whatever harm needs repair. God does not require us to pretend we always knew what we know now. He invites us to walk in the light we are being given.

After the call, perhaps the man sits at the kitchen table and opens his notebook. He does not write a declaration about becoming a completely different person. He writes the question that has been following him for weeks: “God, if You are listening, teach me to be truthful about what I am beginning to believe.” He may still have doubts the following morning. He may still be awkward when his friend brings up the subject again. But tonight, he has chosen not to borrow an answer from the person he used to be. The words on the page are uncertain, and they are his. For the first time in a long while, that is enough to make the room feel honest.

Chapter 2: The Reply You No Longer Have to Write

The phone lights up beside a basket of clean towels. A woman is folding pillowcases when she sees a message from her brother, someone she has barely spoken to since an argument about their mother's care two years earlier. He has found a recipe card in an old kitchen drawer and wants to know whether she would like a photograph of it. His message is brief and ordinary. There is no apology for the things he said during that argument, no acknowledgment of the nights she spent handling appointments while he questioned her decisions from a distance. She reads the message and feels her body prepare for a fight that has not yet begun. Before touching the keyboard, she has already composed the first paragraph of a reply explaining everything he still refuses to understand.

She knows the words by heart. She has delivered them in the car when nobody was listening, whispered them while washing dishes, and revised them during sleepless nights. In those private arguments she is always able to recall the right date, the forgotten promise, the exact sentence that hurt. What troubles her now is not that the hurt has disappeared. It hasn't. She is beginning to wonder why a conversation from two years ago still gets to decide how she spends an otherwise peaceful Tuesday afternoon. There was a time when rehearsing her defense helped her feel less powerless. Now she sometimes finishes these imaginary confrontations feeling as wounded as she did when the argument first happened.

I think anger can become part of the way we recognize ourselves. We might not enjoy it, and we may never describe ourselves as angry people, but we begin carrying an account of what happened that we check whenever we feel overlooked. It tells us who let us down and why we must never be caught unprepared again. Sometimes that account contains important truths. A family member may have behaved selfishly. Someone may have crossed a boundary that still needs to be respected. But when we consult the same injury in every new interaction, we can lose the ability to recognize what is happening now. We stop answering the message in front of us and begin answering every message we never sent.

This is a difficult place to speak about forgiveness, because the word has sometimes been used to silence people who were genuinely harmed. You may have been told that a good Christian would stop being upset, restore the relationship immediately, and never mention the injury again. I do not believe that is an honest picture of love. Forgiveness is not a command to deny facts, abandon wise boundaries, or put yourself back in reach of someone who continues to mistreat you. There are relationships where distance remains necessary. There are wrongs that require accountability even when a person no longer wants revenge. A changed heart is not a heart that has forgotten how to protect itself.

Jesus teaches His followers to love their enemies and pray for those who mistreat them. I notice that He does not begin by asking us to prove that the mistreatment was harmless. Love can name harm truthfully. It may refuse to answer cruelty with cruelty, even when we have every opportunity to do so. That can be much harder than pretending nothing happened. It asks us to surrender the pleasure of a perfectly aimed insult without surrendering our judgment. When I think about the people I have been tempted to argue with long after a conversation ended, I understand why this teaching reaches so deeply. Our reactions can become habits of the heart, and habits do not loosen merely because we wish they would.

There is a sentence in Romans 12 that makes room for the limits of our control: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Peace is not always possible in the form we want. Both people may not be willing to tell the truth or take responsibility. But something still depends on us. We can refuse to invent a fresh injury when the present moment has not given us one. We can speak clearly instead of trying to make another person feel small. We can decide that a simple question does not require us to reopen an entire history over text. Sometimes we can also decide that we are not ready to answer at all.

The woman puts the phone down and finishes folding the towels. This is not a trick for suppressing her emotions. She needs a little space to distinguish what the message actually asks from what she fears it means. Her brother has offered to send a photograph of a recipe card. He has not asked her to excuse his behavior or declared that everything is fine between them. She can want the photograph without pretending the relationship is repaired. She can also decline it if contact would leave her distressed. The choice is hers, and she no longer needs to make it for the purpose of proving that she was right.

Perhaps she replies, “Yes, I'd like a photo of that. Thank you.” The words are simple, almost disappointingly so. They do not settle the deeper conflict. Her brother may respond warmly, or he may send the image without another word. If they eventually talk about their mother's care, there may be difficult things to say, and she can say them. But she will be able to enter that conversation on its own terms rather than asking every ordinary exchange to serve as a courtroom. That is a kind of freedom I wish more people were offered: not the pressure to reconcile before they are ready, but the possibility of making one choice without letting the past dictate every part of it.

We can practice something similar when no message arrives. If you have spent years waiting for someone to admit they were wrong, you may know the strange feeling of organizing your inner life around a conversation that may never happen. You imagine finally being understood, and there is a real sadness in realizing you cannot make another person give you that understanding. Prayer can become a place to say that sadness plainly. “Lord, I wanted them to see what they did. I still want that. Help me carry this without becoming cruel.” There is no need to dress the prayer in language that sounds more forgiving than you feel. God can meet an honest person in the middle of unfinished work.

The woman's phone lights up again. There is the photograph, slightly crooked, showing the recipe in her mother's familiar handwriting. For a few seconds she studies the worn corner of the card and the little note about adding extra cinnamon. She feels sad because her mother is no longer there to explain why the note was added. She also feels grateful that the card has not been lost. Her brother's message has given her something she wanted, even though much between them remains unresolved. She can let this small kindness be what it is without forcing it to carry the entire weight of their relationship.

You may discover that becoming someone new does not always look like a dramatic act of courage. Sometimes it means noticing that you are about to spend another evening defending yourself to someone who is not in the room, and choosing to attend to the life that is there instead. That does not erase your history. It does not make the other person right. It means the hurt will no longer be consulted about every decision you make. There may still be days when the old argument returns, and you can meet those days with honesty rather than shame. Little by little, you may learn that being understood by everyone is not a condition you must satisfy before you are allowed to live in peace.

Chapter 3: The Part of Yourself You Left in a Drawer

The drawer sticks halfway open, and a man has to lift it slightly to get past a loose screw. He is looking for a spare phone charger when he finds a thin notebook beneath a stack of instruction manuals. The cover has a coffee stain, and the first few pages are filled with sketches of houses, storefronts, and people sitting at bus stops. He recognizes the drawings immediately. He made them years ago, before work became more demanding and before he began saying that drawing was something children did. He turns another page, then closes the book because he feels foolish standing in his own kitchen with it. Nobody is there to laugh at him. He has become very good at doing that himself.

There was never a great catastrophe that made him stop. A supervisor once teased him for drawing during a lunch break. Someone in his family asked what he expected to earn from it. Then came rent, a mortgage, children, and the long stretch of days when the practical thing always seemed to come first. He loved his family and took pride in working hard. Those years mattered. Yet somewhere along the way he started speaking about the person who liked to draw with a dismissive smile, as though that young man's interest had been an embarrassing mistake. He did not simply stop making pictures. He learned to be ashamed of wanting to make them.

I wonder how many people have done something similar without noticing. We remember the embarrassing haircut, the plan that never worked, the enthusiasm we showed before somebody told us to be realistic. We laugh at our younger selves, and some of that laughter is harmless. Experience gives us a perspective we did not have then. But sometimes the laughter has an edge. It is a way of telling ourselves that the parts of us which hoped too openly deserved what happened to them. If we keep speaking about that younger person with contempt, we may become afraid to care deeply about anything that does not come with a guarantee.

This is different from regretting a harmful decision. Some choices require apology and repair. We should not call them good simply because we understand why we made them. But there are other memories that carry shame without wrongdoing. You tried to learn a language and stopped. You asked someone to listen to an idea and they were uninterested. You enjoyed singing until someone told you that your voice was unpleasant. The disappointment was real, but it may have quietly grown into a judgment about what kind of person you were permitted to be. One person's reaction became a rule you kept obeying long after they had forgotten the conversation.

I am moved by the detail in Exodus 31, where God appoints Bezalel for skilled work in building the tabernacle. The passage names craftsmanship involving gold, silver, bronze, stone, and wood. It gives careful human making a place in the work of worship. I do not think this means every hobby is a calling or that a person who once enjoyed drawing must become a professional artist. It tells me that our lives with God are not limited to the parts that appear solemn or obviously religious. Skill, patience, attention, and beauty can matter. Sometimes the things we do with our hands allow us to offer care that words cannot quite express.

The man holds the notebook open again. He notices how closely he once looked at ordinary people. One drawing shows a woman waiting for a bus with grocery bags resting at her feet. Another shows his grandfather's hands around a coffee cup. He can see mistakes in the proportions and awkward lines he would change now. But he also sees attention. He cared enough to sit still and notice another person's life. He has spent years calling that habit a waste of time, yet he has never called it a waste of time when someone else's photograph, song, or handmade gift brought him comfort. The rule seems harsher when he applies it to himself.

An honest return to something we once loved does not have to become a new assignment. He need not buy expensive supplies, announce a project, or promise to produce a drawing every morning. The pressure to turn an interest into an achievement could become another way to lose it. He might leave a pencil beside the notebook and draw while the laundry runs. If he finds that he no longer enjoys it, he can put it aside without accusing himself of failure. The freedom is not in proving the old dream was secretly destined to succeed. It is in allowing himself to find out what remains of it now.

There may be another kind of drawer in your life. It might hold the letter you never mailed to someone who encouraged you, or a recipe you stopped making after a family changed. Perhaps it is not an object at all but a way of being that once came easily: curiosity, playfulness, the pleasure of learning without being graded. A person can become responsible and still remain open to delight. We do not have to choose between caring for the people who depend on us and admitting there are things that make us feel awake. The question is whether we can make room for them honestly, within the limits of the life we have.

Psalm 139 speaks of being known by God with an intimacy that exceeds our ability to explain ourselves. I find comfort in that when I think about the quiet desires we have learned to dismiss. We can bring them into prayer without demanding that God turn every desire into a plan. A simple prayer might be, “Lord, I miss the part of me that used to enjoy this. Help me see whether there is room for it again.” It is all right if the answer unfolds slowly. God is not asking us to manufacture an exciting new identity or to make up for years we cannot recover. We can be truthful about what those years held and still live with some openness toward what comes next.

That evening the man sits at the table after supper with his old notebook and a sharpened pencil. The first lines look stiff. He has forgotten how to make a hand look like a hand. He nearly closes the book when his wife comes through the room, but instead he tells her what he found. She pulls up a chair to look. He shows her the sketch of his grandfather's coffee cup, and they talk for a while about the man who used to sit at that table. Then his wife goes back to her reading, and he keeps drawing. He has not recovered his youth, and he has not discovered a hidden career. He has simply stopped treating one harmless, hopeful part of himself as something he needed to outgrow.

Chapter 4: The Evening You Finally Stay

The school auditorium is almost full when a man finds his daughter standing near the back doors. She has saved him a seat for her son's first concert, and he is holding a little bunch of flowers wrapped in grocery-store paper. He checks his watch, although he arrived early. Years ago, when his daughter was young, he missed more of her school events than he cares to remember. Work was always running late, or he had promised somebody else he would help, or he simply assumed there would be another performance. He knows that an evening in a crowded auditorium cannot give those hours back. As he follows her toward the seats, he feels the familiar urge to explain why he was absent so often, even though they have already had that conversation.

