The Gutenberg Parenthesis explores the idea that literate culture represents only a brief phase in human history; as the internet returns us to (written) orality and chat interfaces replace the thus-far software standard of user control panels / tools with plain speech instructions, technology going forward could de-anchor from literate culture’s expectations and needs. I could […]

Remembering what you read by Richard Griffiths “I suspect the memory-aiding features of the bookshelf itself are qualitatively different from those of a plain list of the books in that bookshelf. The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me. It might […]

I’m responding to a piece criticizing the stochastic parrots paper — not wholly backing the parrot metaphor, but also don’t think that models “understand” what they are saying / convey meaning the same way that humans do. Shot: Polly wants a better argument by SE Gyges Humans acquire large classes of concepts primarily through language, […]

I was chatting with my friend about video games as aesthetic experience* and they made the point that tedium is used as negative space in gameplay (for example, forcing the player to walk over to another NPC instead of porting there). In writing, the on-page density of sentences and paragraphs creates visual white space… but […]