A Year of Mornings

How I Learned to Read Again by Magazine Non Grata

One was love. Being with a partner meant, essentially, turning over my inner life to the partner. Reading seemed like a way of distancing rather than connecting, and by far the better way to consume content was to stream TV shows together.

A wonderful read. I found myself nodding along as I read about the adversaries of reading. I went through the same cycle, though my best reading year was my last year at college.

The Social Dilemma probably was the decisive event for me and made me realize the extent to which my behavior—the regular checking of my cell phone—was addiction, no matter that I was probably a bit better than most people I knew.

Same. And finally,

The question then becomes—and I do find myself asking it a lot—why I bother at all. Why do I read, if it’s not particularly good for my career or my social life, or even for my writing, and I often don’t even enjoy it, and have to find these inane tricks to compel myself to do it? What I’d like to say is that somewhere in me is the same compulsive curiosity that first animated me to become such a great reader back when I was a little kid, but I think the answer is a bit different and is more about feeling a kind of obligation. Civilization is facing an existential crisis. We have lost the habit of reading—if I had such a difficult time with digital addiction, I can only imagine what it was like for people who didn’t have the head start as a reader that I did—and that means that we lose both a capacity for deep concentration (which includes the capacity for jumping from our perspective to perceiving the world from the consciousness of others) as well as a critical continuity with the pre-digital past. These are really bad habits to lose.

Report from the march to Stop the AI Race by Robin Sloan

But I also agree that the world would ben­efit from a pause in fron­tier model devel­op­ment. The weird thing about this debate is that no one, not even the most hyped-up accelerationist, dis­agrees about the situation:

1. Here is a powerful technology,
2. operating in a way that no one really understands,
3. with profound effects on the economy, not to mention human psychology,
4. that are very difficult, maybe impossible, to make plans around.

I agree. Where we are right now is enough to keep businesses and people busy for years to come. Let’s pause and reflect and see how we can evolve society to incorporate AI.

Here's Why Apple is Reportedly Skipping M6 Pro and M6 Max Chips by Joe Rossignol

A new 14-inch MacBook Pro with a base M6 chip will be released later this year, and then Apple plans to move on to releasing the base M7 chip in the first half of 2027, M7 Pro and M7 Max chips in late 2027, and an M7 Ultra chip in 2028.

The reason is AI. There is significant improvement in the M7 generation, specifically the Ultra.

Guess I’m waiting till M7 Macs come out to upgrade. Hopefully the M1 lasts till then.

How—and Why—to Cull Your Book Collection by Maris Kreizman

8. The books to keep are the ones I keep revisiting.
   The most important rule in book collecting is to make sure that the ones that are thoroughly underlined and marked up, the ones you found truly revelatory, are easily accessible. Looking at them every day becomes part of who you are, and to me that’s one of the best feelings in the world.

This one makes sense to me. It’s funny that the point I’m quoting is about keeping books and not culling them. Though most of the article reads like that.

I have a similar rule about books that I buy and keep on the shelf. These are books that I would re-read. Otherwise, the wonderful Helmet allows me to read as much as I want and could.

I think a reason why I loved Physics at school was because they had these stories of old physicists (Rutherford and all) trying to figure out how the world worked. Along with Physics, it was a history lesson too.
I’m reading a biography of Marie Curie right now.