No. 101 — Language for imagination ⫶ Richelieu's rotunda in 2048 ⫶ Vous avez trouvé votre bonheur?
the most potent compost for the imagination
Hi, I’m Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter exploring the intersections of computer science, childhood, and culture.
1.
I drafted a piece on speculative RFC design, inspired by Alexandra Lange’s work on urban design, and how the same principles could help build a better Internet, but my mind is still too scattered to finish it. Lange’s writing on family-centered cities still stays with me.
2.
Large language model weights are now part of history. In Brussels recently, conversation turned to a growing concern: who should preserve human-originated knowledge as synthetic data and AI slop flood our information systems? Museums? Archives? Libraries? Matt Webb touches upon this with The need for a strategic fact reserve.
3.
Speaking of libraries: spent a morning working at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Richelieu site. Its rotunda-shaped reading room would make for a gorgeous strategic fact reserve. The year is 2487. The national library no longer tries to store everything: just facts with an unusually long half-life, from time before generative AI.
Meanwhile, the reading room is free for anyone visiting Paris. (Pictured above Salle Labroust as my actual photos had recognisable people. This one requires a research pass, but salle Ovale is equally majestic and you can just pop-in.)
4.
My intuition is going forward we’ll need more precise language to talk about imagination, human or machine. Like human imagination has both involuntary mode (dreaming, mind-wandering) and a voluntary mode (creativity, goal-directed innovation). But for large language models we just say: “the model hallucinates”. To me, hallucination is the most interesting part of large language models.
5.
“I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination. “ - J.G Ballard on his favorite reads.
6.
I promised my family a pause, no writing, no big projects and then I slipped and find myself deep in puddles of ideas: cellular automata, motherhood, memory leaks, egg freezing, recursion, evolution as computation. And time. I’m always thinking about time. My reading list has a lot of Lewis Thomas, and a few books by Philipp Ball and Oliver Sacks, but who else should I be reading on biology, science and computation? Especially female voices?
7.
“The popular view that science is the process of studying what the world is like needs to be given an important qualification: science tends to be the study of what we can study. Its focus is biased toward those aspects of the world for which we have experimental and conceptual tools. The most populous organisms on the planet-single-celled bacteria and archaea-were not just unstudied but unknown until, in the late seventeenth century, microscopes were developed with sufficient resolution to see them. Viruses, being even smaller, weren't discovered for a further two hundred years. So for most of history, zoologists were, despite their zeal and diligence, ignorant of most of the biosphere. It is no different today: it's not just that we are limited by our tools, but that this limitation skews our perception of how the world, and how life, works.” - Philip Ball’s How Life Works
8.
Introducing the Historical Tech Tree. Lovely, crafty map of the history of technologies and the prerequisites, improvements and inspirations in-between.It reminded me of Kate Crawford’s and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires I saw at Jeu de Paume a few weeks ago. It’s there as a physical installation, a map room of sorts and it became my favorite way to experience a map.
9.
“Vous avez trouvé votre bonheur? / Did you find your happiness?” asks the salesclerk at Picard. She was talking about dinner ingredients, but the Finn in me immediately started to think about how I indeed have found my happiness. It’s moments of beauty like these I love in Paris.