Category: Climate Change

  • the cozy catastrophists of cosplay doomerism

    Asterisk Magazine, which aspires to be The New Yorker of effective altruism, has a piece profiling “AI doomers” which, even after reviewing the author’s other sincere engagements with related topics, I’m struggling not to parse as a brilliant bit of parody and/or satire. … AI doom is a remarkably cozy catastrophe. If you suffered through…

  • other, earlier modes of living are fully open to us

    I was amused and delighted to discover that David Wengrow actually shares certain philosophical territory with none other than Alan Moore.

  • the months of rot

    Reflections on the dog days of a) summer, b) that thing we still insist on thinking of as “civilisation”, and c) the human life-arc.

  • and not a drop to drink

    This, I presume, is why Amdahl was out there in the Gulf, hanging on at the trailing edge of the business: Big Blue was focussed on the big-ticket players, and a fading rival could still pick up some gigs on the fringes of its interests.

  • easy solutions to problems of unfathomable scale

    Offered without comment: The modern condition consists of a constant self-infantilization, of any number of “non-adulting” activities. The main being, of course, plugging into a dopamine casino right before going to sleep and right upon waking up. At least a morning cigarette habit in 1976 gave one time to look at the world in front…