cliophate.wtf — Everything https://cliophate.wtf All the posts, notes, and book reviews posted on my blog en-us Copyright 2023-2025, Kevin Wammer Mon, 19 May 2025 16:05:00 +0200 Mon, 19 May 2025 16:05:00 +0200 Kirby desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer) desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer) https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 1440 https://cliophate.wtf/media/site/71a5ba9ff3-1744972254/feed.jpg cliophate.wtf — Everything https://cliophate.wtf Dead to the moment https://cliophate.wtf/posts/dead-moment https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/dxmz6sdb4flp3ojw Mon, 19 May 2025 16:05:00 +0200 What if you had five years left? What about thirty? It might not matter. Most of it, you’ll be dead to the moment anyway.

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Imagine you wake up tomorrow and learn you have five years left to live.

Not exactly 5 years, maybe 4 years 9 months, maybe 5 years 2 months. But around 5.

What would you change? What would you do differently than what you are doing right now? You’d probably stop doing a lot of things. You have only five years left after all. Why bother?

I would probably just sell everything, find a house with a view of the sea, and spend my last years reading and hosting friends.

What if it was around 10 years? That is twice as long. Depending on your age, that might be half or a third of your entire life so far. Dropping everything, knowing there are ten more good years, is a bit extreme. Maybe, during these ten years, you could work on your legacy™.

As for me, I’d probably try even harder to answer the question that has occupied me for the past 15 years: What is a good life?


The thing is, no one knows how long they have left. In Western countries, the average life expectancy is around 80ish. (Knock on wood.)

I'm 33, so that's nearly 50 years left. But it's highly unlikely that at 80, I'm mentally and physically as fit as I am right now. So let's remove 5 years from this: 45 left.

Of these 45 years, I will be asleep for a third. And I need to, because otherwise it will be even less. “I can sleep when I die” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

30 years left. So what would I do now?


Here is the thing: I don't have 30 years left. I might have them on paper (again, knock on wood), but in reality, this number is much, much smaller.

Because during these 30 years, for the majority of the time, I won't be truly present. I won't live in the moment, but instead either regret the past or worry about the future. And worse, I'll be wasting my time with trivial things that don't bring me any closer to... well, anything.

We all do this. We worry about the future and how much time we have left, and then we spend most of our days scrolling through TikTok or doomscrolling world news.

But why worry about the future when we aren’t present in the moment? When we might as well just be dead to that moment.

"Many men die at age 25, but aren’t buried until they’re 75."
— Someone said this.


I recently became very aware of this.

I've realized I had been complaining that I don't have time to do all the things I care about, while simultaneously wasting my time with all kinds of things, be it staring numbly at my phone, trying to play a corporate game I don't care about, or generally just being a pain in the ass for my loved ones.


In the grand scheme of the universe, a human life is incredibly short. But from a human's point of view, 80 years is a long time.

But none of this matters if we are unable to be fully present for these 80 years, if we spend all this limited time worrying about things outside of our locus of control.

Most of us want similar things: to have good social and romantic relationships; work on things that fulfill us; care about our bodies and our minds; learn new things; and have fun while doing them.

In essence, what we all want is to matter, to feel safe, to be seen, and to be free.


Being present takes work. You need to remind yourself not to be dead to the moment. But the more you do this, the more effortless it becomes.

And the more effortless it becomes, the less life happens to you and the more you happen to life. And then you are alive to the moment.

And that's what we are all here for.

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
https://cliophate.wtf/notes/rough-and-shitty https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/fjg9uautdo4a0vvy Wed, 14 May 2025 16:55:00 +0200 The reason I’m drawn to sketching and painting is that, due to AI, everything you see online now is “good enough.” It’s all polished, all passable. Nothing feels rough anymore. Nothing’s a little shitty. And my drawings are super shitty.

(On the flip side, nothing feels truly exceptional either.)

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
Notes on taste and voice in the age of GenAI https://cliophate.wtf/posts/taste-voice-genai https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/doygg8pfbysrr4ti Mon, 12 May 2025 09:50:00 +0200 The day you got the urge to express yourself and take on the arts, you probably went through a process similar to this:

You sat down, started working on the thing you wanted to create, and after a while you've realized, it’s fucking bad. Holy shit, this sucks. The thing you’ve envisioned in your mind and the thing you’ve created couldn’t be more different. You know this. You can see it.

You can see it because you have the taste to recognize it. This taste might have gotten you into the arts in the first place.

