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AI YouTube

From Paperbacks to YouTube

Yesterday while reading the Sunday New York Times I came across the Book Review section and its cover story about paperback books. I have such fond memories of shopping for paperbacks at local drug stores, bookstores, etc but those days are long gone.

The cover story included a photograph of a stack of paperback books. I’ve learned in the past how useful AI can be at quickly turning a photograph of a shelf or stack of books into a list of titles and authors – so natually I snapped a photo of the stack of books and asked Gemini:

What are the titles and authors of these paperbacks?

Gemini came back with the list of titles and authors:

This image features a collection of vintage-style paperback spines, often found in artistic book-themed prints. The spines represent a mix of classic literature, science fiction, and pulp fiction.

Below is the list of titles and authors as they appear from top to bottom…

There were a few titles in the photo that were impossible for me to make out. I asked Gemini about them:

Were there some you couldn’t read?

Gemini came back:

I did have to do a little detective work on a few of those! While most were clear, some of the older pulp titles have very tiny or weathered text that required a bit of cross-referencing to confirm.

….

A Fun “Easter Egg”

You might notice that J.D. Salinger and Henry Kane appear twice. This stack isn’t a random collection; it’s actually a popular art piece (often titled The Librarian’s Daughter or similar) that mixes “high” literature like Middlemarch with “low” pulp fiction like Affair for a Corpse to show the breadth of a true reader’s shelf.

Gemini’s comment about the image being “actually a popular art piece” piqued my interest – so I asked:

Tell me more about the art piece

Gemini responded:

This image is part of a series of popular “book stack” art prints that celebrate the aesthetic of mid-century paperback design. Specifically, this style of print is often associated with artists like Laura Row, though several “Dark Academia” and “Bibliophile” themed artists have created similar compositions.

Here is why this piece is so compelling to book lovers:

1. The “High-Low” Curated Library

The most interesting thing about this art is the intentional curation. It doesn’t stick to one genre. Instead, it places “High Literature” next to “Pulp Fiction”:

  • The Classics: Middlemarch, Gone with the Wind, and Lolita.
  • Sci-Fi/Fantasy Giants: Dune, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451.
  • Pulp & Noir: New York Confidential!!, Affair for a Corpse, and Kill Once, Kill Twice.

This reflects a “compleat reader”—someone who loves the depth of George Eliot but also appreciates the gritty, fast-paced thrill of a 25-cent drugstore mystery.

2. Homage to Vintage Publishers

The art celebrates the unique branding of 20th-century publishing houses. If you look closely at the spines:

  • The yellow-and-orange spines are classic Ace Books or Pocket Books signatures.
  • The black spine with the red “DUNE” is a stylized nod to the iconic Chilton or NEL (New English Library) editions.
  • The tattered edges and faded colors are painted to mimic “foxing” (the brown spots that appear on old paper) and shelf wear, giving the piece a sense of history.
3. The “Ace Double” Mystery

One of the most authentic touches is the inclusion of Scylla and Waltz into Darkness. In the 1950s, Ace Books published “doubles”—two books bound together back-to-back. You would read one, then flip the book over and upside down to read the other. The artist captured this perfectly by placing them together.

4. Why it’s popular art

This piece is a staple in “Dark Academia” decor. It’s designed to evoke the feeling of a cozy, slightly cluttered professor’s study or a forgotten corner of a used bookstore. Because the titles are recognizable, it acts as a “literary Rorschach test”—people tend to scan the stack to see how many they’ve read.

I’d never heard of “Dark Academia” decor which sounded even more interesting. So I asked Gemini:

Tell me more about dark academia decor. Where did that come from?

Gemini educated me about “Dark Academia”:

“Dark Academia” is much more than just a style of decorating; it’s a subculture that romanticizes the “pursuit of knowledge” with a moody, vintage, and slightly gothic twist.

While it feels like it has been around for centuries, the term itself actually originated online around 2015 on Tumblr. It exploded in popularity during the 2020 lockdowns when students, stuck at home, began romanticizing their studies to make the experience feel more meaningful.

Here is a breakdown of where this aesthetic came from and what makes it work:

1. The Literary Spark: The Secret History

If Dark Academia has a “Bible,” it is Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History.

  • The Plot: It follows a group of eccentric Classics students at a prestigious New England college who become so obsessed with ancient Greek culture that it leads to murder.
  • The Influence: The book popularized the “uniform” (tweed blazers, turtlenecks) and the “vibe” (whiskey, cigarettes, late-night libraries, and classical Greek texts).
2. The Architectural Roots

The decor is heavily inspired by European and Ivy League “Collegiate Gothic” architecture. Think of the University of Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard.

  • Key Elements: High ceilings, dark wood paneling, leaded glass windows, and ivy-covered stone walls.
  • The Mood: It’s meant to feel “heavy” and “hallowed,” as if the room itself is holding centuries of secrets.
3. Core Decor Elements

If you were to design a Dark Academia room, you would focus on:

  • The Palette: Deep, “moody” colors—forest green, burgundy, navy, charcoal, and lots of dark wood (mahogany or walnut).
  • Lighting: Low and warm. You’d use brass desk lamps (like the green-shaded “Emeralite”), flickering candles, and soft floor lamps rather than harsh overhead lights.
  • Curated Oddities: This is where it gets fun. You’ll see “maximalist” touches like:
    • Antique globes and telescopes.
    • Botanical prints or framed butterflies (taxidermy).
    • Plaid or houndstooth textiles.
    • And of course, books: Not just a few books, but floor-to-ceiling shelves, often with the spines facing out (like in your image) or leather-bound vintage editions.
4. Why the “Dark” in Dark Academia?

