Snow, Montaigne, Pyrrho, Schopy, and pre-AI slop

Notes for the week of January 26, 2026

We got six or seven inches of snow on Sunday. The killer, though, is that it hasn’t gone above freezing all week, so it quickly turned to solid ice and the plows haven’t done a great job with that. School closed Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, delayed start on Thursday and Friday.
First meeting of a monthly reading group I’ve put together to get through Montaigne’s Essays over the course of a year. Great group of folks. Looking forward to seeing how this develops.
Recorded an episode of WAP about a collection of Arthur Schopenhauer’s late writings called On the Suffering of the World edited by Eugene Thacker.
- Stably was quite frustrated with it, while I loved it. That always makes for the best conversations.
- Discovered in the book what charitably can be called an easter egg or, alternatively, completely fabricated footnotes by Thacker.
Been reading Pyrrhonism: How The Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism by Adrian Kuzminski. Puts certain Buddhist concepts in Western, rationalist terms, which has been very helpful for my very literal mind.
- Buddha ➵ Pyrrho ➵ Montaigne. Maybe.
Explored the idea of generative art further.
- Made a bot that algorithmically generates short videos. I programmatically distort images and produce a pseudorandom soundtrack for each. Once I tuned the look and feel I wanted, I could set the bot to upload as many as possible.
- Inspired by the “work” of Roel Van de Paar, I’m exploring whether quantity has its own quality. There may soon be a demand for pre-AI slop. In a couple days I’ve gotten over 12k views.
- Similarly I played around with a live-streamed generative numbers station.
- Also worked on making non-AI generative music. More on that TK.

Built a simple weeknotes blogging engine, the output of which you are reading.
Came across a guy making the case that Apple, in the long run, is best positioned to ‘win’ the AI race. Don’t know about all his reasoning, but I’m sympathetic to the argument.
- The more I learn about the business of AI, the more I find the current datacenter model unsustainable. OpenAI, for example, has entered into commitments to build over $1.3 trillion in computing infrastructure over the coming years. It has revenue in the $20 billion range.
- I am no expert, and I understand that the bleeding edge of frontier models need insane chips and compute, etc. But to the extent that you can give 80 percent of the utility of consumer AI to 80 percent of people with an LLM running locally, then Apple with its Apple Silicon chips might be sitting pretty.
A friend sent me this great article about the homogenization of downwardly mobile American youth culture. (Made me finally subscribe to The New Atlantis.) Seems a lot like Japanese low-desire society. Japan is the future.
What’s funny about the Moltbook story is that it is basically the plot of Her. It’s too on the nose. Feels like a prank to me.
Switched to Kagi for search. It seems ridiculous to pay for search, but it’s such a better experience. And a subscription comes with access to a suite of LLMs, including Claude Opus 4.5 if you pay enough.
- Digging their custom ‘lens’ feature where you create a set of site and you’ll get back results only from those.
Bees beat Villa away for the first time since the 1930s—and playing with ten men for an hour. Very proud of the boy (except for Schade with whom I’ve lost all patience).

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