Max Read

@maxread

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Max Read@maxread· 4d

wrote about data center protests as a kind of blowback: silicon valley's own tools and ideologies coming back to bite it in the ass www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

But even beyond the use of specific software platforms to undermine their parent companies' long-term aims, the tech industry is finding itself obstructed by the consequences of its own success. One thing Sun emphasizes in particular is how much this pushback is occurring in an atmosphere of almost zero trust:

My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.

Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities—forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI’s wealthy user base—resembles a classic story about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It’s not Skynet: it’s the oligarchy.

Oh, there's no faith in institutions? An all-encompassing skepticism and paranoia? No local institutional news sources? I wonder how that came about. Replacing and diminishing trusted mediating institutions with advertising-surveillance platforms has been extraordinarily lucrative to Silicon Valley executives and investors over the past two decades. But the low-trust environment cultivated over the past couple decades by the tech industry's flagship companies has now created real obstacles to its ambitions. Now that tech giants are the institutions—and effectively in charge of U.S. industrial policy—they are getting a first-hand lesson in how corrosive to long-term planning institutional mistrust can be.

Max Read@maxread· 7d

on scott alexander's simulation post

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible

Max Read@maxread· Jul 10

Thanks to @jaubertmoniker.net and @razzlebathbone.bsky.social for supplying a topic for this weeks newsletter: dad revenge www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

Max Read@maxread· Jul 3

Max Read@maxread· Jun 26

in this week's newsletter: what happened to mark zuckerberg's chain? www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

two photos of mark zuckerberg taken one month apart. on the left, his chain is visible, on the right, his chain is hidden

Max Read@maxread· Jun 23

vibe shift watch: facebook ending its war on its employees?

Max Read@maxread· Jun 22

the venue across the street from the bar where i watched game 5 hosted a band called "prostitute" on june 13 so apple photos has named the automatically generated albums of photos from that night "prostitute concert" for me and all my friends

Max Read@maxread· Jun 9

reasonable people can disagree but i would personally characterize ZM's facial hair as a grown-out mustache rather than a beard as such. in fact he's a longtime mustache guy

Max Read@maxread· Jun 7

this @tcraggs22.bsky.social piece still the best take defector.com/bari-weiss-i...

If Weiss is exceptional, it's only in her knack for making a spectacle of the sort of things that slicker operators in media say and do all the time without causing too much of a fuss. When her CBS Evening News released "five simple principles" guiding its coverage, among them "We Love America," I thought back to the equally fatuous declaration by Weiss's old patron on the New York Times opinion desk, James Bennet, that the editorial page is "pro-capitalism." Bennet said this in a private meeting, a video of which was later leaked. CBS Evening News announced that it loved America in a thread on the Nazified shell of Twitter.

What Sweeney was describing was the routine stuff of mainstream journalism, the unremarkable, everyday work of determining what is and isn't salient, of identifying patterns and shaping a narrative around them, with pressure applied from on high but responsibility distributed across the newsroom. What she was also describing, though she didn't put it in these terms, was the promulgation of a regime-friendly editorial line. The Times let its bureaucracy do the work that Weiss, in scuttling the CECOT story, arrogated to herself. The result in either case was an approach to journalism that could reasonably be said to have abided by professional standards of fairness and comprehensiveness and that was also, on some basic level, utterly sociopathic. Normal newsrooms doing normal things.

Max Read@maxread· Jun 3

this might be right for bk heights but in FG the kids are named ava and leo not isabel and atticus; she's in-house counsel for an AI start up not an investor; he's only "thinking about writing a novel" because he recently got forced out of his design job at uber/fb/apple. nw nowhere near $42m

Max Read@maxread· Jun 2

great piece. this is the sign that greets you as you leave platner's home of sullivan and enter gouldsboro, the next town over. "pride in our veterans"!

Max Read@maxread· May 22

I think there is a pretty good short story in the Granta AI story "The Serpent in the Grove," I just don't think it's "The Serpent in the Grove" www.patreon.com/posts/what-i...

In some sense there is not much to say about this. The story isn't very good, but it superficially resembles a good story (as many people have pointed out, it reads a bit like a pastiche or parody of a certain kind of lyrical Anglophone global-south magical realism), which is both the kind of thing we might expect AI to be fairly at producing and also the kind of "good-shaped" bad story we might expect an inattentive or overextended editor or judge to reward. (Pangram, the company behind most reputable AI-detection software, claims that two of the other Commonwealth Prize winners from this year, and one from last year, are likely fully or partially AI-generated. The Commonwealth Foundation has declined to revoke any prizes, citing the unreliability of AI detectors and "legal parameters.")

