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.”
Latest Posts
In “Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog’s Clothing,” Robin Hanson asked three LLMs to score how much status, social skills, and judgment matter for influence across five domains. Judgment came back higher than his argument wanted. So he...
Why good innovations mint new elites — and how to tell the dangerous cases from the merely disruptive Every year something like forty thousand Americans die on the roads. The strongest large-scale data we have — from driverless fleets...
The wage floor for American farmwork fell by a third. Two different things could have caused that, one defensible and one not, and no one has separated them. In late summer 2025 the USDA discontinued the Farm Labor Survey, the instrument...
A Tale, updated from the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, who did not live to see the machine that would have made his authentications unnecessary The following was assembled from a case file, a parole record, and a public...
A hotel manager once told a marathoner he could run a six-minute mile. The marathoner — who had raced twenty-six miles at 7:35 pace and knew exactly what a six-minute mile costs a body — called bullshit. The manager didn’t retreat to...
Review.
A manifesto for the creative affinity group You may already have the group. People you would text a strange idea to at midnight. But, many of us don’t have a circle of friends who build us up, help us transform and transcend our past...
Every frontier lab runs the largest canon-formation project in literary history and calls it a data pipeline. Look at the actual operations. Crawl the written world. Deduplicate it. Filter it for “quality” — a value judgment wearing a...
The experiment took one word. Hearts of Glass is a story from this site — written with models, as most of the fiction here is, but outside the pipeline the archive documents: it began as a conversation about human hibernation, and the...
Act One They woke her first, the way they always did, because she came up slower and Aaron liked to be awake when she surfaced so hers wasn’t the only face in the room that had missed him too. The waking room was warm. That was the first...
Act One They woke her first, the way they always did, because she came up slower and Aaron liked to be awake when she surfaced so hers wasn’t the only face in the room that had missed him too. The waking room was warm. That was the first...
An argument, three failures, and what the failures leave The conclusion at the end of this shouldn’t be accepted on its own. Stated flat, it sounds like a shrug: whether a preference is really yours is not a question you can answer, and...