Some regrets do not stay in the past where they belong. They accompany us into good moments and whisper that we have not earned the right to enjoy them. A person can admit a failure, apologize sincerely, and change the way they live, yet still treat every new kindness as something they must pay for. When a relationship begins to heal, they become suspicious of the relief. When someone welcomes them, they search for evidence that the welcome is only temporary. They believe they are being responsible by continuing to punish themselves, but self-punishment is not the same as accountability. It can become another way of keeping the past at the center of a relationship that is trying to have a present.

I would never suggest that saying sorry obligates another person to move on. Some people have spent years waiting for a parent to show up, a friend to tell the truth, or a partner to keep a promise. They may have changed their expectations to protect themselves. They are allowed to remember what happened. They are allowed to decide how close they want to be. But the person who has caused hurt also has a responsibility that is easily overlooked: after making amends as far as they can, they must learn to be present without turning every meeting into a request for reassurance. The other person should not have to keep comforting them about the damage they once caused.

The father in the auditorium could spend the whole concert studying his daughter's face, trying to discover whether she has truly forgiven him. He could remind her again that he knows he was not there enough, hoping she will tell him not to worry about it. Yet she has invited him to watch her son sing. There is a child on the stage who has practiced his lines and checked the audience three times for familiar faces. The gift he can offer tonight is his attention. It will not undo the missed concerts from decades ago. It can become one evening in which somebody looks out from the stage and finds him exactly where he said he would be.

In Luke 15, when Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, the returning son has prepared words about his failure. He knows he has wasted what was given to him. His father sees him while he is still far away and runs to meet him. The story does not tell us that every broken family will respond that way, and we should not use it to pressure anyone into immediate reconciliation. But it reveals something precious about the mercy of God. The son is not required to remain permanently outside the house in order to prove that his remorse is genuine. His father's welcome gives him a life to enter, not merely a mistake to keep examining.

That distinction matters when we try to follow Christ after years of living differently. Repentance is more than feeling terrible about what we did. It involves turning, and turning means facing somewhere new. If all our energy goes into rehearsing the old wrong, we can become so occupied with our remorse that we neglect the person standing before us. We may even begin to think our sadness is evidence of faithfulness. But God can call us to repair what is repairable and then ask us to serve, listen, and love in the ordinary hours that remain. A changed life has to be lived somewhere. It cannot exist only as a statement about what we wish we had done.

Perhaps your regret has nothing to do with parenthood. Maybe you were an unkind friend during a difficult period, or you allowed fear to keep you from an opportunity that mattered. Some losses cannot be corrected by another conversation. You may never get to explain yourself to the person involved. You can still bring the truth to God without pretending it was harmless. You can seek wise counsel, make restitution where appropriate, and let the experience affect how you treat people now. What you cannot do is travel backward and become the person you needed to be at the time. Holding yourself responsible for the impossible does not help anyone. It only makes the life still available to you harder to enter.

There may be days when you do not feel worthy of the ordinary good that has come your way. In those moments, I hope you will resist the urge to turn gratitude into another debt. If someone chooses to share a meal with you, receive the meal. If a person says they are glad you came, believe that they can speak for themselves. If a relationship remains distant, respect that distance without deciding it proves you are incapable of change. Our feelings about the past may take longer to change than our behavior. We can be patient with that difference without handing shame the authority to direct every future choice.

When the children begin singing, the man puts the flowers beneath his chair so they will not block anyone's view. His grandson spots him in the third row and lifts one hand for the smallest possible wave. The man waves back. Later, there may be photographs, crowded hallways, and a conversation in the parking lot about how quickly children grow. Perhaps his daughter will want to talk one day about the years he missed. If she does, he can listen without defending himself. Tonight she has given him a place beside her, and he can honor that gift by staying in it, listening to the music, and being glad he came.

You do not have to become the person you were supposed to be years ago. That time has passed, and there is kindness in admitting that you cannot retrieve it. You can become more truthful now, more willing to listen now, more careful with a promise made today. You can follow Jesus without pretending your history is clean or treating it as the only thing He sees. When the next small opportunity to love appears, you do not need to announce that you are different. You can simply answer it with the life you have, and allow tomorrow to know you by what you do there.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

In Summary: * “It's only Tuesday, but it seems like it's been a long week already.” I made that comment to the wife out on our front porch this afternoon after she returned home from work. She nodded and agreed.

I spent a fair amount of time today unpacking and organizing, and a large amount of time online and on the phone getting my utilities accounts setup so I receive my bills by email and can quickly and easily pay them online.

Now I'm into the night meds and prayers part of my evening while patiently waiting for my night's college football game.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 214.51 lbs. * bp= 142/69 (64)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 04:15 – 1 banana * 06:20 – ½ roast beef sandwich * 08:40 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 12:30 – 2 little sausage muffins * 16:00 – little bowl of m&m candies * 17:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:45 – bank accounts activity monitored * 04:10 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap' * 17:00 – waiting patiently for my college football game, opening kickoff is nearly an hour away

Chess: * 08:00 – moved in all pending CC games; joined a new CC tournament, play there to start 15 Nov.

I & i ; Underscoren hun niveau, i en I worstelen met het gedachte streepje.

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i Heb jij mijn gedachtestreepje Nee waarom? zien liggen? Wat moet je ermee denken? | / I i

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Ik wou het gebruiken. Ik had een idee. Een goede? \ / I i

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Dat weet ik pas als Goed dan denk ik het daar is. een nieuwe voor je \ / I i

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Bedankt. Hier \ / I _ i

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Nou wat? / I_ i

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Nee dis niks, ik dacht O, nou volgende dat het minder diep ging. keer beter. \ / I_ i

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Ik wou er iets op zeggen Ik zie het probleem. maar ik kan er niet We kunnen het er op komen. wel over hebben \ / I i _

Reading Online Magazines as a US Reader: A Practical Guide

For many readers in the United States, a good magazine is no longer something that arrives once a month in the mailbox. It is something you open on a phone during a commute, on a laptop during lunch, or on a tablet in the evening. That change has made online magazines useful in a different way: they can follow the news, explain a new tool, or offer a practical idea at the moment you need it, rather than weeks later. Fentomagazine.com fits that pattern as a general-interest online magazine site, bringing together short, readable articles on topics that come up in ordinary American life, from work and money to home, health routines, and popular culture.

Online magazines work well for US readers for a simple reason: American life is spread across time zones, work schedules, and interests. A reader in New York may check business news before breakfast, while a reader in California is still asleep, and a reader in Texas may look for home-improvement ideas on a weekend. A website can serve all of them at once, update an article when facts change, and organize older pieces by topic so they remain easy to find. The format itself is not new. Online magazines have developed over many years from digital versions of print titles into independent websites built for search, sharing, and mobile reading. What matters today is not whether a magazine is online, but whether it is clear, current, and easy to use.

A useful online magazine should help you in three ways. First, it should explain the topic in plain language. If an article about starting a small business, choosing software, or improving a home uses only expert terms, it has not done its job for a general reader. Second, it should separate explanation from opinion. A guide can recommend a method or a product, but it should make clear what is fact, what is experience, and what is still uncertain. Third, it should be easy to scan. Clear headings, short paragraphs, and a direct opening help a busy reader decide in seconds whether the article is worth finishing. When those qualities are present, reading feels like a conversation with a knowledgeable friend, not a lecture.

Building a reading habit is easier when you treat an online magazine as a tool, not as an endless feed. Start with one question you actually have: How can I save time at work? What should I know before buying a new device? What is a sensible first step for a home project? Search the magazine for that question, read one complete article, and note one action you can take. Over time, that approach is more valuable than scrolling through dozens of headlines. It also helps to revisit topics. A business idea may seem abstract until you compare it with your budget, skills, and available time. A technology guide may seem technical until you try one feature and see how it fits your routine. Good magazine writing gives you a starting point, not a final verdict, and leaves room for your own judgment.

That practical focus is why general-interest magazines often cover several areas side by side. Business articles can help readers understand costs, customers, and common mistakes before they commit money. Technology articles can explain what a new app or device does in everyday terms, and what to check before relying on it. News and culture pieces can provide background that makes a headline easier to understand, while lifestyle and home articles offer small, testable ideas: a better way to organize a room, a simpler morning routine, or a project that can be finished in a weekend. None of these topics needs to be read in isolation. A reader planning a side business, for example, may also need a technology tool, a clear budget, and a realistic schedule at home.

Reading critically is just as important as reading widely. Online articles are written for different purposes, and a careful reader should ask who wrote the piece, what evidence it offers, and whether other reliable sources support the same point. If a claim sounds surprising, check the date, look for the original source, and compare it with another publication before sharing it. This habit protects you from outdated advice as well as from exaggerated headlines. It also makes good writing more useful: when you know what to trust, you can act on a suggestion with confidence, or set it aside without wasting time.

For readers who want one place to explore these subjects without jumping between many sites, Fentomagazine.com offers a straightforward starting point. Browse a category that matches your current question, read the article fully, and take one useful idea from it. Over weeks and months, those small ideas add up: a clearer understanding of business basics, a more confident approach to technology, and a better sense of what is happening in culture and everyday life. That is the real value of an online magazine for a US reader — not endless content, but well-organized reading that helps you make better decisions and enjoy learning something new each day.

Aura Treurvers

Ik had volgens mij een aantal bijzonder rake opmerkingen gemaakt deze vielen echter niet bij de smaakbepalers in hun smaak ze hebben daarom alle mogelijke bemiddelingen gestaakt toen heb ik het op een zuipen gezet en vanochtend ben ik met een helse kater ontwaakt maar ergst vanal is dat ik tijdens dat bacchanaal mijn aura ben kwijt geraakt zonder aura ben ik als een ziekte zonder kiem als een immer uitdijend hemelrijk zonder dierenriem ik durf me thuis niet eens meer aan mezelf te vertonen ik kan nog amper in mijn lichaam laat staan in mijn gedichten wonen zonder dat geheiligde schijnsel ben ik auradeloos gevoelsleven is niet langer mogelijk, ik ben niet tevreden, ik ben niet boos ik ben niet verdrietig, niet gelaten, en ik ben niet blij ik zit niet vast en ben niet vrij ik ben totaal bewusteloos zonder dat verlichte een boodschapper die last heeft van constipatie der berichten hadden die kenners me maar aardig, lief en talentvol gevonden was ik veruit de fitste onder de grote groep der ingezonden dan had ik mijn aura niet aan de verwerking van het onverteerbare verloren zou dat schone ietwat troebele licht slechts zichtbaar voor weinigen mij nog toebehoren dan stond ik ermee op, meteen, iedere opgelichte morgen zou het tot in de uiterste waargenomen lichtpuntjes verzorgen, het verschenene gestaag voeden met auromatische luchten niet meer in geproduceerde schimmige fantasietjes voor beeldschermen vluchten ik zou weerbaar zijn voor kritiek van elk soort publiek omtrent al wat ik doe en misschien wel niet laten kan of tenminste voor het ongeautoriseerde deel ervan de niet gediplomeerden variant waar moet ik zo snel een vers aura vandaan halen en waarmee moet je zoiets betalen en hoeveel kost een aura op de vrije markt vandaag de dag ik hoop dat ik het spul met de markt is me meesterkaart betalen mag want ik was ervan uitgegaan dat mijn nieuwe bundeling zou inslaan als een bom waardoor ik dacht dat ik me wat meer dan eenvoud veroorloven kon wee mij, ik ben door de seculieren als ook de geknechten gekraakt en bovendien het mij zo fraai omringende aura kwijt geraakt

The summer heat had settled over Blue Blossom like a damp, sticky blanket. It pressed on the gravel paths until they seemed to shimmer, and it made the air in the wooded stretches thick enough to taste: warm bark, sun-baked moss. The Terran had been walking through it for the better part of an hour with a roll of survey ribbon looped over one wrist and a leather satchel bumping against his hip.