At best the events confirm what we already know, or should have known: One, it's very easy to produce short passages of competently arranged text with a chatbot but much harder to generate writing at length whose effects survive a close read; and two, literary and cultural institutions are not the well-resourced and unimpeachable pure meritocracies we might hope them to be. (We might add, three, that humans are also notoriously bad writers and readers; indeed, we invented "superficially good writing" and "shallow perfunctory reading" thousands of years before LLMs perfected these skills.)

I'll admit that long experience with this kind of thing had conditioned me to expect a smirking Sokal-type hoaxer on the other side of the Nazir's portrait, a glib accelerationist eager to tout the quality of AI writing and expose the corruption and rot in the hearts of literary gatekeepers. Instead, we appear to have an unknown and excitable Trini "business consultant," with friends in the government, sidelines in India, an AI-generated portrait, and a dream of being a fiction writer, who prompted his way into a prestigious literary prize.

Now, that would make for a good short story. And doesn't it, kind of, already exist, in the form of Nazir's conversation with the chatbot that (allegedly) aided the production of "The Serpent in the Grove"?

We tend to talk about "A.I.-generated writing" as though "prompts" and "responses" are separate texts (and the prompts merely omittable adjuncts), but from the perspective of the LLM they're just alternating continuations of the same, continuously flowing piece of writing. I am preoccupied by the idea that LLM-chatbot conversations are at their core a form of fiction-writing: When you "ask Claude a question," in some sense what you're doing is using a sophisticated automatic-writing system to write a science-fiction story about yourself talking to a computer, that takes the form of a transcript of that conversation. It might be a bridge too far to argue that "The Serpent in the Grove" you can read in Granta is fragmentary and incomplete—that the real "The Serpent in the Grove" is the full transcript between Nazir and his chatbot of choice. But I also feel confident that the transcript would be a stranger, richer, funnier, and more stimulating text than the story as published—or any of the thousands of words written about it since. Granta should publish it.

Max Read@maxread· May 19

though i guess this is another way of pointing out the geographical split that krishnan establishes

Max Read@maxread· May 19

washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/grocery-store-owners-map-kroger-albertsons-merger

Max Read@maxread· May 8

my take on the drama, only a few weeks late (w/ "spoilers") maxread.substack.com/i/196025487/...

There are many ways to look at The Drama: As a bit of glib provocation from a Euro bad-boy auteur (it’s not); as a deranged and highly successful rom-com (it mostly is); as an exploration of narrative and linguistic performativity in the Austinian sense (sure, why not); as a vehicle for a perfect 5-minute cameo from the great Jeremy Levick (100 percent). Personally, and surprisingly given its aggressive contemporaneity, I found myself thinking about The Drama in the multi-century lineage of Much Ado About Nothing, or (more provocatively) Dion Boucicault’s The Octaroon--“damaged-goods” dramas and comedies about weddings derailed by “terrible” revelations about the betrothed. (What it means that in this case Emma’s “damage” isn’t sexual impropriety or racial impurity but “school-shooterness,” a kind of potential for anti-sociality, is a fascinating question for more qualified people. Gotta go!)

Above all else, though, The Drama is the best movie I’ve ever seen about the differences between Millennials and Zoomers.

Now, admittedly, “Millennials are judgmental and Zoomers are fatalist” is not the most sophisticated limning of generational difference. Where I think The Drama actually does something interesting is in its frequent cuts back to videos recorded by Emma as a teenaged goth on her webcam--quasi-manifestoes for the shooting she will never undertake. One important bit of historical specificity communicated through these flashbacks is that there was a thing that might meaningfully be called “school shooter culture” accessible to Emma during her adolescence, in a way that simply wasn’t true for Millennials of Charlie and Rachel’s age.

More importantly, I think, the webcam videos reflect Emma’s vastly different experience as a Zoomer of online surveillance, performance, and memorialization. As Millennials, Rachel, Charlie, and Mike would not have been on a social network in middle or high school; their youthful transgressions are dismissible in part because they’re undocumented and half-remembered. (Rachel can’t recall what happened to the boy she locked in the trailer; Charlie doesn’t really seem to remember what happened with the cyberbullying). The existence of Emma’s video manifestoes reminds us that Emma wasn’t afforded the same privilege: There’s still a record, somewhere, of “the worst thing she ever did.” (That Emma still managed to reinvent herself is probably the most “Zillennial” thing about her.)

Max Read@maxread· May 8

"the forklift model" of a.i. education maxread.substack.com/p/the-drama-...

I thought of Winter’s son’s “certification” in A.I. when reading 404 Media’s report this week on a new bipartisan bill proposing an N.S.F. grant to promote “AI literacy” in schools. Both partake of what I think of as the “forklift model” of A.I. education, so-called because it treats A.I. more or less like a forklift: a complex and potentially dangerous piece of industrial equipment whose use must be taught in a formal sense, and in whose practice students might become “literate” or “certified” to better their future chances of employment.