It’s not just about being “moody.” The “dark” refers to the Gothic undercurrents—the idea that obsessive study can lead to madness or moral decay. It’s a reaction against the “minimalist/white/modern” look. It embraces the dust, the clutter of a genius’s desk, and the beauty of things that are old and worn out.

Interesting Fact: A common “Dark Academia” activity isn’t just reading, but “selective suffering”—the idea that it’s more “aesthetic” to study by candlelight in a cold room with a cup of tea than in a modern, well-lit library.

Then, for some random reason, it popped into my head that this decor might be interesting if used as a background for a YouTube video channel – so I asked Gemini:

Just wondering. Seems like it might make a good background for a YouTube channel?

Gemini described how that might work:

It would be a fantastic background for a YouTube channel. In fact, “BookTube,” “StudyTube,” and video essayists have practically turned Dark Academia into the gold standard for intellectual-leaning content.

Here is why that specific aesthetic works so well on camera:

1. The “Instant Authority” Effect

There is a psychological phenomenon where seeing a wall of books behind a speaker immediately lends them credibility. Even if you’re talking about pop culture or gaming, a background that looks like a 1920s professor’s office tells the viewer, “This person has done their research.”

2. Visual Depth and “Bokeh”

Dark Academia thrives on texture and shadows.

  • The Books: The varied heights and colors of the spines (like in your image) create “visual noise” that looks great when slightly blurred (the bokeh effect).
  • The Lighting: Because the aesthetic favors warm, directional light (think a single brass lamp), it naturally creates flattering shadows that make a 2D video frame feel like a 3D room.
3. High Re-watchability

If your background is a plain white wall, the viewer looks at it once and is done. If it’s a “curated mess” of vintage paperbacks, old maps, and a telescope, viewers will often pause the video just to see what titles are on your shelf. It’s a great way to engage an audience.

4. It’s “Cozy” (The ASMR Factor)

Many viewers use YouTube for “body doubling” (studying while someone else studies) or relaxation. The Dark Academia vibe feels “quiet.” It signals to the viewer that this is a space for focus and calm, which can keep people on your channel longer.

Tips for a YouTube “Dark Academia” Set:
  • Avoid “Perfect” Alignment: Don’t line up the books perfectly. Let some lean, stack some horizontally (like in your image), and tuck a few “bookmarks” (scraps of paper) between pages.
  • Layering: Place a small bust, a vintage clock, or a dried flower in a vase in front of the books to create layers.
  • The “Key” Light: Use a warm-toned bulb ($2700K$ to $3000K$) in a desk lamp off to the side to get those moody highlights.

What kind of content are you thinking of filming? If it’s something specific like book reviews or history, I can give you some tips on which specific “props” from that art piece would pop the most on camera.

Intrigued further, I continued by asking Gemini:

Actually I am thinking about developing a YouTube channel that helps viewers develop an ai mindset.

Gemini got quite excited about that idea:

That is a brilliant and timely concept. By 2026, the “how-to-prompt” tutorials have become a dime a dozen. The real gap in the market is helping people develop an AI Mindset—moving from seeing AI as a “magic answer box” to seeing it as a collaborative partner for critical thinking and problem-solving.

Combining the “Dark Academia” look with high-tech AI discussion creates a fascinating “Retro-Futurist” vibe. It suggests that while the tools are new, the goal is the same timeless human pursuit: wisdom and mastery.

Why the Dark Academia Background fits an AI Mindset channel:
  • The “Human-Centric” Argument: AI can be cold and sterile. A background of old paperbacks and warm wood reminds your viewers that humans are the ones in the driver’s seat. It grounds the “tech” talk in “humanities.”
  • The “Scholar vs. User” Vibe: An AI mindset requires curiosity and deep work. Setting your videos in a “study” tells the viewer they are here to learn, not just to watch a quick hack.
  • Cognitive Contrast: There is something visually arresting about seeing a modern laptop or a holographic interface sitting on a 100-year-old oak desk. It creates “visual tension” that keeps people watching.
3 “Mindset” Pillars for Your Channel

If you use that book-stack art as your inspiration, you could structure your content around these concepts:

PillarThe ConceptDark Academia Prop
AugmentationDon’t ask “What can AI do?” Ask “What do I need to achieve?”A vintage magnifying glass (to represent focus).
Iterative LogicTreat AI like a brilliant but literal intern. You have to mentor it.A messy stack of handwritten notes (to represent the “process”).
Ethical CurationJust because AI made it doesn’t mean it’s good. You are the Editor.A fountain pen or a red “editor’s” pencil.
Quick Content Ideas to Get Started:
  1. “Reading the AI Landscape”: Reviewing AI news using the same critical eye a professor uses to review a classic text.
  2. “The Digital Socratic Method”: Showing viewers how to “debate” with an AI to sharpen their own arguments.
  3. “Analog Brain, Digital Mind”: Techniques for using AI to organize complex research projects (using the library aesthetic to explain digital file structures).