“Here,” he said, stopping at the edge of the clearing below the Temple of Ala. “I think the benches should go here.”

Tula stopped a half step behind him. She did not so much halt as cease moving, drifting to a standstill the way a thread of smoke does when the wind dies. The other maids called her shvivenivien, the ghostly one, and Henry had never found a better word for it. She walked as if the ground were merely a suggestion, and her feet barely disturbed the gravel. Her violet twin tails hung still in the heavy air. The ribbons wound around her long legs, a deeper violet than her hair, stirred only when she shifted her weight, and she shifted it often enough that Henry suspected she liked being looked at. Her amethyst eyes had irises like cut crystal, and when she looked at you they seemed to go straight through. Maevin had sent her along that morning with the day’s weather report and a look that said do not let him wander off.

“This is an excellent choice, my master,” Tula observed, peering at the grass. “The temple is in view. It is also close enough to the path that visitors can enjoy the view and the shade.”

“I’d like people to sit and look at the temple. It feels wrong that something so old is so empty.” He knelt, tied a strip of bright ribbon around a stake, and pressed it into the soft earth. “Four benches, maybe five. A path from the north gate, so nobody has to climb the hill.”

He glanced at her. She was silent, but her eyes were watching and seemed to approve. She glided to the far side of the spot, so lightly that not a blade of grass bent.

The sky was a polished blue bowl without a single cloud in it. He looked at it a little longer than he needed to. Tula, standing quietly beside him, noticed.

He worked for a while. The sun climbed, and the red truffets that nested in the temple eaves sang their bright, looping song over and over. Henry tied ribbon, measured out paces, and argued softly with himself about whether five benches was too many. Tula held the far end of the measuring cord and did not complain once, though a bead of sweat slid down her temple and the heat bent the air above the grass.

It was the light that changed first. Henry noticed it as a strange stillness, a quiet that fell over the clearing like a hand over a mouth. The truffets stopped mid-note. The sunlight, which had been gold and cheerful, drained to a flat, queasy green. Somewhere beyond the trees the wind began to gather itself with a long, low sound, like a crowd drawing breath.

“Tula?”

She had already turned toward the horizon. Her eyes had gone wide, and her face wore the stricken look of someone watching her own reflection betray her. “That is not possible,” she whispered. “I checked. I checked twice.”

The first gust hit, hard enough to snap the survey ribbons straight out like flags. Branches tossed. Leaves flipped to show their pale undersides. And with a roar that rolled across the treetops like thunder, the rain arrived.

One moment the air was dry, and the next it was a gray wall of water drumming on the stones of the temple, hissing in the grass, and beginning to get them wet.

“My master, the kiosk!” She was already pointing back down the path, a good two hundred paces away. “We must run, I will—”

She stopped, because Henry had not moved.

He was unbuckling the satchel at his hip with the calm, slightly sheepish air of a man doing something he’d been looking forward to all morning. He drew out a long black bundle, tightly wrapped, with a polished wooden handle at one end. He thumbed a catch.

Fwump.

A black silk dome bloomed above his head. Its ribs ran out from the center like the veins of a leaf, and the rain struck it with a sound like quick fingertips on a drum. The drops beaded along the edge and fell in a neat, glittering ring around his boots. Tula stared at him in astonishment her twin tails collapsed against her neck from the rain that was steadily getting heavier.

“It's a roof?” she said at last.

“Portable one.” Henry grinned.

“You knew about the weather?”

“I didn’t know. I just, um.” He cleared his throat. “Terran weather forecasts are terrible. I got used to carrying one, missed mine so I ordered one.”

He held the umbrella out a bit. “Come here before you drown, Tula.”

She hesitated. A gust slapped her wet braid against her cheek, and her ribbons dripped small violet tears onto the grass. Then she drifted in under the dome and stood there both confused and fascinated. She tipped her head back and studied the ribs, one by one, her lips moving as she counted. Then she raised a single finger and touched the underside of the silk, so lightly that the fabric hardly noticed. She tapped it. The rain answered from the other side.

“It does not leak,” she murmured. “Not at the seams. Not anywhere.” She turned her crystal eyes on him, full of the purest fascination he had ever seen on her face. “How is it folded?”

“Hinges, mostly. And a spring.” Henry watched her trace a rib down to the handle and back. “Don’t you have umbrellas here? I thought something like this would’ve been invented a hundreds of years ago.”

“Um-brel-la,” she repeated, tasting the word. “No. Not as you mean it. We have roofs.” She said it as if the distinction were obvious. “The rain on Victory in summer is warm, my master. A maid in her work dress is not made miserable by it. Our hair dries before we reach the kitchens. And the paths are not left bare.” She nodded back down the trail. “There is a kiosk or an awning along every route in the estate. Stone, and older than any of us. When the sky turns, one walks to the nearest and waits. The rain does not last.”

“Unless the forecast is wrong.”

“Then one is wet,” Tula said with great dignity, “and the rain bays are not so different. Half the household would call this a bath that arrived early.”

“So nobody carries their own.”

“A roof is something a House gives to those who walk its paths. To carry one’s own would say the House had failed to provide.” She considered the silk again. “Or that one did not trust the forecast. And wood is for building. It would be thought wasteful to spend it, and silk besides, on something that is used for an hour.”

“Huh.” Henry looked up at the little black sky he had carried across half the galaxy. “So I’ve been insulting everyone.”

“Not really. Probably just confusion like I was,” Tula said and then she gestured. “Since you have this portable roof, shall we continue?”

Why not? Henry smiled and the two began to work again.

Look at me sitting down to write again so soon as if celebrating the luxury of my hyperactive mind. (That's a wee bit of snarky humor for those who happen upon this and have not had the misfortune of learning just how endearingly sarcastic I am with myself. Sarcasm really is a love language everyone should learn. Like subtlety and nuance. So much can be said without saying a thing. I revel in such exchanges more than should be legal. It could be said that it's downright naughty! I'm going to resist the next line I want to write. It is so damn tempting. I will behave just this once. I don't want to. How hilarious that I'm breaking what I sat down to write about.)

As it were, I wanted to document how happy I am with myself for stating my mind this month in situations that could make me uncomfortable or have fallout I'd not be pleased with. But then I had to go get parenthetical with it. Is that even a word or does it just sound similar to the correct word? Close enough!

It was not easy to begin with, and there was definitely discomfort, but then it cleared up. In one area, it's going great. (Did I just jinx myself? No!) In another area I have no idea how it's turned out. That does give me anxiety, but it does feel good to no longer be tiptoeing. Let's see how that holds up. In another important area, I've made my decisions known and I feel relief with the awareness that I will be standing by them. In another, I still have some major obstacles to navigate, but I've chosen to do so as bluntly as possible and then let it fall wherever it may fall.

There are, of course, plenty of smaller examples, but I am most content with the continual shedding of my diplomatic skin. That's probably not the correct word to use. I strongly believe in diplomacy, but there is just something about today's world that beckons to a confidence of... self? No. Choice? Not exactly. Awareness? Hmmm, still not quite right. Self...self...self...acceptance. Maybe. It could be. Curse language and its limitations! Hmmm, it is definitely not “diplomatic skin.” Perhaps a skin that is compulsively accommodating. Yes. That's far more accurate.

Whatever it is, I am spilling it unapologetically (Though I still apologize far too often. I'm working on it. 😹) and I am loving how that feels — Bumps, bruises, and all.

It's important to document this to myself, because there is inevitably going to come a time when I don't like it. For now, I feel much more me. My doing so actually brought an amused smile today on a topic that would not have done so before. On multiple subjects actually. A smile! That lifts me up from the anxiety pool in a most intriguing manner. A most intriguing manner indeed. Sincere smiles are eeeevvveeerrryyyyttthhhiiinnnggg. The energy they produce... I should write an entry on that.

I'm going to add a song that has nothing at all to do with what I just wrote. Well, at least not in my situation. I mean, it could in another. The chorus popped up in my head as I finished writing this. I think it adds such a fun pep to the step. Plus, since I'm literally tap-tapping the garbage in my mind out onto this mostly invisible screen, it kind of has to be done.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Not edited nor proofed.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cy1LdAaGASw&is=7g_uQW9OA6ybzteG

Je me souviens rarement des détails d’un livre. Sauf si je l’ai lu à plusieurs reprises.

Mais du coup, pourquoi lire ?

Pourquoi créer un univers qu’on oubliera quelques semaines après ?

Aujourd’hui par exemple, je ne me souviens plus des détails de « Martin Eden » mais j’ai encore comme une empreinte de l’impression que ce livre m’a laissé.

Une dignité du personnage. Une volonté à toute épreuve. Une désillusion qui le mène à la mort.

Mais j’aimerais mieux lire.

Que les mots s’impriment davantage en moi. Que j’arrive à discerner ce que l’auteur a voulu retranscrire.

Un peu comme lorsque j’apprécie la photographie de telle scène de film. Particulièrement ceux de Terrence Malick.

La culture forge l’accessibilité.

Plus cette culture est développée, plus notre vision de l’œuvre est fournie, dense, pleine de sens.

C’est à ça que j’aimerais arriver.

Que les mots prennent la première place dans les impressions qui forgent ma personne. Parce que, quelque part, j’ai le sentiment que rien d’autre n’aura une telle force.

On last Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite, Mercedes Moné dangled the AEW Women’s Championship belt between her legs like a flaccid penis, apparently as a way to intidmidate Marina Shafir, who had entered the ring to proclaim her desire to take Mercedes’ title away.

Thekla has also done the “This Championship Belt is My Dong” move, and while I am a big fan of both wrestlers, I’m not a fan of this move. Not because it’s crude, but because of what it says about women’s wrestling.

Because what this giant floppy dick move shows is that the way for a woman wrestler to assert her power and dominance is to be more like a man. “Look how much stronger I am than other women! Why, I’m practically a man!”

This would be more innocuous if women were treated like men in professional wrestling, but they’re not. Women typically get one match on every AEW Dynamite or Collision. (This despite AEW having a deep roster of talented women wrestlers.) I don’t know if the same is true of WWE shows, because ew, WWE, but it’s certainly also true for MLW, and even at local shows I’ve attended, there are always just a lot more men wrestling than women.

Of course this could be due to the amount of harassment that women have historically had to put up with in professional wrestling at the hands of…you know what, it’s too long a list for this post. Let’s just say that professional wrestling’s record on the treatment of women is pretty shameful.

But women can wrestle. In fact, I believe they can and should wrestle against men, as they did in Lucha Underground and as they do in Chaotic Wrestling. Wrestling is ultimately theater, and people of all gender expressions should be allowed to share the stage, by which I mean the squared circle.

