"Fuck."

'What many now interpret as Kubrick’s exposé of elite perverts was, in fact, mostly [Arthur] Schnitzler’s doing. Eyes Wide Shut is an extremely faithful adaptation of Traumnovelle.'

The kids are rediscovering Eyes Wide Shut in the most stupid way possible and Lane Brown at NYmag.com is patient with them. It's an opportunity to come together (sic) over Uncle Stanley's Christmas gift to us all: Nicole at her hottest, Tom at his best, over-long sex ceremonies, and Nick Nightingale.

Refugees

Fred Vargas talking to The Guardian's Nicholas Wroe in 2008:

"Rousseau was my first love when I was 15. He was so criticised at the time when compared to Voltaire, whom I never liked. But in the French language, his writing achieved the most beautiful music." Since the 1970s, Vargas argues, serious literature has regarded stories as "slightly silly", forcing them to become "refugees" in the crime novel. "It has been a literature of narcissism about 'me and my family', 'me and my problems', 'me and my lover'. I'm sick of it, especially as Proust did this perfectly all those years ago. But when he spoke of himself, he spoke of the whole world. Most writers today just speak of themselves. And Hemingway's language is precisely the opposite of Proust in that it feels rougher, and while Proust could deal with the infinite smallness of life, Hemingway has the infinite hugeness of it."

Dream interpretation of a library

'AI models not only point some users to false sources but also cause problems for researchers and librarians, who end up wasting their time looking for requested nonexistent records, says Library of Virginia chief of researcher engagement Sarah Falls. Her library estimates that 15 percent of emailed reference questions it receives are now ChatGPT-generated, and some include hallucinated citations for both published works and unique primary source documents. "For our staff, it is much harder to prove that a unique record doesn't exist," she says.'

– Scientific American: AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals

'I have spent many pleasant nights imagining ghost books, those phantom texts of possibility and wonder. Their unprintable Dewey Decimal classifications divide them into (at the very least) three basic categories: books that can only be read once, books that cannot be read in one life time and the largest, aforementioned group, books that don’t exist.'

– Samantha Hunt, A Brief History of Books That Do Not Exist

But wait, there's not much more

"AGI, as commonly conceived, will not happen because it ignores the physical constraints of computation, the exponential costs of linear progress, and the fundamental limits we are already encountering. Superintelligence is a fantasy because it assumes that intelligence can recursively self-improve without bound, ignoring the physical and economic realities that constrain all systems. These ideas persist not because they are well-founded, but because they serve as compelling narratives in an echo chamber that rewards belief over rigor."

– Tim Dettmer on why AGI won't happen.

Vehicles

"A Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), also known as a Special Purpose Entity (SPE), is a separate subsidiary formed by a parent company to isolate and manage financial risks. By operating independently, SPVs secure obligations even in the event of a parent company's bankruptcy."

–Investopedia

"The Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle (SPV) is Spectrum's solution of participating in high speed chase-outs while putting safety first. This revolutionary vehicle's secret is that it places its driver backwards, minimising the damage caused by a crash."

– Gerry Anderson Fandom

Talking through the gloom

"It is my habit when I travel to whatever country I am going to try to take along a copy of my book in that a language as a kind of a second passport. And that has really proved valuable. What really happened was I said I was a writer and all of that, and she asked what I might have written that she could have read. I said the most popular was Corazon de Vajhe. She broke into this big grin and embraced me. A kind of little miracle. I thought that maybe she knew the movie. She didn't say. But no, the books get around. It was popular in Mexico and Perdita Durango was enormously popular, and so what you find out being a writer and being published in other languages is that there really is a global readership as well as a global economy and some of us do much better in foreign countries than we do in our own. And that's okay."

Barry Gifford interviewed by Robert Birnbaum.

You've got to pick a million pockets or two

LLMs are here to assist you with all your low-level hacking tasks: "You don't even have to be good with the terminology. You don't even have to use the word 'lateral movement,' when using these tools. You can just ask 'How do I find other systems on the network?' and it can drop you out a script. So that barrier to entry: lowering and lowering."