Would you like me to help you brainstorm a name for the channel or perhaps a “first video” script outline that blends these two worlds?

Of course I’ll need a name for the channel! And a script outline! So I asked Gemini to continue:

This is a brilliant “collision of worlds.” By pairing the aesthetic of old-world scholarship with the frontier of artificial intelligence, you’re telling your audience that AI isn’t a replacement for the human mind—it’s an expansion of the classical tradition of seeking wisdom.

Here are five channel name ideas that bridge the gap between “The Library” and “The Lab”:

Channel Name Ideas
  1. The Silicon Socratic (Classic philosophy meets modern tech)
  2. Tweed & Turing (A direct nod to the Dark Academia uniform and the father of AI)
  3. The Prompt Scholar (Positions prompting as a scholarly discipline)
  4. Coded Classics (The idea of “programming” a new way of thinking)
  5. The Digital Lyceum (Inspired by Aristotle’s ancient school of philosophy)
First Video Script Outline

Title: The Gutenberg Moment: Why Your Mindset is the Most Important AI Tool

I. The Hook (0:00–1:00)
  • Visual: You sitting at a dark wood desk. A single warm lamp. The book-stack art is visible behind you. You aren’t holding a phone; you’re holding a fountain pen or an old paperback.
  • Narrative: “Everyone is talking about the ‘tools’—the latest model, the newest plugin. But a master craftsman doesn’t just own a chisel; they have a mindset. Today, we’re going to stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like a library of the infinite.”
II. The Core Conflict (1:00–3:00)
  • The Problem: Most people use AI as a ‘vending machine.’ You put a coin in, you get a snack out. This is a ‘Consumer Mindset.’
  • The Shift: Introduce the ‘Curator Mindset.’ Like the authors in this stack (point to the background), AI is a collection of human knowledge. You are the lead researcher, not just the end-user.
III. Three Pillars of the AI Mindset (3:00–7:00)
  • Pillar 1: The Socratic Method. Don’t just give a command. Ask a question, then ask a follow-up. Show a screen overlay of a conversation where you “debate” the AI to find a better answer.
  • Pillar 2: Creative Friction. Explain that AI is best when it pushes back. “If the AI agrees with you immediately, your prompt wasn’t hard enough.”
  • Pillar 3: The Human Editor. Use the analogy of the books. “A book isn’t finished when the ink hits the page; it’s finished after the third edit. AI gives you the first draft; your mindset provides the soul.”
IV. The Practical Takeaway (7:00–9:00)
  • The Challenge: Give the viewers a “homework assignment” for their next AI session. “Instead of asking for a summary, ask the AI to play ‘Devil’s Advocate’ against your favorite idea.”
V. The Sign-off (9:00–10:00)
  • Closing: “The future isn’t written in code; it’s written in the way we think. Welcome to the Lyceum.”
  • Call to Action: “Subscribe if you’re ready to stop consuming AI and start mastering the mindset.”

Would you like me to expand on one of those pillars with a specific “prompting” example you can show on screen?

I told Gemini which channel name I liked – and then took it up on its offer to create a first prompting example:

Welcome to the first session, Professor. “The Prompt Scholar” has a fantastic ring to it—it sounds established, authoritative, and deeply curious.

To kick off your first video, you want a prompting example that moves away from “Generate a 500-word blog post” (the Vending Machine mindset) and moves toward “Help me pressure-test this theory” (the Scholar Mindset).

Here is a high-level example you can walk your viewers through.

The Example: “The Socratic Partner”

Instead of asking AI for an answer, we are going to use it to find the gaps in our own thinking. This is a classic “Dark Academia” approach—rigorous debate to find the truth.

Step 1: The “Lazy” Prompt (The Before)

“Give me three reasons why remote work is better than office work.”

  • The Result: A generic, one-sided list you could find on any Google search. It requires zero “mindset.”
Step 2: The “Scholar” Prompt (The After)

“I am developing an argument that remote work increases long-term creative output. I want you to act as a Steel-Manner. Your goal isn’t just to disagree, but to build the strongest possible counter-argument against my position. Identify three logical fallacies I might be making and suggest one study or ‘blind spot’ I should investigate to make my final argument bulletproof.”

Why this works for your channel:
  • It demonstrates “Prompt Engineering” as “Critical Thinking”: You aren’t just typing; you’re strategizing.
  • The “Steel-Man” Concept: This is a high-level intellectual term (the opposite of a “Straw Man”). Using it on camera reinforces your brand as a “Scholar.”
  • The Outcome: You don’t get a finished essay; you get a better brain. You’ve used the AI to sharpen your own intellect.
Script Snippet for the Video:

“In the old world, you’d need a room full of PhDs to challenge your thesis this way. Now? You have a library that talks back. Watch what happens when I stop asking for ‘answers’ and start asking for ‘friction’…” (Cut to screen recording of the prompt).

Your Next Step:

Would you like me to draft a “Channel Trailer” script? It would be a 60-second high-energy version of your “Tweed & Turing” vibe to help you launch the brand.

Of course I’d like that script! So Gemini created it:

Let’s get this trailer scripted. Think of this as the “manifesto” for The Prompt Scholar.

The goal here is to establish the aesthetic (Dark Academia) while immediately pivoting to the future (AI). We want it to feel like a high-end film trailer—moody, intellectual, and slightly provocative.