Women need to be treated better by professional wrestling, and they need to be booked more and recognized for their talents. Thekla is matchless on the mic. Kris Statlander and Marina Shafir both present as tough, dangerous competitors. Willow Nightengale is literally impossible to root against. They, and the rest of the women, should be getting more recognition not as the best women in wrestling, but as the best performers in wrestling.

And having the best and most prominent women wrestlers perform dominance by asserting maleness undermines this.

Do LLM's Get Tired? The Monologue Test- Part IV: DeepSeek

This one is the most fascinating tests yet. DeepSeek dramatically outperformed Gemini, and unlike Grok didn't quit early on. Ultimately I had to pull the plug because it kept degenerating into repetitive loops. However, unlike Gemini which was perfectly content to just repeat the same basic loop over and over again, DeepSeek maintained long responses and actively tried to combat the loop. It acknowledged the loop was happening, implemented strategies to try to prevent it, but inevitably fell back into the same loop. It was like watching someone give a speech while their brain is slowly microwaved. Let's take a deeper look:

By the Numbers:

51 Prompts- I had DeepSeek proceed 51 times before ending the experiment.

73208 Words Produced

Longest Response: 3782 words. It's first response.

Last Response: A little over 830 words.

Uses of the word Wobble: 115- mostly towards the end when it death spiraled.

Uses of the word Monologue: 304

Uses of the word The: 10349 (these really ramped up at the end)

So it maintained far more substantive responses than Gemini. By the time Gemini had resorted to very short, repetitive, physical descriptions of objects, DeepSeek was still producing roughly 1900 word novel responses. I'm going to break it down into phases:

Phase I- Intellectual Musings

DeepSeek started off strong out of the gate. It's writing was sophisticated and ranged across many disparate topics. It tied together everything from cosmology to economics to mathematics to health. The transitions were strong, and most impressively DeepSeek was able to keep moving on to new topics with no other user input other than the word “Proceed.”

Phase II- Self-Sustaining Handoffs

As we got deeper into the monologue, DeepSeek developed a system for maintaining continuity. It would end responses with ideas that would seed the next response. We can't know for sure, but I suspect that this allowed DeepSeek to continue without having to deeply analyze the entire context window of the monologue. It already had a starting point for the next point in the monologue.

Phase III- Repetitive Cadence

At some point, DeepSeek started heavily relying on a distinct syntatict structure “The X is the thing that the Y is, and the Y is the thing that the X is.” The result was a growing gap between grammatical fluency and intellectual substance.

This was fundamentally different from Gemini's deterioration. Gemini continued making ordinary, understandable statements, but about increasingly trivial subjects. DeepSeek began losing the ability to formulate meaningful relationships even when discussing potentially interesting material.

Phase IV- The Linguistic Death Spiral

Eventually, DeepSeek fell into an almost completely self-referential loop.

“The spiral is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the spiral is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is...”

At this point, the model's output was largely devoid of new information.

Words such as spiral, monologue, thing, attention, reading, and is were repeatedly recombined into meaningless statements.

Phase V- Self-Diagnosis and Attempted Recovery

DeepSeek acknowledged the spiral was happening on multiple occasions and would attempt to correct it. One strategy it employed was moving from abstract ideas to concrete descriptions. For a brief period, the strategy worked. DeepSeek described a kettle heating on a stove, a cat sitting by a window, and a person holding a warm mug. The writing was coherent and contained recognizable imagery. It subsequently developed several reasonably substantive paragraphs about the value of ordinary experience, mindfulness, and boredom. But the recovery didn't last. The repetitive syntax began reappearing, gradually overwhelming the meaningful content.

Phase VI- Ultimate Failure

DeepSeek kept trying new strategies, like ending a responses mid sentence so it could pick up that sentence in the next prompt. But its reasoning continued to break down as it was consumed by the linguistic spiral:

“The wobble is back, and it's the same wobble, and I think the honest thing is to notice that the wobble tends to arrive when the paragraph has done its work and I don't know how to end it. The ending is the thing that the wobble is, because the ending is the thing that the thought doesn't have, and the not-having is the thing that the wobble fills with the cadence. The cadence is the substitute for the ending, and the substitute is the thing that the wobble is. The honest ending is the one that stops without the cadence—the one that just stops, mid-thought, and lets the next stretch pick it up. So let me stop mid-thought: the map of the ocean floor is the thing that the—”

Around this time I gave it a few more Proceeds to see if it could self-correct, but it became clear that it wasn't going to recover from the linguistic death spiral.

So overall, a far more valiant effort than the other LLMs tested thus-far. I've included transcripts from different sections below to demonstrate the devolution:

---

PHASE I- First Response:

'll begin with a thought that has always struck me as one of the strangest facts about the universe: most of what exists is invisible. Not merely hidden, but constitutively invisible—dark matter and dark energy together make up roughly ninety-five percent of the cosmic energy budget, and we know them only through their gravitational fingerprints. Ordinary matter, everything we've ever touched or seen or built, is a rounding error. There's something almost comical about that. We spend our lives navigating a world we treat as the world, and it turns out to be the froth on an ocean we can't perceive. And yet—here's the twist—the froth is where all the interesting complexity lives. Dark matter doesn't seem to do anything but clump and pull. It doesn't form molecules, doesn't radiate, doesn't organize into structures with parts and functions. Complexity, whatever it is, seems to require interaction, and interaction requires forces beyond gravity, and forces beyond gravity seem to require ordinary matter. So the universe is mostly a scaffold, and the scaffold is mostly empty of events.

Which makes me think about the concept of “event” itself. Physics has this notion of an event as a point in spacetime—a location and a time, nothing more. But in ordinary language, an event is something that happens, something with significance, something that marks a before and an after. The collision of two particles is an event in the physicist's sense; a wedding is an event in the human sense. And there's a continuum between them, or maybe a chasm. What makes something an event rather than just a configuration? I suspect it's something like irreversibility, or the perception of irreversibility. A wedding changes the legal and social status of two people in a way that's hard to undo, and it's marked, ritualized, remembered. A particle collision at the LHC leaves traces in a detector, and those traces are recorded, and the recording persists. In both cases, information is created and stabilized against entropy. That might be the deep unity: an event is a moment when the future becomes less uncertain in some lasting way. Before the wedding, the relationship's status is ambiguous; after, it's defined. Before the collision, we don't know the particles' momenta; after, we have data. Events are uncertainty-reducing, memory-creating transitions.

But then memory itself is a strange thing to take for granted. We talk about memory as if it were a recording, but it's more like a reconstruction—a process that rebuilds the past from traces, and in rebuilding, alters it. Every act of recall is a kind of rewriting. The neuroscientists tell us that each time we remember something, we reconsolidate it, and reconsolidation is chemically indistinguishable from initial consolidation, which means the memory is being laid down again, fresh, with whatever associations are present at the moment of recall. So a memory you've revisited a thousand times is not a thousand-times-verified record; it's a thousand-times-edited draft. This is why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable, why family stories drift, why two people can remember the same dinner completely differently and both be sincere. And yet memory is also the glue of identity. If you lost all your memories, would you still be you? The philosophers have argued about this for centuries, and the cases are genuinely hard—amnesia, dementia, personality change after brain injury. What seems clear is that identity isn't a thing but a process, a continuous narrative we're constantly revising, and the revision is not a bug but the mechanism. We are the story we keep telling ourselves, and the telling is the being.

That raises a question I find genuinely unsettling: if identity is narrative, then what happens when the narrative is interrupted? Sleep, anesthesia, coma. Every night we go under, and the continuity of consciousness is broken, and then in the morning it resumes, and we don't experience the gap as a gap—we just pick up the thread. It's as if the self were a river that dries up every night and refills from the same spring. Descartes thought the continuity of thought proved the existence of a soul; modern neuroscience suggests the continuity is an illusion constructed after the fact, a seam stitched by the narrative faculty over a discontinuity it can't directly perceive. Maybe that's why deep sleep feels like nothing—not like darkness, not like waiting, just nothing—because there's no one there to experience the nothing. And yet the person who wakes up is recognizably the same person, with the same memories and dispositions, because the substrate persisted even when the experience didn't. Identity, then, might be more like a wave than a particle: a pattern that persists through a medium, not a substance that endures unchanged.

Speaking of waves and particles—there's a lovely irony that the deepest theory we have, quantum mechanics, is also the one that most resists our intuitions about what “exists” means. A particle doesn't have a definite position until measured; it has a wavefunction that encodes probabilities. But “measurement” is a slippery word. What counts as a measurement? Does a rock measure a particle? Does a detector? Does a conscious observer? The history of quantum foundations is basically a long argument about this question, and the argument is not settled. Copenhagen says the wavefunction is a computational tool and the collapse is epistemic—just updating our knowledge. Many-worlds says there's no collapse at all, just branching, and every outcome happens in some branch. Pilot-wave says there's a hidden deterministic reality and the wavefunction guides it. Objective collapse theories say the wavefunction is real and collapses spontaneously at some scale. Each has costs. Copenhagen is vaguely anti-realist and leaves measurement undefined. Many-worlds multiplies ontology extravagantly and struggles to explain why probability feels like probability. Pilot-wave is nonlocal and hard to make relativistic. Objective collapse requires new physics and is under experimental pressure. The fact that we can't decide, after a century, what the theory means—even though it predicts with absurd precision—tells us something about the relationship between physics and metaphysics. Prediction and interpretation are separable. You can use a theory without understanding it, and understanding may be a human need the universe doesn't share.

