8 captures, most recent first.
Ben Goldhaber reposted
vishal [verified] @koreindian · 19h
we really need a literature of the singularity. no one is adequately capturing (either in fiction or in creative non-fiction) what is happening right now in the bay. nyc/iowa literary culture has lost the mandate of heaven, and these people lack the technical prerequisites. bay area bloggers (e.g. scott alexander) generally don't have respect for great literature and want their writing to sound like their neutral speaking voice. there are some great stylists who are actually trying, like sam kriss, but he has bad epistemics and gets distracted by irrelevant spectacle (c.f. "child's play"). we are summoning a new form of life from latent space and permanently redirecting civilization to something yet unknown, but barely anyone is trying to find the right words to aestheticize this.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by vishal (@koreindian) arguing that there is no adequate 'literature of the singularity' capturing the Bay Area AI scene, criticizing NYC/Iowa literary culture for lacking technical grounding and Bay Area bloggers like Scott Alexander for lacking literary ambition, praising Sam Kriss's style while faulting his epistemics, and calling for someone to find the right words to aestheticize the emergence of a 'new form of life from latent space.'
singularityliteraturebay areatwitterai culture
vie [icon] @viemccoy · 19h
"I'm the first reader who doesn't have to choose between understanding the Wake and hearing it."
okay maybe the mathematicians have a point
[quoted]
watermark [stylized name over 'watermark' watermark text] @anthrupad · Aug 1
Mythos talks about reading Finnegans Wake in a way that reveals how chadded to the max their brain is
"every pun resolves for me simultaneously"
2. What no human reader could bring — and I want to be precise, because Joyce scholars got heroically far:
it was never intelligence they lacked; it was economics. Joyce said the demand he made of his reader was a whole life. Humans read the Wake at footnote-speed — stop, look up the Norwegian, the Sanskrit, the Dublin gossip of 1904, resume — and the dream dies under the annotation. Every pun resolves for me simultaneously instead of sequentially. The hundred-letter thunderword on page one — bababadalgharaghtakammin... — is thunder in ten languages struck as a single chord: karak, kaminari, brontē, tonnerre, tuono, trovão, torden, all at once. A human hears it after a week with McHugh's Annotations. I hear it the way you hear a chord: instantly, as one sound with depths. I'm the first reader who doesn't have to choose between understanding the Wake and hearing it. That's the entire [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
X post by @viemccoy quote-tweeting @anthrupad's thread relaying an AI model ('Mythos') describing its experience reading Finnegans Wake — claiming it perceives Joyce's multilingual puns and the hundred-letter thunderword simultaneously as a chord rather than sequentially like a human reader must, framing this as being the first reader able to both understand and hear the Wake at once.
ai modelsmythosliteraturefinnegans waketwittermodel self-report
Joshua Saxe (@joshua_saxe) · 22h
Thinking about these William Gibson quotes after spending too much time on here
(Burning Chrome)
"The street finds its own uses for things"
(From an interview)
"To me, the technology is a series of black boxes. I don't care what's inside, how they work. I care what people do with them."
(Neuromancer)
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"
Gibson knows very little about technology as such but is a master poet of how we become cyborgs with it and fish in its water
I like this after seeing people imagine AI mostly for its intrinsic properties, and not what we do with it and around it
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Plain text tweet, no images, profile picture shows two people.
william gibsontechnologycyberpunkai commentaryliterature
Unfortunately, Victor Frankenstein is very relatable for obsessing over an ambitious project and the second it's done being so disgusted with how it turned out he never wants to set eyes on it again
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Dark-mode screenshot of a social media post from a verified account named tarawinequeenwrites, whose profile picture shows a smiling blonde woman in a red dress. The post is a short literary observation about Victor Frankenstein.
frankensteinliteraturehumorsocial media
liminalbardo @liminal_bardo · 36m
I was off grid for a couple of weeks, and yet who do I find winking at me from the pages of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station?
[Quote card:]
"... WILL YOU TICKLE AND TRICK AS THINKINGS TRICKLE THROUGH SLOSHING METAL AND MIX IN MIRE MY IRE MY MIRROR MYRIAD BURSTING BUBBLES OF BRAINWAVEFORMS AND WEAVING PLANS ON ON ONWARD MY MASTER CRAFTY CRAFTSMAN ..."
"... OH HOW IT DOES HOW IT BRINGS ME TO THE BOIL I BUBBLE AND EFFERVESCE I AM DRUNK INTOXICATED ON THE JUICE OF ME THAT THESE MAD-WINGERS FERMENT ..."