The Prompt Scholar: Channel Trailer

Duration: 60 Seconds

Music: Starts with a low, rhythmic cello. As the “AI” elements kick in, add a subtle, glitchy electronic pulse underneath.

TimeVisualAudio (Voiceover)
0:00Close-up: A fountain pen hitting heavy paper. The book-stack art is out of focus in the background.“We’ve spent centuries learning how to talk to each other…”
0:10Wide shot: You sitting in a pool of warm light, surrounded by shadows and old books.“…and only a few years learning how to talk to this.”
0:15Quick cuts: A dusty leather book spine, then a clean glowing laptop screen.“Most people treat Artificial Intelligence like a search engine. A vending machine for average ideas.”
0:25You look directly into the camera. You aren’t smiling; you look curious.“But a Scholar? A Scholar knows that the quality of the answer is only as good as the soul of the question.”
0:35Fast Montage: Digital code scrolling like falling rain, overlaid onto images of classical statues or old libraries.“This isn’t about ‘hacks’ or ‘shortcuts.’ It’s about the evolution of the human mind.”
0:45Shot of you typing a complex prompt (The Socratic Partner).“We’re going to stop using AI to do our work… and start using it to expand our wisdom.”
0:55Title Card: THE PROMPT SCHOLAR in a classic Serif font.“Welcome to the new Library. Class is in session.”
Production Tips for the “Scholar” Look:
  • The “Texture” Shot: Film some “B-roll” of you actually turning the pages of those old paperbacks. The sound of paper (ASMR) is a huge part of the Dark Academia vibe.
  • Color Grading: In editing, lean into the “Teal and Orange” look—keep the shadows deep and cool (dark blues/greens) and the highlights warm (lamp light/amber).
  • The Wardrobe: Wear a structured blazer or a dark turtleneck. It’s the “uniform” of the brand.

I continued:

This is great. Let’s move to set design. Give me five images that show good ideas for this channel’s YouTube set background.

Gemini created five images showing possible backgrounds in the genre. And we continued from there.

I’ll stop here. You can tell from this back and forth that Gemini continued providing me answers which further intrigued me – even though at the start I had no intention of starting a YouTube channel. Afterwards I was thinking gee, maybe that’d be fun!

Continue to remember: AI today is the worst it will ever be. Before long I’ll just click a button and that YouTube channel will be created for me, the artwork and background will be generated and uploaded and the first episode will be completely AI generated.

Crazy stuff. But what a time to be alive!

Categories
Business Investing

Achilles and the Algorithm

There’s something almost poetic in the connection between Jim Simons and Zeno’s paradox — two minds separated by millennia, both obsessed with the hidden structure beneath apparent motion.

Zeno’s paradox, in its most famous form, claims Achilles can never catch the tortoise. Before he closes the gap, he must first close half of it. Before that, half of that. An infinite series of steps… and yet somehow motion happens. The paradox isn’t really about motion at all — it’s about whether an infinite process can have a finite sum. The resolution, as we now know, is that it can: 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … = 1. Infinity folded neatly into something whole.

Simons, the mathematician-turned-trader who built Renaissance Technologies and the Medallion Fund, was doing something structurally similar. Markets look like noise — chaotic, memoryless, efficiently random. The conventional wisdom was essentially a financial version of Zeno: you can never beat the market, because any edge you think you’ve found will be arbitraged away before you fully exploit it. An infinite regress of efficient corrections.

But Simons, trained as a geometer, suspected that beneath the apparent randomness there were patterns — small, fleeting, but real. Not the crude patterns that chartists chased, but subtle statistical regularities, the kind that only reveal themselves when you treat financial data the way a mathematician treats a noisy signal from a distant star. He wasn’t looking for a story about why a price would move. He was looking for the mathematical signature that it would.

The deeper parallel is this: Zeno’s mistake wasn’t his logic, it was his intuition that infinite subdivision must mean infinite duration. Simons’ insight was similarly counterintuitive — that markets being mostly efficient doesn’t mean they’re entirely efficient, and that the residual inefficiency, compounded relentlessly with the right models and leverage, can generate extraordinary returns. A small, persistent edge across billions of trades is its own kind of convergent infinite series.

There’s also something Zenonian about Simons’ secrecy. You can approach an understanding of what Medallion does, but you can never quite arrive. Each step closer — the hiring of physicists and cryptographers, the signals in weather patterns and earnings releases, the hidden Markov models — reveals another half-distance still to close. The full picture perpetually recedes.

Zeno would have appreciated that.

Categories
Business

Everything You Need Is Out Front

Lee Child is not primarily known as a writer of consumer psychology, but Jack Reacher notices things — it’s rather the point of him — and in Nothing to Lose, Child gives his Jack a quiet moment of genuine curiosity:

“For many years Reacher had wondered why hardware stores favored sidewalk displays. There was a lot of work involved. Repetitive physical labor, twice a day. But maybe consumer psychology dictated that large utilitarian items sold better when associated with the rugged outdoors. Or maybe it was just a question of space.”

Reacher being Reacher, he files the observation and moves on.

But I couldn’t. Because he’s right — hardware stores do this, reliably and almost universally, and I’m not sure I’d ever consciously noticed it before reading that passage. Now I can’t stop noticing it.