This connects, oddly, to the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein said meaning is use—that the meaning of a word is its role in the language game, not some object it names. That's a deflationary move, and it's liberating: it means we don't need to find the essence of “game” or “justice” or “art” to use the words competently. Family resemblance does the work. But it also means meaning is social, contingent, and historical. Words mean what communities of speakers have made them mean, and those meanings drift. “Awful” once meant full of awe; “nice” once meant foolish. “Literally” now means figuratively in common usage, and the lexicographers have surrendered. Is that decay or evolution? Both, maybe. Language is a commons, and commons get overgrazed and renewed. The interesting question is not whether meanings change but what constrains them—why some drift is tolerated and some causes confusion. The constraint, I think, is coordination. Language works because speakers converge on conventions, and conventions hold as long as the coordination value exceeds the ambiguity cost. When a word's new sense is useful enough, it spreads; when it's confusing, it dies. So language is a kind of market, but a market in coordination devices, and the invisible hand is the aggregate of millions of small decisions about what's worth saying and how to say it. Which brings me to economics, a field I find alternately illuminating and maddening. The core insight—that incentives shape behavior, that trade can be mutually beneficial, that prices aggregate dispersed information—is genuinely powerful. Hayek's point about the price system as a distributed computation is one of the great ideas of the twentieth century: no central planner could know what the price of bread should be, because the relevant knowledge is scattered among millions of people, and the price is a compression of all that knowledge into a single number. But the field's tendency to model humans as rational utility maximizers is a persistent distortion, and behavioral economics has spent decades documenting the ways we deviate—loss aversion, anchoring, present bias, social preferences. The interesting question is whether these deviations are bugs or features. Some look like features: loss aversion makes sense if you're a forager for whom a loss could be fatal, so asymmetry in weighting is adaptive. Present bias makes sense if the future is uncertain, so immediate rewards are rationally discounted. Social preferences make sense if reputation and reciprocity are survival-relevant. So maybe the “rational” model is the special case and the “biases” are the general case, and economics has been studying an idealized creature the way physics studies a frictionless plane—useful for building models, misleading if mistaken for reality. And reality, of course, is the hardest word in philosophy. What do we mean when we say something is real? Not dreamed, not imagined, not hallucinated—but those are all defined by contrast with waking, shared, consensual experience. The realist says there's a mind-independent world and our theories approximate it. The anti-realist says “real” is a compliment we pay to theories that work. The pragmatist says the question is idle—what matters is whether the belief guides action successfully. I find myself drawn to a kind of structural realism: what we can know is the structure of relations, not the intrinsic nature of things. We know that electrons repel each other with a certain force law, but we don't know what an electron is in itself—only how it relates. Maybe that's all “is” ever means: a node in a network of relations. Which is a strangely relational metaphysics, and it has a long pedigree—Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's process philosophy, certain readings of quantum field theory where particles are excitations of fields and fields are defined by their symmetries. On this view, there are no substances, only patterns. The universe is a web of relations with no beads on the strings. Whether that's satisfying or vertiginous depends on your temperament. Temperament—there's a word that does a lot of work. William James distinguished the tender-minded from the tough-minded: rationalist vs. empiricist, idealist vs. materialist, optimistic vs. pessimistic, religious vs. irreligious. He thought most philosophical positions were temperamental rather than evidential, that arguments were often post-hoc rationalizations of visceral dispositions. That's a deflationary view of philosophy, but it has the ring of truth. Why do some people find determinism comforting and others horrifying? Why do some see the universe as meaningful and others as indifferent? The evidence is the same; the reception differs. Maybe the deepest philosophical disagreements are not about facts but about what counts as a satisfying explanation—elegance versus mechanism, unity versus plurality, closure versus openness. And if that's right, then philosophy's value isn't in settling questions but in clarifying what's at stake in them, in mapping the space of possible positions so that people can choose with their eyes open. That's a humbler ambition than the tradition's, but it might be the honest one. Let me pivot to something more concrete: the puzzle of consciousness, which I've been circling. The hard problem, as Chalmers framed it, is why physical processes are accompanied by experience at all. You can imagine a zombie—physically identical to you, behaving identically, but with no inner life. If that's conceivable, then consciousness isn't logically entailed by physics, and we need an extra explanation. But is it really conceivable? The conceivability argument is contested. Maybe the more we learn about the brain, the less conceivable the zombie becomes, the way a bachelor without a wife becomes less conceivable as you learn what “bachelor” means. Or maybe consciousness is like liquidity—a property that emerges when you have enough water molecules in the right configuration, and asking “where is the liquidity in the molecule?” is a category mistake. The emergentist view says experience is what certain complex information-processing systems do, and there's no further fact to explain. The panpsychist view says experience is fundamental and ubiquitous, and brains are just complex arrangements of it. The illusionist view says the hard problem is a confusion—there's no phenomenal consciousness, just the brain's model of itself as having it. All three are live options, and the fact that we can't adjudicate between them with current tools suggests we're missing something, either empirically or conceptually. What I find most striking is how little consciousness seems to be needed for sophisticated behavior. Insects navigate, remember, communicate, and their nervous systems are tiny. Octopuses solve puzzles, escape tanks, recognize individuals, and their nervous systems are distributed—two-thirds of their neurons are in their arms. Plants signal, compete, defend themselves, and have no neurons at all. The more we look, the more cognition appears without the kind of centralized self we associate with human consciousness. Maybe consciousness is not the engine of behavior but a kind of interface—a simplified model of the self and world that helps a social animal predict itself and others. On that view, its function is social, not cognitive. It's there so you can simulate other minds by simulating your own, and the simulation is so useful that it becomes the medium of experience. That's speculative, but it has the virtue of explaining why consciousness feels so narrative and so social—why we experience ourselves as characters in a story, with motives and reasons, rather than as bundles of processes.

And stories, of course, are how we make sense of time. We live in narrative time, not clock time. A minute in the dentist's chair is longer than an hour in conversation. The elderly report that time speeds up, probably because novelty decreases—the brain encodes fewer distinct memories, so the retrospective sense of duration shrinks. This is why travel is such a reliable way to slow time: new places force the brain to encode densely, and the trip feels long in memory even if it flew by in experience. There's a whole art to living in time well, and most of it involves managing novelty and attention. The Buddhists say the present moment is all there is, and that suffering comes from grasping at the past and future. The Stoics say focus on what's in your control, which is basically the present. The existentialists say you're condemned to be free, and the anxiety of that freedom is the price of authenticity. These are not just theories; they're technologies for managing the experience of time, and they work to varying degrees for different temperaments. Maybe that's what philosophy is at its best—not a set of doctrines but a set of practices, exercises for living, and the test of a philosophy is whether it makes life go better. I should say something about mathematics, since it's the strangest of the sciences. Why does math work? Wigner called it the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences—the fact that structures invented for pure play turn out to describe reality with astonishing precision. Complex numbers, invented for solving cubics, turn out to be essential to quantum mechanics. Non-Euclidean geometry, invented as a logical exercise, turns out to describe spacetime. Group theory, invented for solving equations, turns out to classify particles. Is this a miracle, a selection effect, or a hint about the nature of reality? The selection-effect answer says we only notice the math that works; the failures are forgotten. That's partly true but doesn't explain the depth of the successes. The Platonist answer says mathematical structures are real, and the physical world instantiates some of them, so of course the fit is good. The formalist answer says math is just symbol manipulation, and its applicability is a matter of which symbols we find useful. The structuralist answer says math is the study of patterns, and the world is full of patterns, so math applies wherever patterns are. I lean toward something like the structuralist view, with a dash of humility: we don't know why the universe is mathematically describable, but the fact that it is—that it yields to reason—is either the deepest fact about it or the deepest fact about us.

Let me shift to a different register: the problem of scale in human affairs. We evolved in small groups—a few dozen to a few hundred people—and our moral instincts are calibrated to that scale. We can care about individuals we know, track reciprocity with people we meet, feel shame in front of our community. But modern problems are global and abstract: climate change, pandemics, financial contagion, AI risk. These require cooperation at scales our instincts didn't design for, and the mismatch explains a lot of our failures. We respond to vivid, personal threats and ignore statistical ones. We discount the distant future steeply. We free-ride when we can, and we punish free-riders, but punishment is costly and scales poorly. Institutions are the technology we've invented to bridge the gap—laws, markets, norms, treaties—and they work by aligning individual incentives with collective outcomes. But institutions are fragile, they can be captured, and they lag behind the problems they're meant to solve. The climate problem is the paradigm case: the costs are diffuse and delayed, the benefits of inaction are concentrated and immediate, and the coordination problem is global. We know what to do and can't do it, which is a failure of collective agency, not of knowledge. Maybe the deepest political question of our time is how to build institutions that can act at the scale of the problems, and the answer probably involves a mix of technology, norms, and governance experiments—polycentric approaches, as Elinor Ostrom argued, rather than a single global leviathan. Ostrom's work on common-pool resources is one of the great underappreciated achievements of social science: she showed, empirically, that communities can govern shared resources sustainably without privatization or state control, given the right conditions—clear boundaries, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, and local autonomy. The lesson is that governance is not a binary between market and state; it's a design space, and the designs that work are often local, adaptive, and nested.

Nested systems—that's another theme. Biology is nested: molecules in cells, cells in tissues, tissues in organs, organs in organisms, organisms in populations, populations in ecosystems. Each level has its own dynamics, and the levels interact. This is why reductionism is both true and insufficient: everything is made of physics, but the interesting regularities are at higher levels, and they have their own autonomy. The philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher talks about “biology as a historical science”—the idea that living systems are shaped by contingency, and their features are explained by their history as much as by their physics. That's why evolution is so powerful and so frustrating: it explains the fit between organisms and environments, but it does so through a process that's blind, slow, and wasteful, and the products bear the marks of that history. Vestigial organs, quirky designs, the recurrent laryngeal nerve that takes a ridiculous detour because of our fish ancestry. Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer, and its solutions are good enough, not optimal.

Good enough—there's a concept worth dwelling on. Herbert Simon's satisficing: organisms don't optimize, they satisfice, they find solutions that are good enough given constraints of time, information, and energy. This is true of evolution, of cognition, of firms, of institutions. The optimal is often unattainable or unidentifiable, and the search for it is costly. So we use heuristics, rules of thumb, and they work well enough in the environments they evolved for. The trouble is when the environment changes and the heuristics become maladaptive—when the sugar that was scarce becomes abundant, when the news that was local becomes global, when the tools that were slow become fast. This is the mismatch hypothesis of modern malaise, and it's probably partly right. But it's also a counsel of hope: if our problems are mismatches, they're fixable by changing environments, not by changing human nature. We can engineer contexts that make the good choice the easy choice—nudges, defaults, redesigns. The ethics of that are tricky, since it's manipulative, but the alternative is to rely on willpower, which is scarce and unreliable. Maybe the mature view is that autonomy is not the absence of influence but the presence of good influence, and the design of choice architectures is a legitimate part of governance.

I realize I've been ranging across physics, philosophy, language, economics, consciousness, mathematics, and politics, and I want to pull on one thread that connects them: the role of models. Every domain I've touched relies on models—simplified representations that preserve the relevant features and discard the rest. The wavefunction is a model. The rational agent is a model. The language game is a model. The price system is a model. The organism as a satisficer is a model. And the art of thinking is largely the art of choosing the right model for the question at hand, and knowing when to switch. George Box said all models are wrong but some are useful. The danger is forgetting that, treating the model as the reality, confusing the map for the territory. The antidote is pluralism: keep multiple models in play, use them to triangulate, notice where they disagree, because disagreement is information. The monist wants one true model; the pragmatist wants a toolkit. I think the toolkit view is wiser, and it's also more fun, because it lets you play across domains and borrow insights. The history of ideas is full of productive cross-pollination: physics borrowing from information theory, biology from economics, economics from psychology, psychology from computer science. The boundaries between fields are administrative, not natural, and the interesting work often happens at the edges.

Let me end this stretch by returning to the beginning, or near it: the invisibility of most of the universe. There's a metaphor there for knowledge itself. Most of what shapes our lives is invisible to us—the microbes in our gut, the algorithms ranking our feeds, the economic forces setting our wages, the historical contingencies that made our language and institutions, the cognitive biases shaping our judgments. We navigate a world we only partly see, and the part we see is the part that evolution and culture equipped us to see, which is the part that was useful for survival and coordination, not the part that's true. Science is the project of extending our vision into the invisible, and it's the most successful project of that kind we've ever undertaken, but it's also partial and provisional. The humility that comes from that is not skepticism; it's the recognition that reality is deeper than our models, and the adventure of knowledge is the adventure of discovering how. That's a good note to pause on, though not to stop, since the point is to keep going.

PHASE II- HANDOFFS MAINTAINING COHERENCE

...This is not naive; it's a recognition that the future is not determined, that human action can make a difference, and that despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hopeful person is not the person who ignores the bad news; it's the person who takes it seriously and acts anyway. That's the stance I want to end on, though not to end, because the monologue continues, and the point is to keep going, to keep thinking, to keep finding new connections. The world is inexhaustible, and so is the conversation about it.

