https://silasjelley.com/feeds/everything/ /icon/48.ico Silas Jelley reply@silasjelley.com 2026-04-01T02:02:38Z tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:42c9beb4-a658-4c86-87ad-bf9efd5d643c 2026-04-01T02:49:37Z 2026-04-01T02:50:38Z <p>If I remember one thing from this hostel besides Alen and Tamilan, and the wonderful focus of these days, let it be the wonderful door latches. When opened, the latch of the door stays retracted, either by magnet or spring, and only when closed again does an attracting magnet pull the latch back out of the door and into place to hold it shut. This has the minor effect of making the doors look tidier, smoother, when open, but much more resonant with me is how quietly it lets the doors close. These, coupled with a softer closing (dampening) door frame would be a mute dream.</p> <p>May my future home have such a set of doors, if doors it should have at all.</p> 2:49am on April 1, 2026<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“April 1, 2026 2.49AM”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:6ea83a27-9e88-43c8-a352-086d49f0dc97 2026-03-23T23:20:23Z 2026-03-23T23:20:36Z <p>We find pieces of ourselves in the people we let in.</p> 11:20pm on March 23, 2026 from Atyrau Oblisi, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“March 23, 2026 11.20PM”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:bd5d0743-6ccb-4494-8bea-c145af6e0a26 2026-02-27T21:57:15Z 2026-02-27T21:57:15Z <p><a href="https://kornelius.substack.com/p/india-the-bike-trip-the-book">India, The Bike Trip, The Book?!</a> by Kyle</p> <p>Reading just before bed so here’s my little stream of consciousness before I nod off.</p> <p>This feels like a true Kyle of a book concept. All around you are enriched by your particular ability to digest and synthesise what you read and relate it to us, and this feels like taking that skill to its natural conclusion. As a fellow traveller, and without having read Botton’s book, I feel like I’ve already received the core of what that book might teach me. Not to say that there isn’t likely much more I could glean from reading the book itself, but the right idea at the right time is so much more effective than everything right now (makes me think of Ferriss’ move from reading ahead-of-time to just-in-time).</p> <p>Creative work, and the communication of it, is a kind of filtering of the world as we perceive it. I’ve read and learned many things downstream of your prolific sifting/filtering of the world that I would not have had the capacity to discover alone. By reading these filtered outputs we get glimpses/tastes of a broader set of experience than we could consume individually and from there we can continue to pull on just the thread that feels like it has more for us.</p> <p>I think knitting this directly and imminently into the sharing of a journey feels like a good fit. Where a lot of self-help shtuff is so prescriptive, this feels more humane, gives us more to engage with when inevitably some chapter (thinking book form) doesn’t grab us as much as another had.</p> <p>As always, I love the frankness (and humour) of your writing, looking forward to the chapters to come!</p> 9:57pm on February 27, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“February 27, 2026 9.57PM”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:58eb7299-1e3a-4730-9937-cb4fa2e485c7 2026-02-27T18:53:30Z 2026-02-27T18:53:30Z <p>Worrying is funny, because inevitably […] your mind begins to forget it all.</p> <p>Everything you were anxious about is compressed and edited into a few images. The bike boxes on the sidewalk at 3:30AM, the customs guy cutting open your 10 layers of tape on the bike box, doing squats in Dallas during a layover while being watched by a lady eating a huge tub of yoghurt.</p> <p>Everything else slips away. Inconsequential. And surely soon even these images will be compressed.</p>6:53pm on February 27, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Kyle Siemens, India, The Bike Trip, The Book?!, Making It Meaningful, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:72cb745a-fb63-4c58-a521-0378a0160c12 2026-02-27T14:46:34Z 2026-02-27T14:46:34Z <p>recently it dawned on us that clothes are, in a certain way, open-source. We can go to a thrift store, buy a shirt, rip out the seams, study it, lay all of the pieces down over new fabric, trace the patterns, cut them out, and sew it all back together to produce a copy of that same shirt. We’ve been wanting to learn how to make our own clothes but didn’t know where to begin, until this month. Our first project was to reproduce our hats, after the store we bought them at stopped stocking them. We bought black cotton canvas at a local fabric store, took our old hats apart and re-built them.</p>2:46pm on February 27, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rek & Devine, January 2026, Hundred Rabbits, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:ebeab6f5-f853-43ab-adc8-642c65d13249 2026-02-22T17:52:59Z 2026-02-22T17:52:59Z <p>It’s a fine line between standing behind a principle and hiding behind one.</p>5:52pm on February 22, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“President Thomas J. Whitmore in Roland Emmerich's, Independence Day, 1996”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:bb70b67e-e25c-432c-8bf8-ab63789590df 2026-02-15T01:25:41Z 2026-02-15T01:25:41Z <p>Human must adopt shape of machine or machine will smoosh human into shape of machine.