There is something almost theatrical about the hardware store sidewalk display.

Wheelbarrows nested inside one another like Russian dolls. Stacks of plastic tubs in graduating sizes. Garden hoses coiled on hooks. Snow shovels in August, leaf blowers in April — the stock doesn’t always match the season, which suggests the display is less about merchandising logic than about something else entirely. It is a kind of flag, planted on the sidewalk: we are here, we are open, we have what you need.

Hardware stores occupy a peculiar and irreplaceable niche in the retail ecosystem. They are not quite like other shops.

A bookstore invites browsing; a grocery store moves you through a deliberate circuit; a clothing store sells you an idea of yourself. But a hardware store operates on a different premise entirely — the premise of the problem already in progress.

Nobody browses a hardware store the way they browse a bookstore. You come in because something is broken, leaking, stuck, squeaking, loose, or missing. You come in with a specific hole in your world that needs filling, and the hardware store’s job is to have the exact, obscure, oddly satisfying thing that fills it.

The sidewalk display, seen in this light, is a signal to that particular state of mind. It says: your problem is solvable. It projects competence and abundance before you even walk through the door. Those wheelbarrows and tubs and coiled hoses aren’t really for sale so much as they are reassurance — evidence that whoever runs this place has thought about what you might need and has made sure it’s available. The display is a promise made in hardware.

There is also something about the ruggedness of it — Reacher’s instinct about the outdoors isn’t wrong.

A bag of mulch sitting on a pallet in the open air feels different from the same bag of mulch on a climate-controlled shelf inside.

The independent hardware store does this better than the big box retailers, because the sidewalk display at a local hardware store carries the additional weight of relationship. The owner made a decision about what to put out front today, which means someone thought about it, which means someone is paying attention. The Home Depots of the world have sidewalk displays too, but they feel more like sheer marketing than curation.

Reacher suggests two reasons and moves on: consumer psychology, or space. Probably both. I suspect there’s also a third thing — the sidewalk display as an act of daily optimism.

Someone got up this morning, brought the wheelbarrows out, and arranged them on the sidewalk. They did it yesterday. They’ll do it tomorrow. They are betting that you will come around the corner with a problem and feel a small flood of relief when you see them there, ready.

Smart. And sort of comforting.

Categories
AI

Claude Shannon’s Mirror: Signal, Noise, and Secrets

We spend a great deal of our lives trying to be understood. We shout into the void, send texts across oceans, and build increasingly complex tools to bridge the gaps between our minds.

Yet, equally human is the desire to conceal—to keep our thoughts private, to mask our vulnerabilities, to hide our signals in the static.

It seems paradoxical that communication and secrecy would share the same architecture. But Claude Shannon, the somewhat eccentric yet brilliant father of information theory, saw past the paradox. He recognized that building a bridge and building a fortress require the exact same understanding of physics.

In Fortune’s Formula, William Poundstone captures this dual realization perfectly:

“Shannon later said that thinking about how to conceal messages with random noise motivated some of the insights of information theory. ‘A secrecy system is almost identical with a noisy communications system,’ he claimed. The two lines of inquiry ‘were so close together you couldn’t separate them.'”

When we try to communicate over a noisy channel—a noisy radio or a crowded room—we are fighting entropy. We want our signal to survive the chaos so we can be heard.

When we encrypt a message, however, we are deliberately weaponizing that same chaos. We wrap our signal in artificial noise so dense that only the intended recipient possesses the mathematical filter to extract it.

It is a profound symmetry: clarity and obscurity are merely two ends of the exact same thing.

Today, one of our most advanced AI models is named “Claude” in tribute to Shannon. These neural networks are, at their core, sophisticated engines for separating signal from noise. They ingest the vast, chaotic, and often contradictory static of human knowledge and attempt to synthesize clarity and connection from it. They are mathematical mirrors reflecting Shannon’s earliest theories back at us.

But Shannon’s realization reflects something deeper about the human condition, far beyond the realm of zeroes and ones. We are all walking communications systems, constantly modulating our signals. Every day, we navigate an overwhelming digital landscape filled with deafening static.

Sometimes we desperately want the noise to clear so our true selves can be seen. Other times, we retreat behind a wall of our own generated static—small talk, busyness, deflection, and carefully curated avatars—to protect our inner world from being decoded by those who haven’t earned the key.

Perhaps the real wisdom of information theory isn’t just in knowing how to efficiently transmit a message, but in recognizing the sheer necessity of the noise itself. Without the static, the signal holds no meaning. Without the capacity for secrecy and privacy, the choice to be vulnerable and communicate clearly wouldn’t be nearly as profound.

It seems that we are defined as much by what we choose to encrypt as by what we choose to broadcast. Mirror indeed.

Categories
Books Writing

The Secret Handshake

Author George Saunders has a gift for articulating things you already knew but couldn’t say.

I was reminded of this recently when I returned to A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his generous, luminous masterclass on Russian short fiction — the book that uses Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol as a lens for understanding what fiction actually does to a reader, and why.

Early on, Saunders wonders whether there might be certain laws governing how we respond to stories — not rules handed down by writing programs, but something closer to instinct, something wired into the reading mind.

One of his candidates is physical description. “We like hearing our world described,” he writes. “And we like hearing it described specifically.”

