Journal Entry For 2026-03-19
- Had to update yesterday's post. So, so many typos and omissions. That is the problem if you try to publish stuff that you just quickly jotted down throughout the day.
- The idea behind these kinds of posts btw. is to act as an alternative to posting on social media.
- There is an excellent (German) old-school album review site called Plattentests.de that I discovered for myself late last year. It has been going since 1999. And I am very grateful that it is still going. Every album I read about and then try out makes me feel like I am consuming music "the right way". Highly recommended!
- I notice a strong resistance against nostalgia and wishing the old times back: I try to envision my excursions into owning media, self-hosting things and retreating from context collapsed social media as a new future and not as nostalgia. Yancey Strickler (Kickstarter Cofounder, I happen to follow him not because of that, but because he writes about a more private internet amongst other things) wrote about the particular outrage machine that is X (nee Twitter). Unscale the internet.
- I also notice that my values are more "left-leaning social democratic" than far-left - and maybe always have been (being at times under the spell of more radical notions notwithstanding).[1] I notice this in what I read, what I value (f.x. the ability to compromise) and what I despise, what takes I welcome - if not without skepticism. I like moderation and I fully admit that to me the intellectually most honest stance I can personally take on is one of acceptance of historicity (some would call it fatalist): Therefore I tend to agree more with Noah Smith - who recently wrote about "AI" as a medium for moderation (as in finding a middle ground) on social media (What a crazy thing to say?! Time to shout? Or time to think and differentiate?) - than with Tante[2] and his Master's Tools argument - which forgoes the conclusion of if LLMs are a Master's tool and also if this is a useful lens (and if so for whom).[3]
- Our little baby is moving in its mom's belly kind of a lot these days! But at the same time it is totally shy! Whenever I'm called to put my hand on my partner's belly the movement stops. I am not taking personally. Take all the time you need, little one!
I think that doesn't mean that you can't be weird. It just means that you value social democracy as a way to organize people. But that does not mean I don't appreciate practicing theory and learning about ideas or whatever. ↩︎
[[A Critique Of A Critique (Of LLMs And Technology Critique In General)|Previously.]] ↩︎
This master's tools argument is therefore similar to the "AI is a cognitive hazard" argument. I am familar with this kind of argument that a certain kind of person trained in the humanities likes to make: the self sealing kind (in German we would call this a Immunisierungsstrategie or "strategy of immunisation"). I had said before that I don't think LLMs are a tabu - which I guess is to say they probably aren't master's tools (i.e. guns, whips, etc.). ↩︎
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