Leading thoughts
I recently wrote for the big paper and it was with deep inner reluctance. I wish I could decide whether to be in the world out pull back from the world. The paper asked me to explain vibe coding, and I did so, because I think something big is coming there, and I'm deep in, and I worry that normal people are not able to see it and I want them to be prepared. But people can't just read something and hate you quietly; they can't see that you have provided them with a utility or a warning; they need their screech. You are distributed to millions of people, and become the local proxy for the emotions of maybe dozens of people, who disagree and demand your attention, and because you are the one in the paper you need to welcome them with a pastor's smile and deep empathy, and if you speak a word in your own defense they'll screech even louder. Most people are of course very nice. But I once went to a small local museum upstate, 30 years ago—the kind of old house museum where they assemble farm equipment and various landscape paintings and regional artifacts of manufacturing. It's a place for schoolchildren to touch a tractor. The somewhat leering fellow who ran it, overjoyed to have four college students out to see the world, ended the tour by taking us out back to the pond, where an inner tube was floating, tied to a short dock. He threw moldy and very large flatbreads into the ring of the tube, so large they touched its edges, and suddenly what appeared to be a thousand iridescently slimy eel-like fish swarmed up to it and ate the bread, so viciously en masse that some were thrown on top of the bread and began to asphyxiate, and could not get back down into the water, until the bread was eaten enough, and finally and the whole living, seething, wetly slapping cluster of flesh sank out of view back into the pond. I will never forget that unbearable minute. We were shocked. He looked at us and said, “They're hungry.” And then we went back in and looked at some old shovels. That's how I feel about writing.