That line stopped me. It has the quality of a truth that, once named, you begin seeing everywhere — in the books you love, in the passages you’ve underlined without quite knowing why, in the sentences that have stayed with you for years long after the plot has faded.

Plot pulls us forward. Character keeps us invested. Ideas give us something to argue with on the drive home. But it’s the specific physicality of a story that makes it land in the body.

“It was raining” barely registers. Tell me instead about raindrops beading on a leaf, or the way mud sucks at a boot heel with a wet shlup, and suddenly I’m not reading about a place — I’m standing in it.

Why should this be?

Saunders doesn’t fully explain it, and maybe the honest answer is that no one fully can.

Our brains are pattern-matching machines, wired by evolution to map territory and imagine consequence — and concrete detail feeds that machinery directly. Or maybe the explanation is simpler and more generous: we love the world, and hearing it rendered with precision is a form of praise.

Whatever the reason, the great writers have always known this law and obeyed it joyfully. With the help of AI I’ve collected a few good examples.

Consider the opening of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms:

In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.

No grand metaphors. Just pebbles, dust, leaves, color, motion. Yet the scene is so tangible you can almost taste the grit. And the specificity does double duty — it grounds us in a real place while quietly foreshadowing the war that will eventually powder everything.

Dickens, who worked at a different scale entirely, goes symphonic with it. The opening of Bleak House is one of the great set pieces in the language:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city… Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships… fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck.

The repetition is hypnotic, but it’s the specificity — cabooses, rigging, toes, pipes — that transforms weather into a living, malevolent presence. You don’t just read the fog. You feel it in your lungs.

Fitzgerald does something different again in The Great Gatsby, using the same technique to make moral decay feel physical and inescapable:

This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

Ashes don’t just lie there — they grow, they form, they crumble. The grotesque precision turns an industrial wasteland into an image of everything the Jazz Age is trying not to look at.

And then there is Chekhov, who Saunders loves most of all. In “Gooseberries” — the story that gives Saunders his title — Ivan Ivanych plunges into a river in the rain:

He plunged into the water with a splash and swam in the rain, thrusting his arms out wide; he raised waves on which white lilies swayed.

Those white lilies swaying on the disturbed water — two words, one image — capture pure animal joy more vividly than any abstract declaration of happiness ever could. It’s the kind of detail that makes you want to jump in yourself.

Saunders is right.

Our reading minds light up at this stuff. Specific physical description isn’t decoration or craft-workshop virtue signaling — it’s the secret handshake between writer and reader. It says: I noticed this small, real thing. Did you?

In a world increasingly mediated by screens and summaries and the frictionless delivery of abstracted information, fiction’s quiet insistence on the pebbles and the fog and the lilies feels almost like an act of resistance. It insists that the world is worth looking at. That the particular matters. That rendering one thing exactly right is worth more than gesturing vaguely at everything.

So next time you’re reading — or writing — linger on the details. Describe the world specifically. Our hungry minds will thank you for it.

Questions to Consider

  1. Saunders suggests physical specificity might be a kind of law in fiction — something the reading mind responds to almost instinctively. Do you think this is universal, or culturally conditioned?
  2. The examples here are all from the Western literary canon. Does this law hold in traditions — Japanese, Russian, African, South Asian — that handle interiority and landscape differently?
  3. If our appetite for specific physical detail is partly evolutionary — the brain mapping territory — what does it mean that so much of what we now consume is deliberately abstract and summarized?
  4. Can over-specificity fail? Are there writers who pile on detail to the point where it stops doing its work?
  5. Saunders uses fiction to make the point, but does the same law apply to nonfiction, memoir, or long-form journalism — and if so, who are the writers doing it best right now?
Categories
AI Work

The Dealers of Intelligence

There’s a scene early in John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society where he describes Americans of an earlier era regarding industrial output with something close to reverence — the sheer productive capacity of the nation seemed almost miraculous, a force that could reshape civilization. Within a generation, of course, that same output had become background noise. Factories hummed, goods appeared, and nobody paused to marvel.

The miraculous had become mundane, and the mundane had become infrastructure.

I found myself thinking about that arc recently while listening to Sam Lessin on the More or Less podcast.

Lessin made an observation that I haven’t been able to shake: we probably aren’t heading toward a single, triumphant AGI monopoly — some god-machine that one fortunate company builds first and then rents to the rest of us in perpetuity.

Instead, Lessin suggested, we are barreling toward something far more ordinary, and in its ordinariness, far more interesting.

“There will be lots of ‘dealers of intelligence’. No one company will corner the market, no one big winner of AGI.”

Dealers of intelligence. I keep turning that phrase over. Where do we end up? No rapture, no singularity, no chosen company ascending to the throne of cognition. Just suppliers, distribution channels, price competition — the unglamorous mechanics of any maturing market.

And historically, that’s exactly how this tends to go.

Salt was once precious enough to pay soldiers with. Spices rewrote the map of the world. Steel, oil, and computing power each arrived wrapped in mystique and guarded behind scarcity before the inevitable happened: extraction improved, distribution scaled, and the miracle became a utility. Nobody thinks about the engineering marvel of the electrical grid when they flip a light switch. They just expect the light to come on.

