Writing

Memory for the Machine — What a Wiki Is For When an LLM Reads It Too

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about a young man named Ireneo Funes who, after a fall from a horse, could forget nothing. Every leaf on every tree, every cloud he had ever seen, every sentence spoken in his presence, remained available to him in total, permanent, unbearable detail. Borges’s point in “Funes the Memorious” was not that perfect memory is a gift. It is that a mind which cannot forget cannot think, because thinking requires generalization, and generalization requires the discipline of throwing most of the world away. Human memory works precisely because it is lossy, associative, and biased toward what mattered emotionally rather than what happened exactly. …

The Engineer Returns — On Stopping, Surviving, and Coming Back with LLMs

Some ideas are the wrong size for the forms available to hold them. A poem compresses too hard — you sketch the frame of a house you will never build. A book demands the opposite problem: not craft but infrastructure, a publisher, a grant, a sabbatical, a spouse able to carry the mortgage while you argue with chapter seven for two years. Montaigne solved this exact problem in the sixteenth century by inventing a form for it — the essai, literally an “attempt,” sized for an idea bigger than a stanza and smaller than a treatise, published in no particular order, revised across editions, admitting on the page that the writer had not finished thinking. It is, on paper, the perfect container for someone whose ideas don’t fit neatly anywhere else. …

From Hieroglyphs to Emoji — The Return of Images in the Age of Text

Send a text that says “fine” and the person on the other end will read anger. Send “fine 🙂” and they will read something closer to what was meant, though nothing about the word has changed. The little yellow face has done more grammatical work in one glyph than an adverb could manage in a sentence, which is a strange thing for a species that spent roughly five thousand years engineering its way out of pictures. …

It is written — from cave walls to transformers, the forty-thousand-year project to move knowledge outside the skull

A human brain holds, on average, one lifetime of knowledge, and then it dies. Every technique, every story, every map of the territory accumulated inside it — the name of the plant that heals, the angle of the spear throw, the face of the ancestor — goes with it. Evolution gave us language as a partial fix: knowledge that can be spoken can outlast the speaker, if someone else hears it and repeats it. Oral tradition is the first external memory system. It is also the most fragile: dependent on faithful transmission, distorted by each relay, bounded by the range of a voice and the attention of a listener. …

The Escribano in the Cloud — LLMs, Authorship, and the Oldest Arrangement in Intellectual History

Let me tell you how this works. I have a thought — usually dense, usually half-formed, sometimes barely grammatical. I write it down in what I call a seed: a compressed file of references, connections, structural intuitions, and emotional register. It is often messy. It is always specific. I know what I want to say; I do not always know how to say it in a way that a reader will want to receive. …