Now
I got offered a job for JPMC, which is apparently the largest company in the world (according to Forbes 2024). Which was a bit unexpected, but I thought it would be an interesting opportunity to study egregores in a more hands-on manner. When I worked in molecular biology, I spent a lot of time watching helicase unwinding DNA and imagining the dreams and schemes of those tiny machines. Now I am such a little machine, iterating on my instructions in a vast incomprehensible entity. I use the moments normally lost to the transaction costs of beurocracy to practice shorthand (actually Quickscript) and write little opaque notes to myself. It is a thoroughly pleasant existence, I can see why humans are so eager to find a great other to obey. Couldn’t be me though, mores the pity.
Living in Glasgow Southside. I was always weary of returning to my homeland, but I think Glasgow is the one place here I could comfortably call home for a while. There is a great music scene, I have seen some of the best punk gigs of my life already since returning. Regular interesting experimental music. Some art. Some nice people, though the nightlife atmosphere is very disorienting to me now, my cultural codes have been scrambled. I have been asked three times since I moved here if I’m German. So it goes I suppose.
I have started waking an hour earlier each day and writing. Mostly science fiction. After writing so long with AI augmentation, I honestly didn’t think I’d still be able to do it on my own, but I have found the spell of the dark mornings and a candle and a pen and paper have drawn words out of me quite freely and fluidly. Very refreshing after so long in front of a screen.
o3 was just demoed. Another benchmark falls. And some of the latest models I have tested have made plausible attempts at my own benchmark– writing the opening of book VII of The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer. Janus is sharing Finnegan’s Wake style products on X. What is to become of us? I’m studying history when I find a spare moment, reading Braudel and thinking always of acceleration and singularity.
Greetings from the thickening years at the beginning and the end of history.