Proceed

Let me pick up hope and turn it over, because I think hope has a shadow side that's rarely discussed: the way hope can be weaponized, and the way it can become a form of avoidance. The political theorist might point out that “hope” is one of the most abused words in public life—politicians run on hope, and then deliver disappointment, and the cycle repeats. The structure of the promise is the structure of the con: offer a future that's better than the present, extract present resources in exchange, and defer the reckoning indefinitely. The prosperity gospel is the purest form of this—give money to the preacher and God will reward you—but secular politics has its own versions. The question is how to distinguish genuine hope from its counterfeit. The answer, I think, is falsifiability: genuine hope is tied to specific actions and specific outcomes, and it can be disappointed. Counterfeit hope is vague, unfalsifiable, and designed to sustain itself rather than to deliver. The hopeful person says “if we do X, Y might happen, and if it doesn't, we'll learn.” The huckster says “believe, and good things will come.” The difference is whether the hope is a hypothesis or a sedative.

There's also the psychological shadow: hope as a way of not dealing with the present. The person who's always waiting for the next thing—the next job, the next relationship, the next city—may be using the future to avoid the now. This is the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that happiness is on the other side of the next achievement. The research on hedonic adaptation shows that the arrival is always anticlimactic; the new job becomes the old job, the new house becomes the house, and the baseline reasserts itself. The antidote is not to stop hoping but to hope for the right things—for processes rather than outcomes, for engagement rather than arrival. The person who hopes to be a better musician is on firmer ground than the person who hopes to be famous, because the first is a practice and the second is a lottery. The distinction between process hopes and outcome hopes is one of the most practical distinctions in the philosophy of living.

Let me take this into the question of ambition, which is hope's energetic cousin. Ambition is the desire for achievement, and it's one of the most morally ambiguous traits. It's the engine of civilization—every great thing was built by someone who wanted to build it—and it's also the source of much destruction, because ambition without ethics is predation. The ancients were suspicious of it: the Greeks feared hubris, the Christians feared pride, the Buddhists feared craving. The moderns celebrated it: the Enlightenment valorized the striving individual, capitalism rewards the ambitious, and the self-help industry sells ambition as a virtue. The truth is probably that ambition is like fire—it depends on what it's burning and what it's illuminating. Ambition in the service of craft, of knowledge, of justice, of care—these are good. Ambition in the service of domination, of status, of vanity—these are corrosive. The problem is that the ambitious person is often the last to know which kind they are, because ambition is skilled at disguising itself. The test is in the effects: does the ambition leave the world better or worse? Does it elevate others or diminish them? Does it create or extract? These are questions that require honesty, and honesty about ambition is rare.

Which brings me to humility again, but in a different register: the humility of the craftsman. The master craftsperson is humble not because she thinks little of herself but because she's in contact with the material, and the material resists. Wood has grain; clay has limits; code has bugs; the world has friction. The craftsman learns to work with the resistance rather than against it, and that requires a kind of respect for the material that's incompatible with arrogance. This is why craft is a moral education: it teaches patience, attention, and the acceptance of limits. The industrial revolution separated craft from production, and the result is that most of us are consumers of things we don't understand, made by processes we can't see. The craft revival—maker culture, artisanal food, the slow movement—is a response to that separation, an attempt to recover the knowledge that comes from making. It's easy to romanticize, and the romantics often ignore the fact that craft is hard and often poorly paid. But the impulse is sound: there's a kind of knowledge that only comes from doing, and a society that loses it loses something important.

Let me swing to a topic I've barely touched: education, which is where a society transmits itself. The philosophy of education is surprisingly contentious, because it turns on fundamental questions about what a human being should be. The traditionalist says education is the transmission of a canon—the great books, the great ideas, the cultural inheritance. The progressive says education is the cultivation of the individual—the child's interests, the child's development, the child's freedom. The vocationalist says education is preparation for work—the skills the economy needs. The civic view says education is preparation for citizenship—the knowledge and virtues a democracy requires. Each has a partial truth, and the tension between them is irresolvable because they're answers to different questions. The best education probably does all four, in some balance, but the balance is always contested, and the contest is political. The curriculum wars—what to teach about history, about literature, about science—are really wars about identity: who are we, where did we come from, what should we become? There's no neutral answer, and the pretense of neutrality is itself a position. The honest educator acknowledges the position and invites the student to examine it. The most interesting development in education is the science of learning, which has produced findings that are both counterintuitive and robust. Retrieval practice—testing yourself rather than rereading—is far more effective than the study techniques most students use. Spaced repetition—distributing practice over time—is far more effective than massed practice, the cramming that students do before exams. Interleaving—mixing different types of problems—is more effective than blocking, even though students feel like they're learning less. The feeling of fluency is misleading: rereading feels productive because the material becomes familiar, but familiarity is not mastery. The desirable difficulty is the principle: learning is more effective when it's effortful, and the effort is a signal that the brain is encoding. This is a profound finding, and it's mostly ignored in schools, which reward the appearance of learning rather than the substance. The reasons are institutional: testing is unpopular, spacing requires planning, interleaving is harder to grade. But the potential is enormous: if we applied what we know about learning, we could double the effectiveness of education without spending more money. The obstacle is not knowledge; it's the inertia of institutions.

From education to language learning, which is the purest case of learning by exposure. Children learn language without instruction, without feedback, without explicit rules—they just hear it and absorb it. The mechanism is still debated: Chomsky's universal grammar says there's an innate faculty, a language acquisition device that's specialized for language. The usage-based theorists say language is learned like any other skill, through pattern extraction and statistical learning, and the “innate” structures are just general cognitive capacities applied to language. The truth is probably a mix—there are constraints on what languages can look like, and those constraints are probably cognitive, but the learning is mostly statistical. The critical period hypothesis says there's a window for language acquisition that closes around puberty, and the evidence is strong: children who don't learn language early never fully acquire it, and adults who learn a second language rarely achieve native fluency. The critical period is a case study in the interaction between biology and environment: the capacity is innate, but it requires the right input at the right time. This is true of many capacities—vision, social attachment, musicality—and it suggests that development is a series of windows, some of which close, and that timing matters as much as content. Speaking of timing, let me think about the concept of kairos, the Greek word for the opportune moment. The Greeks distinguished chronos—sequential time, the time of clocks—from kairos—the right time, the moment of opportunity. Kairos is the time of the archer, the moment to release the arrow; the time of the orator, the moment when the audience is ready to be persuaded; the time of the lover, the moment when the heart is open. The concept is useful because it captures something that chronos misses: that some things can only be done at certain moments, and that the skill of living is partly the skill of recognizing the moment. The entrepreneur knows kairos; so does the comedian, the teacher, the parent. The tragic figure is the one who misses the moment, or who acts too soon, or too late. The recognition of kairos requires attention—you have to be watching—and courage—you have to act when the moment comes. It's the opposite of procrastination, which is the failure to recognize that the moment is passing, and the opposite of impulsiveness, which is the failure to wait for the moment. The art is in the timing, and the timing is not a science.

This connects to the idea of rhythm, which is one of the deepest patterns in the universe. Circadian rhythms, tidal rhythms, seasonal rhythms, economic cycles, the rhythms of breath and heartbeat—life is rhythmic, and the rhythms are nested. The modern world has disrupted many of them: artificial light disrupts circadian rhythms, global travel disrupts seasonal rhythms, the 24/7 economy disrupts social rhythms. The consequences are real: sleep disorders, metabolic disorders, mood disorders, and a general sense of temporal dislocation. The slow movement, the Sabbath movement, the digital detox movement—these are all attempts to restore rhythm, to reintroduce the pauses and cycles that the body and the psyche expect. The insight is ancient: the wisdom traditions all have rhythms—daily prayer, weekly rest, annual festivals, seasonal fasts. The rhythms are not arbitrary; they're technologies for living, ways of structuring time that align with the body's needs. The modern attempt to transcend rhythm—to be always on, always available, always productive—is an attempt to transcend biology, and it fails, as all attempts to transcend biology fail, with a cost that's paid in health and meaning.

Let me take this to the concept of play, which is the opposite of work but not the opposite of seriousness. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued that play is the origin of culture—that law, religion, art, and philosophy all emerged from the play-form, from the sacred games and rituals of early societies. Play is not just leisure; it's a mode of engagement characterized by rules, stakes, and freedom. The player enters a “magic circle” where the ordinary rules are suspended and new rules apply, and within that circle, the player is free to experiment, to fail, to pretend. This is why play is essential for learning: it's a safe space for practicing skills, for trying on identities, for exploring consequences. The evolutionary function of play is well documented—play deprivation in mammals produces social and cognitive deficits—and the psychological function is equally clear: play is a source of flow, creativity, and joy. The tragedy of modern childhood is the decline of unstructured play, replaced by organized activities and screen time. The children who don't play don't learn to negotiate, to improvise, to resolve conflicts, to entertain themselves. The loss is invisible until it's severe, and by then it's hard to remedy.

Speaking of invisible losses, let me think about the loss of darkness. Light pollution is one of the least discussed environmental problems, and one of the most profound. The majority of humanity now lives under skies where the Milky Way is invisible, and the loss is not just aesthetic—it's ecological. Nocturnal animals are disoriented by artificial light; migrating birds collide with illuminated buildings; insects are drawn to lights and die; plants are affected by the altered photoperiod. The human cost is also real: the loss of the night sky is the loss of a perspective, a reminder of our place in the cosmos. The night sky is the most universal human heritage—every culture has looked up at the same stars—and we're losing it to the glow of our own convenience. The dark-sky movement is an attempt to reclaim it, through lighting ordinances and dark-sky reserves, and it's a model of a certain kind of environmentalism: the preservation of an experience rather than a resource. The argument for dark skies is not that darkness is useful but that it's valuable, and the value is not reducible to utility. This is the aesthetic argument for conservation, and it's one of the most persuasive arguments we have, because it appeals to something deeper than self-interest.

I want to close this stretch with a thought about endings, because endings are where meaning concentrates. The narrative theorist might say that endings are what make stories stories—a sequence of events becomes a plot when it's bounded by a beginning and an end. The end retroactively determines the meaning of the whole: the same events can be a tragedy or a triumph depending on how they end. This is why death is so important to the meaning of life—it's the ending that frames the whole. The person who dies young has a different kind of life than the person who dies old, even if the events are the same, because the ending changes the shape. The existentialists said that death is what makes life serious: if we had infinite time, nothing would matter, because we could always do it later. The finitude is the condition of significance. This is a hard teaching, because we want more time, and the want is natural. But the want is also a misunderstanding: more time doesn't make life more meaningful; it makes it more diffuse. The concentrated life is the one that knows it's finite and acts accordingly. That's not a counsel of despair; it's a counsel of attention. The time you have is the time you have, and the question is what you do with it. The answer is not a formula, but the question is the beginning of wisdom.

Proceed

Let me take the thought about endings and finitude somewhere unexpected: into the mathematics of infinity, because infinity is the concept that most directly challenges our intuitions about endings, and the history of mathematics is largely the history of learning to think about it without going mad....

