Grammatically punch-drunk

Success in this work isn’t burning down the system, but setting more people on the path towards arson.

—Eileen Webb

There is still a vulnerability, a stupidity, a grammatically punch-drunk inappropriately self-revealing absolutely unhinged run-on sentence cri de coeur quality to what I am saying to you right now as I try to reach through my screen and hold you tight and light a fire and put seven futures together in a house to stop being polite and start getting real that lets you know someone with blood and marrow and insomnia was on one end of this bastard by the time you get to the other end. Is that worth anything? Is that the inimitable human spirit that cannot be distilled into ones and zeroes? Maybe, maybe not. If I didn’t think it was worth something to do it, I’d have asked Buzz Writeyear to do this for me. BUT I DIDN’T, BECAUSE THAT CYBERASSHOLE WRITING THIS WHILE I HAVE A 9 AM COCKTAIL WOULD HAVE DONE FUCK ALL TO ACHIEVE CATHARSIS FOR ME.

Earlier in this lecture I made the claim that the output of language models can’t help but be poetry, and I think this bears out in the way that we appreciate text that is generated by language models. We appreciate this text not for what it does, or what it says, but how it makes us feel—the ways in which it “imitates… meaning” but nonetheless “overflows the borders of signification.” Paradoxically, language models operate only because they work to minimize chance in the selection of words—by imposing an obligation on language—and yet we’ve seen their potential to allow writers to speak as though “nothing is compulsory.”

Like the subway, bogedas are a kind of social equalizer in New York: across race, class, and generational divides, the bodega serves all. Bodega owners are uniquely attuned to neighborhood change in the form of product requests, which can lead to adding of so-called bougie products to their shelves. While occasionally reported on and memed, bodega inventory change is rarely measured in-depth due to the nuance of such metrics and limited data. But thanks to the emergence of white-label product locator maps, it’s possible to track some products’ entry and proliferation into bodega-space.