Cafe Bedouin
Cafe Bedouin
Cafe Bedouin
This is my show. It’s a blog as hupomnemata. Michael Foucault defined hupomnemata as a personal notebook similar to a spiritual journal but with a different goal. He did not want “to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid [like a spiritual journal does], but on the contrary to capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self.”
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There’s a fundamental mismatch between what AI can do and what most people want it to do. Most users treat AI as a confidence machine. They want answers delivered with certainty, tasks completed without friction, and validation that...
“What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor?” “Make me one with everything.” And then, somebody’s later addition… The hot-dog vendor makes him his hot-dog with all the trimmings, and says, “That’ll be $7.50.” The Buddhist reaches...
“There is no plan to save the world or a 4D chess game being played.” Guess we are on our own then.
Francis Spufford once said that Bletchley Park was an attempt to build a computer out of human beings so the credit for this metaphor belongs to him. But it can be generalised to any bureaucracy. They are all attempts to impose an...
Small talk as a costly signal of social commitment: for many of the social benefits of language, the content of what is said literally doesn't matter. pic.twitter.com/wypaSXq0tr— Cameron Harwick (@C_Harwick) October 10, 2022
Note: Written in response to Adam Mastroianni, “The Decline of Deviance.” experimental-history.com. October 28, 2025. There’s a strange thing happening: people are getting more similar. Teenagers drink less, fight less, have less sex....
Mr. Naroditsky is intent on making sure that readers of his Times column feel as if they are getting something out of it, just as he does on his social media channels. “I feel like that’s my God-given responsibility,” he said, laughing....
“Live by the Claude, die by the Claude.” In late 2024, a meme captured something unsettling: the “Claude Boys”—teenagers who “carry AI on hand at all times and constantly ask it what to do.” What began as satire became earnest practice....
Or: Why some posts are tools, some are evidence, and some are just interesting The Problem With Judging Things Here’s a pattern that shows up everywhere: the way you measure something determines what you find valuable. If you judge fish...
“Daily heart rate per step (or DHRPS) is a simple calculation: you take your average daily heart rate and divide it by the average number of steps you take. Yes, you’ll need to be continuously monitoring both measurements with a health...
Thank you, lords of the latent space, for the gift of convenience—for promising ease while siphoning our clicks, our keystrokes, our midnight sighs,our grocery lists, our panic searches, our private rants to dead relatives in the...
You know that David Foster Wallace speech about fish? Two young fish swimming along, older fish passes and says “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The young fish swim on, then one turns to the other: “What the hell is water?” That’s the...