Contraptions (auto-discovered)

AI is enabling a new intellectual culture centered on rural domesticity, which author Venkatesh Rao calls 'cognitive farmsteading' — the use of AI automation to run complex intellectual operations fro…

Robert Darnton's book on the 18th-century Encyclopédie prompts a reflection on how encyclopedic knowledge environments shape human knowing, arguing that the more there is to know, the more one needs t…

Venkatesh Rao expands on his 2023 essay 'A Camera, Not an Engine', arguing that generative AI is primarily an instrument for seeing in latent space rather than a utilitarian engine. He introduces Sree…