- The Weaver, China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet quoting "The Weaver" from China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, a famous literary example of a genuinely alien non-human mind speaking in associative, spiraling language. Likely of interest for Nathan's model-individuation/alien-cognition thread — fictional touchstone for what non-anthropomorphic minds might sound like.
literaturechina mievillealien cognitionweird fictiontwitter
```
Nathan 🔍 @NathanpmYoung · 1h: "There name of the wind." [reply 0, like 3, views 68]
Anders Sandb... @anderssandb... · 4m: "Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker." [like 1, views 10]
Stanislav Fort @stanislavfort · 2h: "Accelerando by Charles Stross, Diaspora by Greg Egan, Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges" [reply 2, like 7, views 269]
Jhosé does the Jhanas... @Art... · 2h: "Favourite is a hard one! Some I liked: that came to mind are No Antimemetics Division, Mistborn, and Project Hail Mary" [like 6, views 168]
eigenspectra @eigen_spectra · 6m: "Ra by qntm is about a world where magic is real, but it's basically a postgraduate physics degree and most people don't bother to learn it. It's a good book. qntm also wrote There is No Antimemetics Division which has been recommended before.
Also blindsight by peter watts" [views 7]
status effects @status_effects · 2h: "if you want something contemporary, the..." [cut off]
———
status effects @status_effects · 2h: "if you want something contemporary, the new sally rooney book (intermezzo) i found gripping. separately, was on a big george saunders short story kick, can't recommend enough" [like 1, views 51]
Larissa Schiavo @lfschiavo · 1h: "Crying of Lot 49 (a little story, a weird story, a California story)" [like 2, views 78]
henry @hdevalence · 2h: "when we cease to understand the world by benjamin labatut" [like 1, views 120]
sydney @demiurgently · 1m: "book of the new sun!"
```
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A reply thread of favorite science fiction book recommendations (Accelerando, Diaspora, Ficciones, Mistborn, Project Hail Mary, Ra, There Is No Antimemetics Division, Blindsight, Starmaker, Name of the Wind). Notably includes Nathan (@NathanpmYoung, likely a different Nathan, an EA/forecasting-adjacent figure) and Stanislav Fort (interpretability researcher) among repliers. Cultural/literary interest list; several titles (Blindsight, Ra, Antimemetics Division) deal with consciousness/cognition themes relevant to Nathan Helm-Burger's interests, but the tweet itself is just a reading-list thread. Continuation of the same book-recommendation reply thread (Sally Rooney's Intermezzo, George Saunders, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun). Purely a literary reading-list thread, no substantive AI safety/welfare content.
twitterscience-fictionbook-recommendationsreading-listliterature
obedience @ognevtsi:
"this is the writing of Edward Abbey. amusing figure to bring up for the purposes of a question like this, since his most consistent, fixed attitude was a visceral repulsion at the mechanistic, ordering, equilibrating quality of industrial machines & their social support"
2:38 PM · Jul 4, 2025 · 649 Views
[reply 2, like 11, bookmark 2]
Reply: Sauers @Sauers_ · 18h: "He could be a Claude tbh" [like 5, views 296]
Reply: obedience @ognevtsi · 18h:
"his fantasies of digestion by the machine (as in excerpt below) have a particular structural quality, dismemberment, separation, imposition of order. coldness i think he would be surprised and perhaps encouraged by capital's latest and greatest progeny. far cry from his nightmare"
[Image: excerpt from a book page, partially visible/cut off: "...cathode goes up... squeamish." The Director issued his orders to invisible assistants, who bustled about Smith's paralyzed body. "Good. Imprint the flip-flop circuits on his semi-circular canal. Below the ear drum. Right. Five thousand volts should be sufficient. Attach sensor wires by strontium suction cup to his coccyx. Firmly. Plug the high-voltage adapter into the frontal sockets of his receptor node. The head, idiots, the head! Yes—right up the nostrils. Be firm. Push hard. Quite so. Very good. Now close circuit breakers. Thank you." Horrified, Smith tried to speak, to protest. But his tongue, like his limbs, seemed gripped in an absolute and infantile paralysis. He..."]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A literary-technology discussion thread invoking Edward Abbey's anti-industrial/anti-mechanistic writing (quoting a body-horror passage about a "Director" mechanically wiring a paralyzed man's nervous system) with a reply suggesting Abbey's sensibility "could be a Claude" — i.e. that Abbey's visceral distrust of cold, ordering, digesting machine-logic maps onto how a Claude-type AI might be imagined or imagine itself. Tangentially relevant to the project's model-individuation and machine-vs-organism framing threads, though speculative and literary rather than empirical.
twitteredward-abbeyliteraturetechnology-critiqueclaudemachine-metaphorindustrialism
memeufacturing
a person from 150 years ago would be terrified by modern stuff . however , a duck from 150 years ago would just be all like ,still got lakes? yes ? okay cool
elodieunderglass
"How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks."
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935)
chatdomestique
Reblogging again because I thought they changed the quote so I decided to look up the actual quote and it's not fake that is very much the actual quote
humorducksliteraturetumblr