</p>1:25am on February 15, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Garbi, Google might think your Website is down, Lobsters, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:35b5e4d3-6166-4954-8ae2-09365eb2c96c 2026-02-14T10:44:58Z 2026-02-14T10:44:58Z <p>So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth.</p> <p>The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system.</p>10:44am on February 14, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Scott Shambaugh, An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened, The Shamblog, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:88cf8aed-9795-46ff-95ad-49dee3861abb 2026-02-14T00:30:42Z 2026-02-14T00:30:42Z <p>What you cannot do, let others do for you.</p>12:30am on February 14, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Mysaria in Ti Mikkel, season 2, episode 5, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:d2317ff3-653d-4f12-8482-f6f30fe58145 2026-02-13T19:10:00Z 2026-02-13T19:10:00Z <p>Multitasking is a lie. It is just rapid-fire distraction.</p>7:10pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Calin, Single Tab Week, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:0ac87b3a-55fa-4f11-97d7-678212efb6d5 2026-02-13T15:20:20Z 2026-02-13T15:20:20Z <p><em>adapted from an email I sent to Matt Webb</em></p> <p>Just a quick mail to say I loved this. It’s a weird, fascinating, far-fetched, and slightly-dystopic-but-not-in-the-ways-we-might-have-guessed future we’re being conveyed into. This paragraph:</p> <blockquote><p><p>With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.</p></p> <cite>— <a href="/2026/02/13/152004">Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026</a></cite></blockquote> <p>conjures the experience of taking care of a loved one, of service; beautiful amongst humans but oh how wretched to give that too to the machines. Sometimes it seems so much of what we’re doing here in the future is taking care of machines, asking machines, answering machines, our every thought a footnote or reaction to some energised filament thrown off by the ur-machine, that pseudo-sentience come substrate that binds it all together: the Internet.</p> <p>Maybe a day comes when we really are fully in service of the machines, not because <em>they took over</em> but rather because we woke up one day and realised (or didn’t) that we could no longer distinguish ourselves from them. And maybe if that day comes we’ll be so exhausted by it that we’ll throw in the towel of our humanity and willfully succumb, make every desperate attempt to lower ourselves into that infinite binary pool of suspended animation, that we might be free at last from the machines we have become.</p> <p>But! Like us, the machines are brilliant but, like us, made in our own image, they are also stupid. We worry that with their arrival some simpler time has come to an end. We worry because the limits of our memory &amp; empathy let us believe that this vague and amorphous “simpler time” ever existed. Life has always, and ever will be fraught, confusing, and rife with external affairs of fickle malice that loom on dystopic horizons; and has always, and ever will be full of love, charm, and beauties so dazzling we wish we could linger ever in their embrace.</p> <p>The <a href="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/12/18/Humanist-Plumbing">Humanist Plumbing</a> is not gone from this world.</p> 3:20pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“February 13, 2026 3.20PM”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:03603dbb-ea90-474b-b421-504f059d5490 2026-02-13T15:20:04Z 2026-02-13T15:20:04Z <p>With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.</p>3:20pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:717276e5-9752-49be-a97e-2db7e54077cd 2026-02-13T14:38:58Z 2026-02-13T14:38:58Z <p>The very features of the sport that the ‘C’ swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring-swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say-they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. […] It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.</p>2:38pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Daniel F. Chambliss, The Mundanity of Excellence, Sociological Theory, American Sociological Association, Vol. 7, 1989”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:ae299648-eb86-4063-a954-71e7f5153ef1 2026-02-13T14:37:06Z 2026-02-13T14:37:06Z <p>Can a writer appoint themselves artist-in-residence of a place or subject or idea and make some kind of literary project about it? How would that work, exactly?</p>2:37pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Amy Stewart, The Self-Appointed Writing Residency, It's Good to Be Here, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:9d595722-60bd-4d30-87be-d19546079d24 2026-02-13T14:32:10Z 2026-02-13T14:32:10Z <p>I imagine robots will be priced like a car and not like a dishwasher? It’ll be worth it, assuming reliability. RELATED: I was thinking about what my price cap would be for Claude Code. I pay $100/mo for Claude right now and I would pay $1,500/mo personally for the same functionality. Beyond that I’d complain and have to find new ways to earn, but I’m elastic till that point.</p> <p>Because I don’t doubt that domestic robots will be reliable. <a href="https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response">Waymo has remote operators that drop in for ambiguous situations</a> so that’s the reliability solve.