Brian Whitton
LightNews LightNews
noslouch.bsky.social
Brian Whitton
@noslouch.bsky.social
58 followers 46 following 13 posts
Computer journalism @wsj

My latest: https://www.wsj.com/news/author/brian-whitton
Posts Replies Media Videos
noslouch.bsky.social
I must say it's surreal
johnwest.bsky.social John West @johnwest.bsky.social · Oct 25
I couldn't stop thinking about this perfect Borges idea from @marcusjmerritt.com. So I made it: internaut.club.

(N.B., if you want write access, you'll have to DM me.)
October 26, 2025 at 3:49 AM
Reposted by Brian Whitton
johnwest.bsky.social
I couldn't stop thinking about this perfect Borges idea from @marcusjmerritt.com. So I made it: internaut.club.

(N.B., if you want write access, you'll have to DM me.)
Over on Bluesky, Marcus Merritt, an artist and poet (who I don’t know), proposed a fake Borges story—one he might have written had he seen the Lovecraftian face of the AI-supercharged attention economy rise out of Silicon Valley. It goes like this: A man asks AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything Like so many of the Argentine writers’ actual stories, I couldn’t get this one out of my head. A parable about compression, it plays on Borges’s map—his story about the useless horror of a map with perfect fidelity to reality. It touches on the Borges’s Library or Babel—his story about every book that could ever exist, which drives its librarians mad. It’s also just funny. And like the best Borges conceits, it has the ring of prophecy. The man at the desk is all of us now: scrolling, summarizing, consuming endless “content” whose abundance is only a disguise for its emptiness. AI slop, despite its volume, turns out to be rather thin gruel. I had a question—a bad question given that Merritt was making a pretty good joke. Why not actually make it? Enter HOMER, my piece of digital performance art masquerading as a social media platform, a microblogging platform where every hour, every post is run through AI summarization, until it can’t really be summarized much more, until all we have left to do is repeat a single word again and again, certain we finally understand. If you want access, reach out to me on Bluesky, I'm @johnwest.bsky.social.
October 25, 2025 at 7:54 PM
noslouch.bsky.social
@wnyc.org the live stream on google home is glitching out
May 9, 2025 at 12:33 PM
noslouch.bsky.social
come ON javascript
a screenshot of javascript code showing when you call "toDateString" on a date object returns a different date than the one you started with
May 7, 2025 at 8:24 PM
noslouch.bsky.social
the local paper reporting on right-wing backlash to a 30-minute lesson on gender (annual) used a group byline for coverage
Close up of a newspaper article showing a byline reading "By staff of the Rivertowns Dispatch"
December 1, 2024 at 2:52 PM
noslouch.bsky.social
Just setting up my blsky
November 15, 2024 at 5:10 AM