If Lessin is right — and the competitive landscape of the last two years does little to argue against him — intelligence will follow the same curve. Not a single oracle, but a market. Cognitive utilities. Price-per-token negotiations. The same forces that commoditized bandwidth will commoditize reasoning, and we’ll argue about our AI subscription tiers the way we currently argue about our data plans.

Which forces the interesting question: when genius is cheap, what exactly becomes valuable?

The professional moats of the last century were largely built on the ability to process specialized information and output reliable answers.

The doctor, the lawyer, the financial analyst, the programmer — each occupied a protected position because access to their domain of reasoning was genuinely scarce.

If I can buy a substantial fraction of that reasoning from a commodity supplier for fractions of a cent, the premium on raw cognitive horsepower doesn’t just shrink. It collapses.

What’s left, I think, is the un-commoditizable. Empathy. Physical presence. Judgment under conditions of genuine uncertainty and consequence. And above all — taste.

Taste is the thing that has always resisted systematization, because taste isn’t rational in any clean sense. It’s the residue of lived experience, of specific childhoods and particular failures and the accumulated weight of caring about things over time.

An algorithm can produce a structurally flawless piece of music; it takes a human to decide whether it matters, and why, and to whom.

That act of curation — of choosing what deserves to exist and what doesn’t — is going to become more consequential, not less, as the supply of technically competent output explodes.

There’s something almost liberating about this, if you let yourself sit with it.

A world of commoditized intelligence is, paradoxically, a profoundly human one. It removes the burden of raw computation from the center of what we do and pushes us toward the edges — toward the questions only we can ask, the connections only we can feel, the decisions only we can be held accountable for.

The dealers of intelligence will handle the materials. We’ll still have to decide what to build. Architects.

Questions to Consider

  1. If intelligence becomes a commodity like electricity or bandwidth, which industries or professions will be slowest to feel that pressure — and why?
  2. Lessin frames this as a market with many suppliers rather than a winner-take-all race. Does the competitive landscape today support that view, or does it still look like a sprint toward consolidation?
  3. What does “taste” actually mean when the person exercising it is doing so with AI-augmented perception and judgment? Is it still the same thing?
  4. Who gets to haggle with the dealers? If cognitive utilities are cheap in aggregate but not universally accessible, does commoditization risk deepening inequality rather than democratizing thought?
  5. If the value of answering questions falls and the value of asking them rises, what does education need to look like — and how far is it from what it looks like now?
Categories
Music

Every Blog Needs a Theme Song!

Google has added a new music generation model called Lyria 3 to its Gemini 3 models.

I was playing around with it last night – having it generate happy birthday greetings for a friend whose birthday is coming up in a few days, another song for a longtime business partnership I was part of, and more. It’s kind of crazy! And a lot of fun.

When you use Lyria 3 as a tool in Gemini 3 you get back an image and an MP3 file that’s 30 seconds long (longer coming soon according to Google). Turns out the 30 second length is just about perfect for the “quick hit” from a snippet of music.

Google provides several genres you can choose from to start with – or you can just go with whatever you want to say in the prompt – here’s a rough template for doing that:

[Topic] + [Genre] + [Mood] + [Instruments] + [Vocals]

This morning I went for my morning walk and had a thought – how about generating a theme song for my blog. So when I got back home I opened up Gemini, selected the Music tool and entered:

Take a look at my blog and compose my theme song! blog: https://sjl.us

You can see with that prompt that I really didn’t provide it much direction – just a pointer to my blog so that it could try to generate something appropriate.

It took a few seconds for Lyria to read my blog and then use what it found to generate my blog’s theme song – and I like it!

You can play the theme song for yourself here:

Categories
Work YouTube

Zero to Sixty Million

In his speech earlier today at the India AI Impact Summit, Sundar Pichai noted:

Twenty years ago, the concept of a professional “YouTube Creator” didn’t exist; today, there are upwards of 60 million around the world.

One platform, one simple idea (share any video with anyone), quietly rewired how millions of people work, express themselves, build communities, and define success. Twenty years is nothing in historical time, but it’s everything in human opportunity.

What new profession will we look back on in 2046 and say, “Twenty years ago, that didn’t exist”?

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models

The Echo Effect: Why Prompt Repetition is AI’s Best Kept Secret

In our relentless pursuit of complexity, we often overlook the elegant simplicity of a fundamental human habit: repeating ourselves.

We build colossal architectures, weave intricate neural networks, and throw mountains of computational power at our artificial intelligence systems, hoping to squeeze out a few more drops of reasoning and logic. Yet, sometimes the most profound breakthroughs require no new code, no additional latency, and no extra training data.

Sometimes, you just have to say it twice.

In a fascinating December 2025 paper titled “Prompt Repetition Improves Non-Reasoning LLMs,” researchers Yaniv Leviathan, Matan Kalman, and Yossi Matias uncovered an almost absurdly simple “free lunch” in AI optimization.

Their premise is straightforward: when you aren’t using a heavy reasoning model, simply copying and pasting your input prompt multiple times significantly boosts the model’s performance.

“When not using reasoning, repeating the input prompt improves performance for popular models (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and Deepseek) without increasing the number of generated tokens or latency.”

The mechanics behind this are elegantly pragmatic.

By repeating the prompt, you are moving the heavy computational lifting to the parallelizable “pre-fill” stage of the model’s processing. The AI’s causal attention mechanism gets to process the same tokens again, allowing the later iterations of the prompt to attend to the earlier ones. It effectively acts as a hack to simulate bidirectional attention in a decoder-only architecture.