</p> <p>But in a home setting? The open mic, open camera, and a robot arms on wheels - required for tele-operators - gives me pause.</p> <p>(Remember that smart home hack where you could stand outside and yell through the letterbox, <em>hey Alexa unlock the front door?</em> Pranks aplenty if your voice-operated assistant can also dismantle the kitchen table.)</p>2:32pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:17b8abf1-5ad3-4df4-b3f2-633a2d23603a 2026-02-13T14:30:22Z 2026-02-13T14:30:22Z <p>What mundane pleasures will I be robbed of by domestic robots?</p> <p>Sometimes I feel like my job at home is putting things into machines and taking things out of machines.</p> <p>I don’t mean to sound unappreciative about “modern conveniences” (modern being the 1950s) because I take care of laundry and emptying the dishwasher, and I love both. We have a two drawer dishwasher so that is a conveyer belt. And I particularly love laundry. We generate a lot of laundry it seems.</p> <p><a href="https://x.com/Duderichy/status/1935313693866180976">There was a tweet in 2025</a>: woodworking sounds really cool until you find out it’s 90% sanding</p> <p>And it became an idiom because 90% of everything is sanding. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhotography/comments/1lj3pal/what_is_our_90_sanding/">See this reddit thread</a>… 90% of photography is file management; 90% of baking is measuring; etc.</p> <p>So when I say that I love laundry I don’t mean that I love clean clothes (everyone loves clean clothes) but I love the sanding. I love the sorting into piles for different washes, I love reading the little labels, especially finding the hidden ones; I love the sequencing so we don’t run out of room on the racks, I love folding, I love the rare peak moments when everything comes together and there are no dirty clothes anywhere in the house nor clean clothes waiting to be returned. (I hate ironing. But fortunately I love my dry cleaner and I feel all neighbourhood-y when I visit and we talk about the cricket.)</p>2:30pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:49f2ec78-7653-4907-91a5-32cf49c1f525 2026-02-13T14:26:15Z 2026-02-13T14:26:15Z <p>woodworking sounds really cool until you find out it’s 90% sanding</p>2:26pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Duderichy, Twitter, 2025”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:51d40ad8-d3b0-4d5b-a03f-c627e5995bac 2026-02-13T14:16:48Z 2026-02-13T14:16:48Z <p>What happened was, a faucet started dripping. And then I managed to route around the malignant machineries of late-stage capitalism. These days, that’s almost always a story worth telling.</p>2:16pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Tim Bray, Humanist Plumbing, ongoing, 2025”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:84e3ac28-1d00-4f34-aa7b-d0f1ef65c1f7 2026-02-13T12:22:27Z 2026-02-13T12:22:27Z <blockquote><p><p>I don’t understand anything about flavour, that’s the problem. My taste buds are like a child’s. I’m perfectly happy with convenience store bento boxes and curry from cheap restaurants.</p></p> <cite>— <a href="/2026/02/13/122112">Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 9, 2023</a></cite></blockquote> <p>I’m a little like Rika. I lack taste and, at times, I am self-conscious about that lack of taste.</p> 12:22pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“February 13, 2026 12.22PM”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:eb867c73-bc29-420b-93a6-a91381e80615 2026-02-13T12:21:12Z 2026-02-13T12:21:12Z <p>I don’t understand anything about flavour, that’s the problem. My taste buds are like a child’s. I’m perfectly happy with convenience store bento boxes and curry from cheap restaurants.</p>12:21pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 9, 2023”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:d543d3c6-93c0-45af-9b87-a29317726d8b 2026-02-13T12:20:19Z 2026-02-13T12:20:19Z <p>Every night, those women would clean out the toxins that had built up in their partners’ bodies and souls over the course of the day – toxins that, if left untouched for too long, would eat a person away. The elder male colleague of hers who had died unexpectedly at home last month had been single and lived alone. An image rose up in Rika’s mind of her own cold apartment which she hadn’t cleaned in some time – his had probably looked a lot like that. The apartment also closely resembled the one her father had inhabited by himself after his divorce.</p>12:20pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 8, 2023”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:bcaa705f-7c7b-4d53-91c2-2595a0e4b69a 2026-02-13T11:50:26Z 2026-02-13T11:50:26Z <p>Impressive, you have reached the end of the page: Thank you for your interest!</p>11:50am on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Adrien Barbaresi, Trafilatura, GitHub, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:20196c22-9e8e-463a-b985-d87ead962ed7 2026-02-12T23:40:39Z 2026-02-12T23:40:39Z <p>your notes to be useful to yourself later[.] They have to be useful to someone else, too. Future you <em>is</em> someone else: you won’t remember everything.