analects noun, pl

/ˈan.ə.lɛkts/

a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings.

Digital Architecture

stuff On our digital personhood

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analects under the categories btrmt. believes in, as set out in the manifesto

analects organised according to the fundamental questions of philosophy

sequences of articles gathered around a more focused idea

  • ai is shit at reasoning 8 Jul 2026 [marginalium] AI is shit at reasoning. Since I wrote my article on the Enigma of (AI) Reason, this arXiv article has come out, exploring the same fundamen...
  • ai dark output 4 Jun 2026 [marginalium] AI Dark Output. I vacillate about how useful AI is. It’s got classic Malcolm Gladwell Shit/Karstic energy. It feels productive, for many peo...
  • ai and task fragmentation 4 Jun 2026 [marginalium] AI and task fragmentation. A while back I came across the time-horizon model of AI task automation. It was a somewhat reassuring piece for p...
  • ai productivity 22 May 2026 [marginalium] AI productivity. I’m pretty skeptical about AI enhancing productivity (see e.g. AI isn’t changing anything yet and the slow gains despite ap...
  • ai simulates conversations 24 Feb 2026 [marginalium] AI simulates conversations. Sometimes, when a problem is hard, LLMs with ‘thinking’ will simulate an internal conversation between different...
  • ai use and skill formation 5 Feb 2026 [marginalium] AI use and skill formation. A paper out of Anthropic’s alignment fellowship program. Coders coding with and without AI. Not super compelled...
  • digital personhood 1 Jul 2025 [marginalium] On the possibilities for secure digital personhood. I am fairly obsessed with this, but my first project on it isn’t very user-friendly. Nor...
  • the personal and private nature of smartphones 25 Jun 2025 [marginalium] The Personal and Private Nature of Smartphones: because smartphones are considerably more personal and private than PCs, using them activat...
  • agi is far away 10 Jun 2025 [marginalium] AGI is far away. I only really skimmed this—it’s about the slow productivity gains from what seems to be enormous bursts of growth in AI cap...
  • ai personality extraction from faces (pdf) 9 Jun 2025 [marginalium] AI personality extraction from faces: we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate t...
  • the speed of ai take-off 8 Jun 2025 [marginalium] The speed of AI take-off. Videocast with Tyler Cowan and Azeem Azhar. It’s just good quality AI speculation. 50 mins. Worth a listen.
  • how to do soul-craft with state tools 6 Jun 2025 [marginalium] How To Do Soul-Craft With State Tools: We seem to be grieving literacy in public lately. Thoughtful essays keep appearing—in TheGuardian, T...
  • pitfalls of ai for information gathering 28 May 2025 [marginalium] Pitfalls of AI for information gathering. Nominally about openai’s Deep Research, but applicable to all: it excels at straightforward quest...
  • seo for ai 23 May 2025 [marginalium] SEO for AI: While the number of consumers using AI in lieu of Google is still small, it’s growing quickly. A 2024 survey estimated that 13...
  • anthropic co-founder on ai 23 May 2025 [marginalium] Jack Clark on AI, co-founder of Anthropic. Lots of interesting insights, especially about the value of people. Not very optimistic about the...
  • ai in the military classroom 23 May 2025 [marginalium] AI in the Military Classroom. Actually AI in all classrooms. Actually the future of AI use for anything that requires education (think consu...
  • legoai 16 May 2025 [marginalium] LegoAI makes Lego models from text prompts.
  • i'd rather read the prompt 16 May 2025 [marginalium] I’d Rather Read The Prompt. Another perspective on AI in assignments: You only have to read one or two of these answers to know exactly wha...
  • cheating with ai 8 May 2025 [marginalium] Cheating with AI. It’s mostly narrative, but I liked it. I went to a conference recently where the guy who co-wrote the 2024 paper demonstra...
  • social media and moore's law 1 May 2025 [marginalium] Social Media and Moore’s Law. From Tyler Cowan, who is confusing me recently, but I still like his predictions. I have a draft article that...

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