This attitude toward the role of A.I. in education (or, really, vice versa) is a natural outgrowth not simply of institutional anxiety about the necessity of traditional education after the advent of the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-doing chatbot, but also of the increasingly pervasive idea of college as mostly an employability signal--rather than mostly an education--described by my friend Jay Kang in his recent New Yorker column about the post-A.I. uneases felt in higher education. One response to this kind of cynicism--now widespread, as Jay documents, among the college-aged population--is to embrace it. If college is already effectively a certification process, why not formalize it as such, and refashion the general-education program into a quasi-vocational one, in which students receive the white-collar equivalent of a C.D.L. or forklift certification?

But, not to ask a stupid question: Is A.I. actually like a forklift or a semi truck? It’s neither as immediately dangerous nor as patently useful; more importantly, it’s not actually very hard to use. Indeed, one of the uncanny miracles of A.I. chatbots is that the main interface is… writing and reading. Large language models are complex technologies, but, as Henry Farrell keeps pointing out, they are cultural technologies, and the skills and knowledge necessary to use them “safely” and effectively are skills you might call “cultural” rather than technical: the ability to write clearly and read critically, a working knowledge of science and technology, familiarity with culture in general and the specific. What you need to be literate in A.I., in other words, is… a well-rounded liberal-arts education.

In a world being reshaped by a natural-language interface to a compression of All Written Culture, surely everyone should want to hone their skills in the classic trivium, and some other arts besides? If you want to understand and use LLMs to your benefit, an education in statistics, philosophy, literature, and psychology is vastly more useful than anything that might be described as “prompt engineering.” Indeed, there is some (exceedingly anecdotal) evidence that this is bearing out in, at least, the finance industry, per the Financial Times:

Max Read@maxread· Apr 28

tuesday champions league//wednesday champions league

Max Read@maxread· Apr 14

johan lange is quietly building the best wide receiver program in europe and if spurs can find a good QB i could see them competing for bowls next year

What Tottenham have is a roster filled with explosive athletes who can run. Using their physical metrics, Gradient created an "athleticism" score that's a combo of endurance, explosiveness and speed that adjusts for position and size. It's on a 1-100 scale. Tottenham have seven players at a 90 or above and five of them -- Wilson Odobert, Lucas Bergvall, Archie Gray, Dominic Solanke, Conor Gallagher -- were signed after Johan Lange became the club's technical director in October 2023. The first four were the four outfield players signed during Lange's first summer in charge.

Max Read@maxread· Apr 7

this but for war crimes

Max Read@maxread· Apr 7

he's doing reality tv promo. you should imagine this music on while you read this www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx9u...

Max Read@maxread· Apr 6

what kind of "inevitable" is ai? maxread.substack.com/p/is-ubiquit...

For all the revolutionary, transformational promises of A.I.--for good and for ill--the problems it causes all seem quite familiar.

My perspective on this is admittedly shaped by a 17-year career in digital media that I would describe as “de-sentimentalizing,” at a minimum. To work as a journalist online over the past decade has generally meant--with only a few exceptions--to be producing text inside a system that prioritizes speed, volume, and attention over any other attribute, including and maybe especially those you’d associate with “quality.”

At some publications, institutional identities and imperatives can militate against sloppiness, unreliability, and banality. But the external pressures and incentives toward slop are enormous and un-ignorable. And that has been true for many years, since well before A.I. offered a tantalizing push-button interface for high-volume content production. All the problems of A.I. writing--inaccuracy, misinformation, plagiarism, misrepresentation, and, above all, hack work--were widespread in the early days of blogs¹ and throughout the digital media boom years, accelerated by the Facebook News Feed and other platform distribution schemes.

Generally, this is exactly the kind of assumption of inevitability that rubs A.I. critics precisely the wrong way.² And in most ways I agree with A.I. critics that no technological development or implementation is “inevitable” in the sense of un-opposable, and certainly not “inevitable” because it presents some kind of revolutionary new paradigm that’s self-evidently superior.

But if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary.

Max Read@maxread· Mar 31

Max Read@maxread· Mar 29

the lost maxis classic

Max Read@maxread· Mar 27

pov: youre dave roberts and you just asked major kusunagi to pinch hit for andy pages

Max Read@maxread· Mar 27

Alex Rain (Olivier Gruner) in the 1992 sci-fi actioner NEMESIS

Freddie Freeman of the Los Angeles Dodgers

Moritz (Brion James) and Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson) in the 1992 sci-fi actioner NEMESIS

Max Read@maxread· Mar 26

you can tell this lady used to be a gawker commenter bc she has that particular combination of smug, dull, and unselfaware

Max Read@maxread· Mar 24

Max Read@maxread· Mar 18

when the article mentions "hoagie, burger and pizza shops frequented by Princeton University students" cc @katiebakes.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...

Max Read@maxread· Mar 17

when your mysterious traveling companion says something so eggphobic you gotta hit em with the angel stare