</p>11:40pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, Using an engineering notebook, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:2fda940b-3cc4-4553-892e-51fb8b49a866 2026-02-12T23:30:01Z 2026-02-12T23:30:01Z <p>There was a pre-LLM version of this called “battledecks” or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPoint_karaoke">“PowerPoint Karaoke”</a> where a presenter is given a deck of slides they’ve never seen and have to present on it. With a group of good public speakers it can be loads of fun (and really impressive the degree that some people can pull it off!)</p>11:30pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“crystal_revenge, Hacker News, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:830489a3-ba79-4ac6-9f3c-490695edc6e9 2026-02-12T21:07:07Z 2026-02-12T21:07:07Z <blockquote><p><p>The way that Reiko spoke made it seem as if her baby already existed in the world, Rika thought – as if they were all just waiting for it to appear in the room. It was the previous summer that the obstetrician had told Reiko it was likely that stress was to blame for the fact that two years into her marriage she still hadn’t conceived, and Reiko had promptly quit her job in the PR department of a major film production company […]</p> <p>When Reiko had resolved to give up the job that she was so good at, Rika had thought it a waste. Not just that – her friend’s decision had produced in her a sense of loneliness and resentment that had left her sleepless. They had argued about it several times over the phone.</p></p> <cite>— <a href="/2026/02/12/210118">Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 5, 2023</a></cite></blockquote> <p>There’s a quiet expression of loud truth, that the world is so caught up in the identity of work that we’d run ourselves to ruin in its name.</p> 9:07pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“February 12, 2026 9.07PM”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:192aa0a1-2e5c-456a-a0d1-3cc810a00e3b 2026-02-12T21:01:18Z 2026-02-12T21:01:18Z <p>The way that Reiko spoke made it seem as if her baby already existed in the world, Rika thought – as if they were all just waiting for it to appear in the room. It was the previous summer that the obstetrician had told Reiko it was likely that stress was to blame for the fact that two years into her marriage she still hadn’t conceived, and Reiko had promptly quit her job in the PR department of a major film production company […]</p> <p>When Reiko had resolved to give up the job that she was so good at, Rika had thought it a waste. Not just that – her friend’s decision had produced in her a sense of loneliness and resentment that had left her sleepless. They had argued about it several times over the phone.</p>9:01pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 5, 2023”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:81f11337-9002-4646-950b-febcdb1ee123 2026-02-12T20:40:54Z 2026-02-12T20:40:54Z <p>François Chollet, creator of ARC-AGI, has consistently said that solving the benchmark does not mean we have AGI. It has always been meant as a stepping stone to encourage progress in the correct direction rather than as an indicator of reaching the destination. That’s why he is working on ARC-AGI-3 (to be released in a few weeks) and ARC-AGI-4.</p> <p>His definition of reaching AGI, as I understand it, is when it becomes impossible to construct the next version of ARC-AGI because we can no longer find tasks that are feasible for normal humans but unsolved by AI.</p>8:40pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“modeless, Hacker News, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:0a366cb1-1766-475c-b060-2e5abfce6c36 2026-02-12T18:21:31Z 2026-02-12T18:21:31Z <p>I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We’re literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can’t believe it’s actually happening, and I’ve never had more fun computing.</p>6:21pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“sosomoxie, We mourn our craft | Hacker News, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:54683b92-14b4-4885-8c91-82a22ab11a0a 2026-02-12T00:52:04Z 2026-02-12T00:52:04Z <p>The answer to that is lost in time. Sin begets sin begets sin.</p>12:52am on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Ser Simon Strong in David Hancock's, The Burning Mill, season 2, episode 3, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:e47cb22c-6698-425c-98ba-93311dfaf897 2026-02-11T15:38:56Z 2026-02-11T15:38:56Z <p>Well-intended actions, including those that accomplish assigned duties, may lead to harm. When that harm is unintended, those responsible are obliged to undo or mitigate the harm as much as possible.</p>3:38pm on February 11, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, Association for Computing Machinery, 2018”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:b85736b5-3667-479c-9502-fbd2e3da633e 2026-02-10T20:38:30Z 2026-02-10T20:38:30Z <p>We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact — even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.</p> <p>The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a <em>description</em> of current AI, a <em>prediction</em> about the foreseeable future of AI, and a <em>prescription</em> about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future.