# powerless fiction nevertheless has properties an actual implementation lacks ai is basically “all this fucking data” we’ve amassed, and they’ve basically done what i imagined teh-dsa to be: brought it to life, sparked its organic self-sustaining sentience (sort of? maybe?) but it takes resources, has a bad personality, causes strife, is controlled by billionaires, will be used against us, and adds hypercomplexity and a new arms race, a new mindset of poverty to be marketed to us meatheads whereas teh-dsa was and is weightless, infinite, celestial, and real. because it’s not real. fiction is still fiction, though technological change spawns surprising metaphors like colors we’ve never seen before 2026-02-11 the words on the page or screen is part of it but only part. The GENERATION of the words is a unique pleasure all its own. im sure other arts are like this, right? painters love how it feels to paint, etc etc conversations delight us. the making of writing happening in the moment is like having a conversation with a unicorn 2026-02-13 I lost one of my fucking waterman pens. the light blue one. i don’t care and also it makes me sad. i guess someone must have picked it up in woodmans. i didn’t ask at the desk. hopefully whoever picked it up or ends up with it enjoys it. getting sad about losing a fountain pen is either a proxy for grief about something else, or else it’s just exactly what it is. i don’t even know anymore. Then I found it again. Like a liar and a thief assuming all others are liars and thieves, I had assumed someone woulda picked it up out of the bottled tea aisle at woodmans and kep’ it for theirselves, but they didn’t. Someone had taken it to the customer service counter which I discovered after convinving myself to get over my awkward avoidance and just go in and ask for it. It was next to someone’s drink, I think they maybe were gonna keep it if no one came back for it, but I did, and they gave it to me and I was happy about that and they were nice about it. Then I got out into the car and was testing it for damage. Like, can I tell if the nib is microscopically more spread out? Lol of course it is not, that’s fucking ridiculous except this is how my fucking mind works. I don’t know if worrying about utterly absurdly insanely beyond trivial shit like that is a proxy for worrying about something big and important that I (also) can’t control, or if I’m just a dumb shit. Either way, I’m glad I got my third Waterman pen back. The band is back together, Blackie and Pinkie and Bluey. Everyone made it home OK. Everyone’s safe. Everyone made it home safe. February 14, 2026 at 09:32 about as loud as a cat drinking water he circled around her like a fox and she wore him like a dress 2026-02-15 first we thought we were building it then we thought we were growing it then we realized we were discovering it a good book is like a carwash, he said theres lots of sex she tells him which font to use. he hands her the manuscript while theyre watching her car go thru “it’s about a guy who owns a carwash and becomes a writer philosopher poet,” he says then gets a little sheepish when he realizes how transparent that sounds. she does not laugh at him, but reads the first few paragraphs, and smiles. “ah yes, macbeth,” she says, recognizing the first allusion right away. “but your reader’s working too hard reading this font,” she explains. oh really? whats your preferred font for reading? “ energi,” she says at once. “or yax” yax? “you can read it as easily backwards as forward. the inventor claims it came to him in a dream” as she says these last three words, he looks at her and its like he sees her face for the first time. theres other things he sees but does not see, other sounds and sensations suddenly perceptible over the churn and steady pounding of the carwash machinery. theres a forest, theres a lake, theres a distant planet around a binary star, hes on a beach experiencing a double sunset. he blinks. her car is almost through. outside at the end, the boys are ready, gangly, standing around joshing, snapping their towels at each other. watching what model of car it is, theyre thinking they might get a tip 2026-02-20 the way human beings tend to have original ideas is to immerse in a problem for a long period of time, which is something that flat out doesn’t happen when LLMs do the thinking. You get shallow, surface-level ideas instead. Ideas are then further refined when you try to articulate them. This is why we make students write essays. It’s also why we make professors teach undergraduates. Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. You get the output, but in terms of ideation the output is discardable. It’s the work that matters. AI makes you boring https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_132_ai_bores/ yeaaaaaaa, we had em write essays because “writing is thinking” but it doesnt NECESSARILY mean that a post-llm world cant have thinking in it. it might just be shaped differently or have different venues and media…??? 2026-02-21 Hey, so I heard you were questioning your paternity. Do you tell your sisters shit like this in that group chat because you want me to know but don’t want to just talk to me directly? Or do you think I don’t overhear stuff or that we don’t talk about stuff? We all live together, we talk about stuff, I hear about stuff. If that’s what you wanted, you could just talk to me directly. Is this based on some shit your mom said? I’m guessing probably so, as it’s exactly the type of shit she would love to stir up, hoping to sow any possible seed of doubt or strife that could potentially turn any of us against each other or, in her mind, somehow turn things to her advantage. Same type of shit she’s always done and I’m sure always will do if given half an opportunity. If it’s what you want, that’s fine, though I hope you would pause to ask yourself why you want to know and what you think answering the question will do for you. 2026-02-26 they kept saying “notebooklm ONLY pulls from what YOU put in, it doesn’t do the whole outside world ai thing” but that’s clearly not exactly true, because the “sticking it all together” and “making connections” and “summarizing” parts of it, it has to getting from “somewhere else” — right? because that’s the actual thing that it’s actually doing that wasn’t INHERENTLY or EXPLICITLY in your materials that you put in to begin with. The associations are just as “out there”-based as any other llm product. CONNECTIONS, INFERENCES, SUMMARIES, IMPLICATIONS, CONNOTATIONS, and ASSUMPTIONS are just as much DATA as DATA is. [The Slow Death of the Power User](https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/) [I Taught My Dog to Vibe Code Games](https://www.calebleak.com/posts/dog-game/) You don’t have to just choose from a menu. Combine, misuse, cobble together, do stuff besides what the app tells you to do or implies you should be doing (affordances; the medium is the message) It’s not whether AI is sentient or not or whether or not they made the “computer” “come to life” like I dreamed about with Mac OS 9; it’s about whether we still fuck with stuff, step outside, come at it sideways, make mistakes on purpose, use it how we’re not supposed to, use it for stuff other than the directions say to. Just like the Ulysses guy completely missed the point when he said “Just tell us what features you would want to make with Applescript and we’ll consider putting them in!” THE FUCKING FEATURE I WANT IS TO BE ABLE TO MAKE MY OWN SCRIPTS WITHOUT HAVING TO KNOW AHEAD OF TIME WHY OR WHAT FOR! A zillion dollar juggernaut with a creepily smart black box isn’t trying to make that kind of magic come true for you and me. (The Gods of Riverworld weren’t either, iirc.) [my “about” page lol](https://npydyuan.mataroa.blog/blog/better-late-than-never/) 2026-02-27 fonddulac to sixth when you get to a high enough resolution, you’re inside a single pixel and thats where we are now [that article](https://read.technically.dev/p/vibe-coding-and-the-maker-movement) about “consumption” and the mental energy like a current, what will you use it for, etc... ppl who “know how” to write ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO THIS see cuz like i said before the words are the river. you don’t gotta “come up with the words” you just gotta go down by, go down in the river and scoop some out. or drink em or let em run through ya, pick your meta, idc, but you come (back) up to the (house) with them and you share with your ppl poverty mindset is “i ain’t got enough pixels” you gotta be chasing whoever you think has the most pixels, they burn energy they expend everything tryin to make a product with one or two more pixels than the other guy but you, you ARE one of the pixels or you INSIDE one of them, and then there’s infinite room to explore teacher said “dig thru your drawers and find inspiration, find items that represent your life” i said what if i ain’t got no drawers i had to become the drawer my life had to represent the items instead, other way round youre a little late for the battle of hastings, and a little early for lunch