{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "one long token soup", "home_page_url": "https://ohrg.org", "feed_url": "https://ohrg.org/feed.json", "description": "A rookery: every post is exactly one idea.", "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ], "items": [ { "id": "https://ohrg.org/birdkeeping.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/birdkeeping.html", "title": "Birdkeeping", "summary": "We need new ways of talking about large language models. The artificial intelligentsia at frontier labs have beguiled us (and themselves) into using an exclusively calamitous tone of voice. If we are to take the Silicon Valley oracles at their word, the latest models are effectively sentient and thus pose existential…", "date_published": "2026-08-11T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2026-08-11T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "systems" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/taming-jagged-intelligence-with-beads-and-jj.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/taming-jagged-intelligence-with-beads-and-jj.html", "title": "Taming jagged intelligence with beads and jj", "summary": "Theres no need for a prelude on how agential harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex, and Opencode are changing the political economy of software engineering. The entry barrier to writing code has never been lower. LLM-enabled agential harnesses wont replace software engineers wholesale; but their existence and…", "date_published": "2026-07-17T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-17T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "systems" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/writing-weeknotes.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/writing-weeknotes.html", "title": "Writing weeknotes", "summary": "These past few days I have been inspired by Anil Madhavapeddys and Jon Sterlings online presence to start a practice of weeknotes. Jons weeknotes offer a complete example of what weeknotes are, and I also recommend his post on intellectual junkyards as an overview of how the practice emerged. As he notes in that post,…", "date_published": "2026-06-07T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2026-06-07T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "general" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/muskism.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/muskism.html", "title": "Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian: Muskism", "summary": "After buying a hard copy of this book at the RiffRaff launch with Quinn Slobodian—Ben Tarnoff pulled out briefly before on account of illness—it has sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks while Ive pottered around fulfilling various obligations to others and myself (a conference, a short presentation about my…", "date_published": "2026-04-09T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2026-04-09T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/writing-in-typst.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/writing-in-typst.html", "title": "Writing in Typst | Hacking on Neovim with Claude", "summary": "What is a good writing system? I have been incrementally hacking on my writing environment for some time now, since at least 2013 when I started seriously using computers in undergrad. A couple of years ago, I migrated to Orgmode as the best markup syntax for my needs, and wrote a post about how Emacs and Orgmode…", "date_published": "2025-11-01T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-11-01T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "systems" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/mladen-dolar-rumors.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/mladen-dolar-rumors.html", "title": "Mladen Dolar, Rumors", "summary": "First on the syllabus in Rohit Goel's current BICAR course is Mladen Dolar's 2024 book Rumors. This short book is an extended and adapted version of Dolar's contribution to the 2022 edited volume Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and in its first sentence it lays out the topic at hand: To take…", "date_published": "2025-06-15T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-06-15T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/alma-steingart-axiomatics.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/alma-steingart-axiomatics.html", "title": "Alma Steingart, Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism (introduction)", "summary": "I started reading Alma Steingart's 2023 Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism in preparation for a reading group on Math(s), Philosophy, and History that I have been running for almost a year now. (We meet approximately bi-weekly, and wander from text to text based on the group's discussion and shared…", "date_published": "2025-06-14T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-06-14T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/writing-with-rheo.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/writing-with-rheo.html", "title": "Writing with Rheo", "summary": "Youve no doubt already heard about Rheo, the hot new typesetting and static site engine from the Free Computing Lab (FCL). In the unlikely event that you havent, let me clue you in. With Rheo, you can flow a folder of Typst files into various different publishable formats, such as PDF (paged documents), EPUB…", "date_published": "2025-06-09T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-06-09T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "systems" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/karl-marx-capital-volume-1-chapter-22.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/karl-marx-capital-volume-1-chapter-22.html", "title": "Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (chapter 22)", "summary": "Chapter 22 of Capital Volume I– following the chapter structure in the 2024 English translation - builds on ;, which had laid out the impossible position of \"economic bondage\" (Marx 2024, 532) of the wage laborer in relation to capital. Chapter 22 shifts from outlining the standpoint of the wage laborer to a closer…", "date_published": "2025-05-16T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-05-16T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/is-psychoanalysis-a-science.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/is-psychoanalysis-a-science.html", "title": "Is psychoanalysis a Science?", "summary": "Psychoanalysis was once described as a ‘calling card that was to be left at the door of Science. The idea here, I think, was that psychoanalysis should not become (as Freud envisioned it in his first explorations of it) a ‘science in the sense of having an answer for everything. If psychoanalysis were to become a…", "date_published": "2025-04-10T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-04-10T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "general", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/karl-marx-capital-volume-1-chapter-21.