</p>8:38pm on February 10, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, AI as Normal Technology, Knight First Amendment Institute, 2025”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:2e866d56-fa99-4ff1-99c8-da8df6320da3 2026-02-04T13:17:32Z 2026-02-04T13:17:32Z <p>You desire not to be free, but to make a window in the wall of your prison</p>1:17pm on February 4, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rhaenys Targaryen in Ryan Condal, season 1, episode 9, 2022”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:19fcaa85-0b6b-4549-933d-019d6c905d36 2026-02-04T11:50:21Z 2026-02-04T11:50:21Z <p>You, as a creative person, are a much better investment than any piece of gear that is going to give you incremental improvement.</p>11:50am on February 4, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Jesse Senko, when a “better” camera isn’t better, 2025”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:b89f4450-c225-40ee-b4b5-074e71607708 2026-02-03T00:09:01Z 2026-02-03T00:09:01Z <p>I’ve often imagined how nice it would be if someone were to confide everything to me. But now that it’s reached that point, I realize how difficult it is to put yourself in someope else’s shoes and find the <em>right</em> answer.</p>12:09am on February 3, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Books (2008), p. 323, 1947”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:0fe8fdb6-8cf6-4368-af1d-ffc0cc480b12 2026-02-03T00:04:30Z 2026-02-03T00:04:30Z <p>There’s only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and forget everybody else! It sounds egotistical, but it’s actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity.</p>12:04am on February 3, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Books (2008), p. 320, 1947”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:5d984a77-d35e-4d95-9aa4-2cc5e2b2d092 2026-02-02T23:56:57Z 2026-02-02T23:56:57Z <p>[…] in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. And what’s her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she’s disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, her beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!</p> <p>I don’t mean to imply that women should stop having children; on the contrary, nature intended them to, and that’s the way it should be. What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don’t acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women’s share in society is.</p> <p>[…] men must learn that birth is no longer thought of as inevitable and unavoidable in those parts of the world we consider civthzed. It’s easy for men to talk—they don’t and never will have to bear the woes that women do!</p> <p>I believe that in the course of the next century the notion that it’s a woman’s duty to have children will change and make way for the respect and admiration of all women, who bear their burdens without complaint or a lot of pompous words!</p>11:56pm on February 2, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Books (2008), p. 318-319, 1947”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:6a5dc521-fc53-43d9-ae53-7ae637758b6c 2026-02-02T23:50:51Z 2026-02-02T23:50:51Z <p>Is it because I haven’t been outdoors for so long that I’ve become so smitten with nature? I remember a time when a magnificent blue sky, chirping birds, moonlight and budding blossoms wouldn’t have captivated me.</p> <p>[…] It’s not just my imagination—looking at the sky, the clouds, the moon and the stars really does make me feel calm and hopeful. It’s much better medicine than valerian or bromide. Nature makes me feel humble and ready to face every blow with courage!</p> <p>[…] Nature is the one thing for which there is no substitute!</p>11:50pm on February 2, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Books (2008), p. 317, 1947”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:6be17b48-0ebd-455f-a8f2-7a4ebff058ce 2026-02-02T23:46:00Z 2026-02-02T23:46:00Z <p>What’s so difficult about my personality is that I scold and curse myself much more than anyone else does; if Mother adds her advice, the pile of sermons becomes so thick that I despair of ever getting through them.</p> <p>[…] Sometimes I’m so deeply buried under self-reproaches that I long for a word of comfort to help me dig myself out again.</p>11:46pm on February 2, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Books (2008), p. 315-316, 1947”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:3d40f097-3001-45ec-b683-18f010d7f708 2026-02-02T23:41:37Z 2026-02-02T23:41:37Z <p>I’m not really as conceited as many people think; I know my various faults and shortcomings better than anyone else, but there’s one difference: I also know that I want to change, will change and already have changed greatly!</p>11:41pm on February 2, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Books (2008), p. 315, 1947”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:235f3923-12d2-4d8d-a5fe-3f0210e4f24b 2026-02-02T19:11:25Z 2026-02-02T19:11:25Z <p>There’s a particular kind of hollowness that visits me when someone asks what I’ve been learning lately.</p> <p>I pause. I know I’ve been learning <em>something</em>. I listen to podcasts constantly. Good ones, long conversations between people smarter than me about things that matter. I listen on walks and commutes and while doing dishes. I pay attention.</p> <p>And yet when I reach for specifics, there’s almost nothing to hold. A vague shape. The feeling that something important was said around minute forty. The memory of engagement without anything to show for it.</p>7:11pm on February 2, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Terry Godier, Phantom Fluency, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p>