Patrick John Gillam

Artificial intelligence is our own Tower of Babel, but instead of aspiring to reach an existing God we’re aspiring to create a new one.

I have fished many the bay leaf from a dish, but damn me if I could tell you how bay tastes.

Could we tax billionaires enough to materially pay down the national debt such that interest rates would drop? What might those numbers be?

Jotting this here to have a record: “Language makes infinite use of finite means.” —Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1769–1859, German naturalist and explorer

While we’re nationalizing SpaceX, let’s fix the Postal Service’s budget by nationalizing FedEx and create the social media equivalent of NPR by nationalizing X, the former Twitter.

Have you read the latest George Saunders story in The New Yorker? It’s probably paywalled; sorry I don’t have a gift link. It really captures life in the post-truth era, and how we can’t just ignore the truthers and live without them. “Appeasement, Ohio” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Business idea: a magazine of bot editors publishing stories and articles by bot writers for bot readers. Call it Bot & Sold or something. Notion inspired by a TikTok about AI agents pitching stories to human editors.

People like to say “Everything happens for a reason,” but I wonder if it’s more like we make reasons for everything. Or that legitimate reasons arise after the fact. My point is that the reasons do not precipitate the actions. But we crave meaning. Paging Viktor Frankl.

Forgive me as I scream into the void here after listening to the first few minutes of another podcast interviewing a Trump voter. As Naomi Klein puts it: the right feelings; the wrong actions in response. Also, the gullibility. This rube saw Donald Trump and thought, “This guy is trustworthy.”

Some people believe political polarization is unusual and undesirable, but I would argue that much seeming comity is just going along to get along, and ignores issues that need tending.

Maybe the billionaires and not-quite-billionaire techbros who are killing the world are doing so in reprisal for us allowing them to become so deranged.

Wired magazine brimmed with optimistic tech boosterism in the 1990s. It still does some of that, but I like how it reports the dark sides now.

Seems the difference between leftists and centrists is the leftists say “Our policies would turn out voters we’ve heretofore failed to inspire to vote” whereas centrists say “People who don’t pay attention but vote anyway decide elections, so we need to appeal to them.”

Looking forward to the ways Meta enshittifes the Muse agent.

One symptom of my chemo brain was it took nine months after the conclusion of chemotherapy to realize I had chemo brain.

Maybe putting an AI agent to work for me intrigued me when I heard of using it to phone, wait, and navigate to a health insurance representative to resolve a problem. But then it occurred to me that the great minds creating AI could have fixed the health insurance payment problem in the first place.

Finally finished the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang interview and I’m thinking all the techbros should sit for such interviews because after listening to their conversations people will lose all qualms about taxing them into oblivion and banishing them to islands subject to sea level rise.

Have you figured out how to configure Bluesky so it’s as good as Twitter was in its prime? I used to follow tweeted links to interesting articles and come across amusing bits that made laugh, thereby releasing the app’s grip. Show me how to recreate that here, please. Thanks.

Did the funny people not come here?

I started the year hoping natural causes would gather him to the arms of his Maker, but now that he’s losing his juice, I relish the prospect of his living to suffer humiliation.

I don’t understand this AI “race” with China. Are they even competing? They use our AI to develop weapons against us and they’re releasing, as I understand it, really good open source software we can run locally in our homes and offices. And what’s the goal? It’s not as if we’re landing on the moon.

My request is that we do not label this era with his name. I want it forgotten. I propose we call this time The Occupation. Instruct the children that in 30 years, when people erect statues to the era, to immediately pull them down.

“You cannot build a good society atop a flawed vision of human nature.” —Ezra Klein, speaking in the context of a conversation with Francis Fukuyama, who posits that our present system sees people as having the ability to consume but doesn’t recognize our desire for greatness and recognition.

I subscribe to journalism outfits because they vet the news but the social media era also requires me to subscribe to Snopes and the Question Everything podcast to vet the flood of mis- and disinformation coming at me from the primary medium of this era. www.kcrw.com/shows/questi...

I am so very grateful the Republicans got Trump and the Democrats did not.

Resolved: The Middle Ages are the DC Comics era of Christianity and the Renaissance is the Marvel Comics era of Christianity. Discuss.

AI rumspringa

Can democratic capitalism—the system we have now—thrive alongside democratic socialism? They had a fraught partnership for two generations in the 20th century. But could they again?

You asked. I answered. Milo Yiannopoulos never thought…

Listening to John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The theology is tedious. The mythology is boring. But the misogyny is first rate!

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I would countermessage by calling Republicans “democratic capitalists.” (We’ll ignore that Democrats have been democratic capitalists, too.)

I wonder if drag appeals to people who recognize we’re all performing one kind of drag or another, and the people offended by it just don’t get it. It’s a matter of self-awareness.

Thanks to Rebecca Solnitt for including this quotation in her Dolly Parton tribute: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” —Albert Camus

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” disappoints as a book but could make for a great movie. Screenplays usually depart from the books to the benefit of the story. Spare me the read but give me Greta Gerwig’s movie.

Welcoming recommendations of readings addressing the dichotomy of personal responsibility and institutional support. When someone suffers a loss, the common responses fall into two camps: “You should have take personal measures” and “the system failed you.” Who has talked about using both measures?

Welcome to the internet, where the motto is “Where there’s smoke, and it’s almost all smoke, there’s the absolute bare minimum of fire. And really it’s mostly smoke.”

Any historians here who can describe how Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Great Depression Democrats arrived at the New Deal? They must have dithered and misfired on the way there as we Dems are doing now.

Curious how people on the losing end of white supremacy have no trouble discerning what the problem is, whereas people on the losing end of capitalism have so much trouble identifying their problem.

@chescaleigh.bsky.social The hits just keep on coming www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/u...

The Daily podcast reports on our dwindling supply of defensive missiles and I am shocked—*shocked*!—that removing non-white and non-cisgender male officers didn’t avoid this problem.

My morning news consumption regularly leaves me with the conclusion that we’re fast on our way to hitting bottom, at which point conservatives will give up and we liberals will see what’s needed and get to work. But before hitting bottom, so much flailing!