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/karl-marx-capital-volume-1-chapter-21.html", "title": "Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (chapter 21)", "summary": "Up first today, some notes from chapter 21 of Marxs Capital, Volume I, his chapter on Simple Reproduction. I returned to this text (in its new translation) at a writing retreat in Connecticut over the weekend. After sharing a work-in-progress regarding the outline of a theory of a subject in Marx, it was sagely…", "date_published": "2025-03-07T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-03-07T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/erich-horl-sacred-channels.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/erich-horl-sacred-channels.html", "title": "Erich Hörl: Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication (chapters 1 and 2)", "summary": "Last week I read the first two chapters of a book recommended to me quite some time ago by a friend: Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication by Erich Hörl. The book was published in English in 2018, but was defended as a dissertation in 2003, and published in German in 2005. Friedrich Kittler was the…", "date_published": "2025-02-10T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-02-10T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/terry-eagleton-why-marx-was-right.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/terry-eagleton-why-marx-was-right.html", "title": "Terry Eagleton: Why Marx Was Right", "summary": "Over the holiday period (which I count as the entirety of January, as my wedding took place on the 11th January, and I have not seriously returned to work until very recently) I read Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton. The book was given to me by my father– over in Italy from New Zealand for the aforementioned…", "date_published": "2025-02-05T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-02-05T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/using-nixos.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/using-nixos.html", "title": "Using NixOS", "summary": "My NixOS configuration For about a year now, the operating system that I use on my daily driver has been NixOS. I moved to the distribution from Arch Linux, as I was sold on the idea of having all my dependencies declaratively specified, and thus no longer having to mess with stateful package management (apt-get…", "date_published": "2025-01-27T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-01-27T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "systems" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/writing-academic-essays.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/writing-academic-essays.html", "title": "Writing Academic Essays", "summary": "As an undergraduate student in the US, I feel like I never properly learned how to structure an academic essay. This was no doubt partially due to my being a bad student who never asked the right questions; but I do think that there is something in the structure of an interdisciplinary liberal arts education in the…", "date_published": "2025-01-01T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-01-01T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "general" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/fall-semester-2024-update.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/fall-semester-2024-update.html", "title": "Fall semester 2024 update", "summary": "The pause in proceedings here has been principally due to a (final) semester of coursework and teaching at Brown University; the other side of a PhD in the U.S. I have now advanced to candidacy, which means that I have completed all requirements for my PhD except the submission of the dissertation itself. (This is…", "date_published": "2024-12-27T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-12-27T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "general" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/cycling-typing.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/cycling-typing.html", "title": "Cycling typing", "summary": "Last summer I got into cycling. I've long been a standing desk-er, and going out for long zone 2 rides and wondering what to think about made me wonder: could I work at a desk while I cycle? I have a stationary bike trainer, so I first tried the obvious thing and just slid it slightly under my standing desk. This made…", "date_published": "2024-11-13T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-11-13T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "general" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/using-two-remarkables.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/using-two-remarkables.html", "title": "Using two ReMarkables", "summary": "I'm a PhD student currently, which means that I spend most of my work life reading, or thinking about what I should read next. The timelines for my reading schedules range from what I need to read before a class or meeting next week, to what I ought to read for a paper or research trajectory that won't have any…", "date_published": "2024-11-06T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-11-06T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "general" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/svitlana-matviyenko-and-sarah-pourciau.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/svitlana-matviyenko-and-sarah-pourciau.html", "title": "Svitlana Matviyenko and Sarah Pourciau", "summary": "Today's log discusses two projects, Svitlana Matviyenko's and Sarah Pourciau's, as a follow on from ;. Svitlana Matviyenko I came to Matviyenko's work through an event here at the IWM, which took place this past Friday. She is currently an associate professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in the School of…", "date_published": "2024-05-02T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-05-02T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] }, { "id": "https://ohrg.org/amanda-holmes-and-adrian-johnston.html", "url": "https://ohrg.org/amanda-holmes-and-adrian-johnston.html", "title": "Amanda Holmes and Adrian Johnston", "summary": "I have been at the institute (the IWM) for nearly a month now, the first month of three. It is the first time that I have had something close to my own office (I share a room with one other fellow), and the first time that I have had the space and time of mind to attend specifically to the task of my dissertation…", "date_published": "2024-04-24T00:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-04-24T00:00:00Z", "tags": [ "post", "reviews" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Lachlan Kermode" } ] } ] }