Link Log 26
2026-07-26
Article from Noema on AI Rewriting Human Nature. I can't believe I got through this whole article without closing it, and that's mostly because I needed to yap about how self-centered and delusional this writer sounds. This whole notion people have about AI revolutionizing industry and changing the dynamics of work is a load of hot garbage. AI, and more specifically robotics, is not advanced enough to change how most industries work. We will not be seeing robotic tradesmen in this lifetime; we will not be seeing robotic surgeons; and we will most certainly not be seeing robots of any kind doing jobs that are critical to societal infrastructure. Sure, we might see self-driving cars (barring all the regulatory havoc that's already causing), and we might see even further automation of manufacturing, but these glowies need to respect our intelligence enough to stop trying to convince us that any of this is already here. It's not, and this charade needs to end before a bunch of idiots take an LLM (that's actively getting worse, not better, due to recursive training on synthetic data) and actually try putting it in the driver's seat, creating massive critical failures. I don't want to see planes crashing into each other; I don't want to see hospitals completely shut down; and I most certainly do not want to see what happened back in 2024 with Crowdstrike happen again at 100x magnitude. This shit sucks, and I'm afraid those things and more are going to happen, bankers are going to pull the rug from the tech companies, and no systemic change will have taken place.
Look, I know I've made my position as an anti-podcast person clear before, but a friend from my parish recommended this one: Rod Dreher and Winston Marshall discussing the occult. I listened to it because I learned that Rod used to be a member of my parish, and before listening to this, I had never heard of Rod and his work. Man, I always get jealous of other cool writers who are way more successful than me :P and what's even funnier is that I have finally found someone whose work is very similar to mine, and he writes more than me. I briefly remember hearing about The Benedict Option back when I was in college, but I didn't pay much mind to it since I had no spiritual inclinations at that time. Man, I can't believe I was glazing my own nuts so hard the other day with my measly 50–100k monthly site views; this guy used to get a million views a month, and his Substack has over 35,000 subscribers. What a weird mixture of admiration and envy that is, but it gives me hope for my own future as a writer. Even though I find Rod's ecumenism slightly distasteful, I empathize with it as a fellow writer; we are curious and driven, and that can lead to a little too much open-mindedness. Where Rod is more sensitive, I want to try and use my youth to write with more bite while my blood still boils. Well, one can hope anyway.
Article from Compact on how French theory lost its cool. Even though I don't have the Ivy League pedigree of people like Eakin or Shullenberger, I shared their fascination with French theory and deconstructionism as a whole when I was a younger man. This was, of course, by way of the famous public intellectual and Lacan acolyte Slavoj Žižek; I remember thinking that Vice interview was so fucking cool, but now that I'm a bit older and part of whatever nouveau you want to label me as, I find the decades of deconstructionism to be stupid and dangerous because of all the occult bullshit it popularized. Overall, I agree with the article's sentiment: we need to construct something out of all this mess those French child molesters created, and hopefully it'll be something more sustainable than capitalism—that is, if the needed collapse ever actually happens.
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