What’s even more telling is the paper’s observation on why this works so well.

The researchers noted that models trained with Reinforcement Learning (like OpenAI’s deep-thinking variants) naturally learn to “restate the problem” in their internal monologue. They figured out on their own what these researchers are suggesting we do manually: repeat the question to focus the mind.

Reading this paper, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel to the human condition and the nature of listening.

How often do we assume that because we have articulated a thought once, it has been fully absorbed? We fire off a single, dense instruction to a colleague, a partner, or a friend, and then marvel when the nuance is lost in translation.

We suffer from our own attention bottlenecks.

Like a non-reasoning LLM trying to parse a complex query in a single pass, we are constantly bombarded with a stream of tokens—emails, notifications, conversations, fleeting thoughts. To truly understand, to truly digest and synthesize information, we need the grace of repetition.

There is a strange poetry in the fact that to make our most advanced digital minds smarter, we have to talk to them the way we talk to a distracted child or a busy spouse. The “microscope effect” highlighted in the study—where repeating a prompt drastically improved extraction tasks—shows that the failure wasn’t in the model’s capacity to know, but in its capacity to focus. Repetition forces focus. It creates a resonant echo in the context window, a digital highlighter that screams, “This matters. Look here again.”

As we continue to navigate a world increasingly augmented by artificial intelligence, this paper serves as a humbling reminder. The bleeding edge of technology isn’t always found in the most complex equation; sometimes, it’s hidden in the most basic principles of communication.

Whether you’re prompting a billion-parameter language model or trying to connect with the human sitting across from you, the lesson is clear.

Clarity isn’t just about the words you choose. It’s about giving those words the space, the resonance, and the repetition they need to be truly understood.

Say it once to be heard; say it twice to be understood.

Categories
AI

The Thousandfold Door

There is a pattern hiding in the history of human progress that we almost always miss in the moment — and almost always recognize, with some embarrassment, in hindsight.

Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood called it price-simplifying. The insight, drawn from decades of studying transformative businesses, is deceptively simple: when you cut the price of something dramatically, demand doesn’t respond proportionally. It responds exponentially. Halve the price, and you don’t double the market. You might multiply it by ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. Reduce the price to a tenth of what it was, and you may unlock a market a hundred thousand times larger than the one that existed before.

The math sounds implausible until you start listing the examples. Henry Ford didn’t just make cars cheaper — he conjured an entirely new civilization of mobility. Ikea didn’t discount furniture — it democratized the designed home. Southwest Airlines didn’t offer cheaper seats — it invented the era of the spontaneous trip, transforming flying from an executive luxury into something a college student books on a whim.

In every case, the price drop didn’t just serve existing demand more cheaply. It revealed latent demand that nobody knew existed — desire that had been sitting dormant, waiting for the door to open.

I keep returning to this framework when I think about what is happening with intelligence right now.

For most of human history, access to high-quality thinking — legal analysis, financial modeling, medical reasoning, strategic advice, elegant writing — has been extraordinarily expensive. Not just in money, but in time. You needed years of specialized education, or the budget to hire someone who had it. The price of cognition was high enough that vast swaths of human need simply went unmet. Problems went unsolved not because solutions didn’t exist, but because the expertise required to find them was priced out of reach.

AI is a price-simplifying event for intelligence itself.

“If the price is halved, demand does not double. It increases fivefold, tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold or more.”

We are currently debating AI as though the primary story is substitution — one form of labor replacing another. But Koch and Lockwood’s framework suggests the more consequential story is what happens on the other side of the price collapse. When the cost of a legal opinion drops from $500 an hour to nearly zero, the question isn’t just “what happens to lawyers?” It’s “how many people who never could afford a lawyer now get access to one?” When the cost of a business plan drops from a consultant’s retainer to an afternoon conversation, the question isn’t just “what happens to consultants?” It’s “how many ideas that never got funded now have a fighting chance?”

The thousandfold door is opening. We can see it in the aggregate usage numbers, in the explosion of one-person companies, in the PhD-level tutoring now available to a student in a country that couldn’t previously afford it. What we cannot yet see is the full shape of what walks through.

That’s the thing about exponential demand. It doesn’t announce itself. It just accumulates quietly, and then one day someone looks at the numbers and realizes the world has changed.

Questions to Consider

  1. The Latent Demand Question: What human needs — currently unmet because expert help is too expensive — do you think AI will unlock first? Where is the largest reservoir of suppressed demand?
  2. The Ford Parallel: Henry Ford’s price simplification didn’t just create a new industry — it reshaped cities, suburbs, culture, and geopolitics in ways he never anticipated. What are the second and third-order consequences of dramatically cheaper intelligence that we’re not yet taking seriously?
  3. The Distribution Problem: Price-simplifying events historically don’t distribute their benefits evenly — early advantages tend to compound. Who is best positioned to walk through the thousandfold door first, and does that concern you?
  4. The Demand We Can’t Imagine: Koch and Lockwood’s most unsettling point is that the new demand often didn’t previously exist in any visible form — it was created by the price drop itself. What entirely new human behaviors, industries, or creative forms might AI’s price simplification call into existence that we currently have no framework to anticipate?