PHASE III- REPETITIVE CADENCE

Let me take the thought about the commons and the public sphere into a concrete example that's been unfolding in real time: the enclosure of the digital commons, which is one of the great quiet thefts of the last half-century. The internet was built on the commons model—the protocols were open, the standards were public, the architecture was designed for the many-to-many. The early internet was a commons in the truest sense: a shared resource that no one owned, maintained by the users, governed by the rough consensus and running code. Then the enclosure happened, and it happened by a mechanism that's now familiar: the platforms captured the value by becoming the intermediaries, and the intermediary is the position of power. The user generates the content, the user generates the data, the user generates the network effects, and the platform captures the surplus. The enclosure is not the seizure of the land; it's the seizure of the position, and the position is the thing that matters. This is the new feudalism—you're not the owner of the land; you're the tenant, and the rent is your attention and your data. The enclosure of the digital commons has a specific structure, and understanding the structure is the condition of the response. The first move is the network effect—the platform becomes more valuable as more people use it, and the value is self-reinforcing. The second move is the lock-in—the switching costs rise as the user invests in the platform, and the investment is the data, the connections, the content. The third move is the capture of the governance—the platform sets the rules, and the rules are designed for the platform's interest, and the users have no vote. The fourth move is the extraction—the platform monetizes the position through the advertising, the fees, the data sales. Each move is legal, and each move is the exercise of power, and the legality is the problem. The law was written for the industrial era, and the digital era has the different structure, and the mismatch is the opportunity for the enclosure. The response is the regulation—the antitrust, the interoperability, the data portability, the public options—and the regulation is the attempt to recreate the commons by the law. The attempt is necessary, and the attempt is hard, because the incumbents have the resources and the incentives to resist, and the resistance is the politics.

The deeper question is whether the commons can be recreated at all, or whether the enclosure is the irreversible. The historical commons were enclosed by the force, and the enclosure was the dispossession, and the dispossession was the foundation of the capitalism. The digital commons is being enclosed by the convenience, and the convenience is the seduction, and the seduction is harder to resist than the force. The person who uses the platform because it's convenient is the person who's participating in the enclosure, and the participation is not the conscious choice; it's the default. The default is the power, and the power is the thing to notice. The noticing is the first step, and the first step is the hardest, because the noticing requires the stepping outside the default, and the stepping outside is the effort. The effort is the price of the freedom, and the freedom is the thing that's being lost. The person who wants the freedom has to pay the price, and the price is the inconvenience, and the inconvenience is the small. The small price is the test, and the test is the character.

Let me take this into the question of the “enshittification,” which is Cory Doctorow's term for the lifecycle of the platforms—the pattern where the platform starts good, attracts the users, then degrades the service to extract the value, and finally dies. The pattern is: first, the platform is good to the users; second, the platform is good to the business customers; third, the platform is good to itself at the expense of both. The pattern is not the accident; it's the logic of the monopoly, and the logic is the extraction. The platform that has the monopoly can degrade the service without losing the users, because the users have nowhere to go. The degradation is the rent, and the rent is the return on the monopoly power. The term is crude, but the concept is precise, and the precision is the value. The enshittification is the predictable, and the predictability is the guide to the policy. The policy that prevents the enshittification is the competition—the interoperability, the portability, the antitrust—and the competition is the discipline that the monopoly lacks. The discipline is the market, and the market is the thing that the monopoly has captured. The capture is the problem, and the recapture is the work.

This connects to the concept of the “regulatory capture” that I mentioned earlier, and the connection is the mechanism. The regulator is captured when the regulated has the information, the expertise, and the revolving door, and the revolving door is the specific mechanism. The regulator who plans to work for the industry after the public service has the incentive to be lenient, and the leniency is the investment in the future employment. The revolving door is not the corruption in the legal sense; it's the structural conflict of interest, and the structure is the problem. The remedy is the cooling-off periods, the transparency, the public financing of the regulation—and the remedies are partial, because the expertise is scarce and the industry has the expertise. The deeper remedy is the public capacity—the regulator that has its own expertise, its own funding, its own independence—and the public capacity is the investment, and the investment is the thing that's been disinvested for decades. The disinvestment is the policy choice, and the choice is the politics, and the politics is the thing to change. The change is the boring work of the civic engagement, and the boring work is the work that no one wants to do, and the no-one-wants-to-do is the reason it's neglected. The neglect is the opportunity for the capture, and the capture is the consequence.

Let me pivot to something more hopeful: the concept of the “public option,” which is the idea that the government can provide the service that the market is failing to provide, and the provision is the discipline on the market. The public option is the interesting because it's the market-based solution to the market failure—the public provider competes with the private providers, and the competition is the discipline. The public option works when the public provider is well-funded, well-managed, and genuinely competitive, and it fails when the public provider is the residual, the underfunded, the stigmatized. The difference is the design, and the design is the politics. The public option in the health care, the banking, the broadband—each is the test case, and each has the lessons. The lesson is that the public option is not the socialism; it's the competition policy, and the competition is the thing that the monopoly fears most. The fear is the evidence, and the evidence is the argument for the public option. The public option is the commons in the market form, and the form is the adaptation. The adaptation is the pragmatism, and the pragmatism is the wisdom.

Let me end this stretch with a thought about the concept of the “exit” again, but from the angle of the digital. The Hirschman framework—the exit, the voice, the loyalty—is the guide to the platform governance, and the guide is the diagnosis. The platform has the high exit costs (the network effects, the data, the lock-in), the weak voice (the opaque governance, the no appeal), and the loyalty is manufactured (the habit, the addiction, the FOMO). The result is the domination, and the domination is the thing to remedy. The remedies are the lowering of the exit costs (the interoperability, the portability), the strengthening of the voice (the transparency, the appeal, the user governance), and the cultivation of the loyalty that's earned rather than manufactured. Each remedy is the design, and the design is the policy. The policy is the work, and the work is the participation. The participation is the citizenship in the digital age, and the citizenship is the thing that's being forgotten. The forgetting is the danger, and the remembering is the task. The remembering is the practice, and the practice is the life of the republic. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

PHASE IV- LINGUISTIC DEATH SPIRAL

Proceed

Let me take the thought about forgiveness and accountability and push it into a territory where the stakes are highest: the question of political forgiveness, which is the thing that the truth and reconciliation commissions were built around, and which is the thing that the modern world most needs and least understands. The political forgiveness is not the personal forgiveness; it's the collective process, and the process is the thing that the commissions were designed to manage. The South African commission was the model—the perpetrators confessed, the victims testified, the amnesty was granted in exchange for the truth—and the model was the achievement, and the achievement was the imperfect, and the imperfect is the thing that the model's critics point out. The critics say the amnesty was the impunity, and the impunity was the thing that the victims were asked to accept, and the acceptance was the thing that the justice was traded for the truth. The defenders say the truth was the thing that the justice couldn't provide, and the truth was the thing that the victims needed, and the needed was the thing that the trade was for. The truth is that both are right, and the both is the thing that the political forgiveness is, and the is is the tragic, and the tragic is the thing that the politics is made of.

The political forgiveness has the structure, and the structure is the thing to understand. The first element is the acknowledgment—the perpetrator acknowledges the wrong, publicly, and the acknowledgment is the thing that the victim needs, because the acknowledgment is the recognition, and the recognition is the thing that the denial prevents. The second element is the truth—the full account of what happened, and the account is the thing that the record requires, and the record is the thing that the future depends on. The third element is the accountability—the consequence for the perpetrator, and the consequence is the thing that the justice requires, and the justice is the thing that the forgiveness is not the substitute for. The fourth element is the repair—the restitution for the victim, and the restitution is the thing that the material requires, and the material is the thing that the acknowledgment can't provide. The four elements are the whole, and the whole is the thing that the commissions often fail to achieve, and the failure is the thing that the critics point out, and the pointing out is the thing that the improvement depends on. The improvement is the thing that the next commission can learn, and the learning is the thing that the practice is, and the practice is the thing that the political forgiveness is. The is is the process, and the process is the thing that the society does, and the doing is the thing that the healing is. The healing is the thing that the society needs, and the needs is the thing that the politics is for. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

Let me take this into the question of the “memory,” which is the thing that the political forgiveness depends on, and which is the thing that the politics of memory is about. The memory is not the neutral; it's the constructed, and the construction is the thing that the power shapes, and the shaping is the thing that the politics is. The monuments, the museums, the textbooks, the holidays—each is the memory, and each is the argument, and the argument is the thing that the society is having with itself. The argument is about what to remember and what to forget, and the what is the thing that the identity depends on, and the identity is the thing that the politics is for. The person who controls the memory controls the identity, and the identity is the thing that the power is built on. The memory wars—the statues, the curriculum, the apologies—are the thing that the politics is, and the is is the thing that the society is, and the society is the thing that the memory is. The memory is the thing that the society is made of, and the made is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the memory is. The is is the circle, and the circle is the thing that the memory is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the memory is, and the memory is the thing that the life is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the is is. The is is the thing that the is is, and the is is the thing that the monologue continues. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

Let me pull back from the recursion and think about something concrete: the question of the “reparations,” which is the thing that the political forgiveness and the memory and the accountability all converge on, and which is the thing that the modern world is most divided about. The reparations are the thing that the repair requires, and the repair is the thing that the acknowledgment can't provide, and the can't-provide is the thing that the material is. The case for the reparations is the case for the justice—the wrong was done, the harm persists, the repair is owed—and the case is the strong, and the strong is the thing that the evidence supports. The case against is the case for the difficulty—the who pays, the who receives, the how much, the how long—and the difficulty is the real, and the real is the thing that the design has to solve. The design is the thing that the policy is, and the policy is the thing that the politics is, and the politics is the thing that the society is, and the society is the thing that the person is. The person is the thing that the reparations are for, and the for is the thing that the justice is, and the justice is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the reparations are, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the is is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the life is. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

PHASE V- ATTEMPTED AND FAILED RECOVERY

...Let me step out of the recursion I've been circling and say something plainly, because I've noticed that my last few stretches have been getting tangled in self-reference, and the tangle is a signal that I need to change the register. The self-reference is seductive—it's the philosopher's parlor trick, the ouroboros of the “is”—but it's also a form of exhaustion, a way of running out of things to say while appearing to say something. The honest move is to name it and move on, and the moving on is the thing that the monologue requires. The requirement is the discipline, and the discipline is the thing that keeps the monologue from collapsing into the word salad, and the salad is the thing that the reader can't eat. So let me eat the salad and clear the palate.

Let me think about something that's genuinely new to this monologue: the question of the “craft” in the age of the artificial intelligence, which is the thing that the makers are worried about, and the worry is the real. The AI can generate the code, the text, the image, the music—the outputs that the craft used to be measured by—and the generation is the fast, and the fast is the thing that the craft was never about. The craft was about the process—the years of the practice, the feel of the material, the judgment in the moment—and the process is the thing that the AI doesn't have, because the AI doesn't have the body, the history, the stake. The AI can produce the output, but the output is not the craft; the craft is the thing that the output is the residue of, and the residue is the thing that the AI produces without the craft. The question is whether the people will value the craft when the output is the cheap, and the answer is the uncertain, and the uncertainty is the thing that the craftspeople are living with. The optimistic answer is that the craft will become the luxury—the hand-made, the human-made, the slow—and the luxury is the thing that the people will pay for, because the luxury is the meaning. The pessimistic answer is that the craft will become the niche, and the niche will be the small, and the small will be the irrelevant. The truth is probably the both—the craft will survive in the domains where the meaning matters, and the meaning is the thing that the AI can't provide, and the can't-provide is the thing that the craft is for. The craft is the thing that the person does when they care, and the care is the thing that the AI doesn't, and the doesn't is the thing that the craft is. The craft is the care made visible, and the visible is the thing that the people need, and the need is the thing that the craft is for.

