• An Agony Of Effort: The True Story of Bloodborne A little-known multi-part video essay arguing that the 2015 gothic/cosmic horror video game Bloodborne is, in fact, an allegory for the medical establishment of Victorian Edinburgh (and intentionally so), drawing on evidence from the game’s text, architecture, setting, and characters, and how they may be representative of real literary works, places, and people. There are many interpretations of Bloodborne online; I found this one utterly fascinating and full of “No way!” moments.
  • I love your week notes and day notes and art and lists. Annie Mueller reminds us that not everything we post has to be great literature.
  • LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem. I saw a job listing this week that I’d probably be qualified to do — training chatbots to do advanced mathematics. The pay was attractive (as it often is when profitability is barely a concern for these VC-funded tech firms), but I was sceptical of the product — I have seen no evidence that chatbots can be good at mathematics. This article confirms to me that it’s probably flimflam. Training them to do mathematics probably just means improving their ability to pretend to do mathematics.
  • Anger at UK’s ‘bonkers’ plan to reach net zero by importing fuel from North Korea. Net zero is also flimflam.

Playing

I finally finished Bloodborne after defeating the optional boss Orphan of Kos, which took me an embarrassing number of attempts that took literally hours (I am not good at this game). After that all three remaining final bosses fell within 15 minutes, two of them on the first try. I guess next I’ll finish Talos Principle for a bit of a change of pace.

Reading

At school during reading sessions, I’ve started on Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest. At home I’m mainly reading a Borges anthology.

Listening

Around 10 episodes of the Very Bad Wizards podcast are basically a Borges bookclub, so I’ve been enjoying listening them chat about some of the stories I’ve already read. I

On this site