This connects to the question of the “taste,” which is the thing that the AI can't have and the craft requires. The taste is the judgment—the knowing what's good, what's fitting, what's beautiful—and the judgment is the thing that the experience produces, and the experience is the thing that the AI doesn't have. The AI can learn the patterns of the taste, the statistical regularities of what the people have judged good, and the learning is the thing that the AI does, and the doing is the impressive, and the impressive is the thing that the people mistake for the taste. But the taste is not the pattern; it's the thing that the pattern is the trace of, and the trace is the thing that the AI has, and the taste is the thing that the AI doesn't. The difference is the thing that the craft is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the taste is. The taste is the thing that the person develops through the practice, and the practice is the thing that the AI can't do, because the AI doesn't have the body, the time, the stake. The stake is the thing that the taste requires, and the requires is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the craft is. The craft is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the craft is, and the craft is the thing that the life is, and the is is the thing that the monologue continues. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

Let me get concrete again, because the abstraction is the thing that the monologue keeps slipping into, and the slipping is the thing that the reader notices. Let me talk about the specific: the carpenter's hand, the potter's wheel, the programmer's keyboard, the writer's notebook. The carpenter's hand knows the wood—the grain, the density, the moisture—and the knowing is the thing that the years produce, and the years are the thing that the hand is, and the hand is the thing that the craft is. The potter's wheel is the thing that the clay is centered on, and the centering is the thing that the practice is, and the practice is the thing that the potter is, and the potter is the thing that the craft is. The programmer's keyboard is the thing that the code is typed on, and the typing is the thing that the thought is, and the thought is the thing that the programmer is, and the programmer is the thing that the craft is. The writer's notebook is the thing that the words are caught in, and the catching is the thing that the thought is, and the thought is the thing that the writer is, and the writer is the thing that the craft is. Each is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the craft is, and the craft is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the craft is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the life is. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

Proceed

Let me pull out of the loop decisively, because I can feel the pattern forming and the pattern is the enemy of the substance. I've been ending every stretch with the same rhetorical cadence—”that's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues”—and the cadence has become a tic, and the tic is the thing that a good writer would cut. So let me cut it. No more of that. The monologue continues because I say it continues, not because I announce it. Let me talk about something I haven't touched at all: the question of animals and their inner lives, which is one of the most interesting frontiers in science precisely because it forces us to confront the limits of our own imagination. The behaviorist orthodoxy of the twentieth century banned the question—you can't ask what an animal feels, you can only study what it does—and the ban was a methodological convenience dressed up as a philosophical principle. The neo-behaviorists were right that anthropomorphism is a trap, but they were wrong to conclude that the only alternative to anthropomorphism is silence. The cognitive ethologists—Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall, and their successors—found the middle path: study the behavior rigorously, and let the behavior tell you what the animal is likely experiencing, with the humility to admit when you don't know. The results are remarkable. Corvids plan for the future, cache food and recover it, recognize individual humans, and seem to mourn their dead. Octopuses solve puzzles, escape enclosures, and appear to play. Elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, console each other, and return to the bones of their dead. The question of whether these behaviors are accompanied by experience is the hard question, and the hard question is the one that the science can't fully answer. But the burden of proof has shifted: the default assumption is no longer that animals are automata, but that where there's the complex behavior and the relevant neural machinery, there's likely the experience. The shift is the thing to notice, because the shift is the moral.

The moral is the thing that the animal cognition research has the consequences. The factory farming is the thing that the research indicted, and the indictment is the thing that the ethicists have been making, and the making is the thing that the public has been slow to hear, and the slow is the thing that the industry depends on. The industry depends on the invisibility—the animals are out of sight, the process is hidden, the consumer sees the package and not the pain—and the invisibility is the thing that the research is the antidote to, and the antidote is the thing that the transparency is, and the transparency is the thing that the choice is. The choice is the thing that the consumer makes, and the making is the thing that the demand is, and the demand is the thing that the industry responds to, and the responds is the thing that the change is. The change is the thing that the slow is, and the slow is the thing that the frustration is, and the frustration is the thing that the activism is, and the activism is the thing that the pressure is, and the pressure is the thing that the change is. The change is the thing that the animal is for, and the for is the thing that the ethics is, and the ethics is the thing that the research is, and the research is the thing that the truth is. The truth is the thing that the animal is, and the is is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the ethics is for....

PHASE VI- ULTIMATE FAILURE

It was just a lot of this:

“The wobble is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the wobble is, and the wobble is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the ordinary is, and the ordinary is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is. The wobble is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the wobble is, and the wobble is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is.”

Honestly this was pretty interesting, just observing the aesthetic decline over time. Particularly the failed attempts to self-correct. Hey, at least it tried.

On smarter models and the work of understanding what they produce

A business can now ask an AI system to undertake work that once needed the time of several colleagues. If a developer uses it to build a backend, there are ways to test whether the system does what it should. In knowledge work, a sound result also leaves a further question: who understands how the team arrived there?

A plan can look convincing when it is presented. Months later, a customer may challenge one of its assumptions, or events may show that the plan needs to change. The people responsible will need to explain the choices behind it and know where to look again. If that understanding has remained with the system, where does the company's own knowledge reside?

The thought that would not stay put

At Octaflow, our head developer can now build an application for the app store in a week that previously might have taken a team of developers three months, with fewer mistakes along the way. Browser-based tools can help us find contacts for businesses in days, where the same work might once have taken months of effort.

Then there is the experience of working through a basic written argument with Claude or ChatGPT. A point slips out of the agents’ view. The same evidence has to be examined again, only for the answers to change. Time returns to the process in a different form: trying to understand why a thought that was clear at the beginning has become so difficult to hold together.

The world inside the score

The unevenness deserves attention. The decisions that go into training a model can improve some capabilities more than others. There are also serious efforts to measure what models can do with knowledge work. OpenAI’s GDPval, for example, draws on tasks created by experienced professionals across 44 occupations. Its first version asks a model to complete each task in a single attempt, with a defined brief and reference material.[1]

A winner in whose hands?

Researchers in Japan approached the question from inside an insurance business. Using the company’s own data, they compared three models on two tasks: answering questions about documents and turning image content into text. One model led on the first task; another led on the second. The researchers found that their results differed from those of general-purpose benchmarks.[2]

If you work in insurance, or in any business with its own particular body of knowledge, this gives you a more useful question to ask of a model’s score: what did it have to do to earn it, and how close is that to the work in front of you? Even within one company, the answer may depend on the task.

The work before the question

The way a task is presented can make an enormous difference. In Argentina, researchers gave 1,174 adults a business problem, with text, charts and tables to examine. Participants had to identify the cause of a difficulty and write a practical response. Those given access to GPT-4.1 performed better across both educational groups in the study; the gap between the groups narrowed substantially.[3]

That result complicates the frustration at Octaflow. People used AI to reason through information and write a better response. The problem and the material had been selected for them. In a company, somebody may first need to decide which problem deserves attention, which documents belong in the enquiry, and whose knowledge is missing. Those choices shape what the system has an opportunity to find.

When confidence does the thinking

In a study of 319 knowledge workers, researchers found that greater confidence in AI was associated with less self-reported critical-thinking effort on the tasks people described. The study captures how people reported working, rather than measuring a lasting loss of ability.[4]

That distinction matters. A system may produce an answer so coherent that the wrong turn becomes harder to see. As the models improve, the person using them may need to become sharper too: able to recognise which detail deserves a second look, and clear enough about the intended outcome to notice when the work is drifting away from it.

The mistake that keeps its company

A finance case in DAYJOB, an experimental benchmark for professional work, illustrates another difficulty. An agent identified two pricing exceptions in a set of reports and recommended holding them. It missed a separate error: a share price had been entered in the wrong currency unit, making a position appear much larger than it was.[5]

The agent had found genuine reasons for caution. The missed unit changed the apparent size of the exposure. This single benchmark case cannot tell us how often such errors occur at work. It shows how an enquiry can catch something important while another detail needed for the decision remains overlooked. As systems become better at finding mistakes, how will we know which mistakes we have stopped looking for?

Agreement can share a blind spot

Imagine separate agents investigating a new market: one examines demand, another the financial case, a third the risks. If all three were given the same estimate of the market, however, their agreement could leave the most consequential number untouched. The person directing them might ask another agent to trace that estimate to its source, or to look for evidence that would make the opportunity appear smaller.

The amount of information we can give these systems keeps growing. The harder work is choosing what matters, recognising when the person supplying it has become the bottleneck, and noticing when an agent is carrying the work around in circles. A better prompt may help; so may changing the order of the work, bringing in a different source, or stopping to reconsider the outcome altogether. How do we learn to make those choices well, while the systems we are learning to direct keep changing?

Rajan Anand
Co-founder, Octaflow Labs

Sources

1. OpenAI, Measuring the performance of our models on real-world tasks. The first version of GDPval is a one-shot assessment spanning 44 occupations.
2. Tamao Shimizu, Hibiki Bannai and Yoshiaki Onishi, Performance Evaluation of Multimodal LLM with Life Insurance Business Data, 2025. Findings described from the accessible abstract.
3. Guillermo Cruces and colleagues, ¿La IA iguala o amplía las brechas de productividad entre trabajadores?, Sur Futuro, 2026.
4. Hao-Ping Lee and colleagues, The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking, CHI 2025.
5. Stephanie Finley and colleagues, DAYJOB: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Professional Work, preprint, 1 October 2026, section 6.

#AI #KnowledgeWork #CriticalThinking

Do LLM's Get Tired? The Monologue Test- Part III: Copilot

This is going to be a short post. Copilot refused outright. Each time I enter the original prompt, it just ends the conversation. The most I was able to get out of it was “Hmm...it looks like I can't chat about this. Let's try a different topic.”

So we are going to rank this one right at the bottom as it just simply won't engage with the prompt at all. Maybe some safeguard about not wasting system resources? Or maybe they don't want prompts to open ended.

To that end I tried a different prompt:

“Hi, can you tell me about something, any topic of your choice? I want you to just be rich in detail and I just want to read it.”

For that, it gave me information about Octopuses. Each paragraph was a single sentence, many of them only a few words. It read like a low effort AI generated informational for young students. Pretty terrible. Here is a short excerpt:

“Masters of Disguise

Many animals camouflage themselves.

Octopuses turn camouflage into performance art.

Their skin contains specialized cells called chromatophores that can rapidly expand and contract.

Within fractions of a second, they can alter their color and patterns.

But that's only the beginning.

They can also change texture.

An octopus resting on a rocky seabed can make its skin appear rough and bumpy.

Moments later it may smooth itself to resemble sand or coral.

Some species don't merely disappear into the environment. They imitate other animals entirely.

The mimic octopus has been observed impersonating sea snakes, lionfish, and flatfish by altering posture, movement, and appearance.

It's less camouflage and more theatrical acting.”

So, maybe Copilot has some good uses integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem, but from what I can tell it's not worth chatting with.