But what you lack is the necessary skills to make this thing good. Every beginner goes through this. I went through this. And no shortcut, no tool or technology, can replace the struggle it takes to get better.

Here is what Ira Glass had to say 16 years ago (emphasis my own):

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this.
― Ira Glass

This special thing, I believe, is your voice. It’s your own style, the thing that makes you you.

When we start in the arts, and I speak from the point of view of a writer, we emulate the masters. We try to be like Hemingway, or Picasso, or Hendrix, so we copy what they did, take on their style, and output subpar creations because, in the end, we are not them.

There is probably a scientific, evolutionary reason (something something mirror neurons), which makes it easy for us to emulate these masters. We all do this.

But over time, we start to change some things. Bring in something a little different. Do a thing that the masters did not, and very likely even frowned upon. We start to break some rules here and there, do things that feel almost forbidden. We add more of our own into our creations.

By doing this over and over again, by continuously tweaking a little thing here and there, we realize that we are not copying anyone anymore. Slowly, we see—I hope—glimpses of our voice.

But to be able to spot these glimpses, we need to build one more thing. We need, as Ira Glass put it, killer taste.

The taste that got you into the arts in the beginning, and the taste you need to discover your own voice, aren’t at the same level.

It has to improve. Like finding your voice, you need to find and develop your own taste. The way you do this is by consuming widely and broadly. By looking at a lot of things, especially outside of your arts, and deciding for yourself if this is any good or not.

I believe Elizabeth Goodspeed put it best:

I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images, and pieces of culture not because someone you respect likes them, but because you simply can’t look away. Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers.

By developing killer taste, you learn to recognize your own voice. I know this because I have been developing both for the last 15 years. I have been going through repetitions upon repetitions upon repetition, constantly asking myself—both when I create and when I consume—is this any good? Do I like this? Does this move me?

Going through this is a long and at times painful process. You’ll feel like you are not moving forward, like you keep constantly failing over and over again, and no matter what you do, it’s all just fucking shit. You will doubt yourself, wonder why the fuck you started creating in the first place since you are obviously not meant for this. Maybe your mother/father/teacher/whoever was right, you should go work for random company X.

Keep persisting. Keep going. This is necessary. You need to kill yourself over and over again, fail repeatedly, do thousands of little repetitions and adjustments(!), and then you’ll get there.

But don’t expect to suddenly feel like you’re the next big thing. That won’t come. Fellow writer Ben Kuhn (emphasis my own):

I’ve noticed a lot of people underestimate their own taste, because they expect having good taste to feel like being very smart or competent or good at things. Unfortunately, I am here to tell you that, at least if you are similar to me, you will never feel smart, competent, or good at things; instead, you will just start feeling more and more like everyone else mysteriously sucks at them.


All of this is hard. But it’s necessary.

And I fear we are losing it. I’ve been observing the creator space for years now, and people have forever tried to reach for shortcuts and hacks to not having to go through the motions. People are wasting their time, but they still do it.

Humans are naturally lazy. This is “energy conservation” at play. We want to avoid the hard work and the pain that comes with hard work, but still reap the benefits. In the past, what this led to was nothing. These people, except if they got lucky, went nowhere.

Now we have Generative AI. Now there is this thing that can emulate creation in seconds, spit something out that might be technically flawless, and so we perceive it as art.

And people have been jumping on it. (I did, too, by the way.) It’s the ultimate shortcut.

But it sucks. It’s bad. I don’t know how people don’t recognize this (Ben Kuhn was right), but most things that Generative AI spits out are pure trash (sometimes it gets “lucky”1). It all has this sameness to it. It all lacks life. It’s devoid of anything creative, and instead is just this grey goo.

I see it everywhere. Maybe I'm paranoid, but so much art online now feels AI-generated.


Yet despite all this noise and temptation, the real work of creation, the slow, vulnerable, deeply human process, remains as vital as ever.

Here’s the thing. I don’t care about the grifters and scammers and AI-bros who want to call themselves artists, because they can tell a machine to output something. Bravo, you are not an artist, you are an operator. The industrial revolution would have loved you!

But I fear for my fellow creators. The people who got into this because they have something to say. Because they have this urge to express themselves.

Don’t create with AI. You will not be able to build up your taste and find your inner voice.2

I am repeating myself, but I know this is hard. I know this is painful. When we create, we offer ourselves up to a higher power (you can call this god, I call it the muses). We stand completely naked in front of our creations, giving up our whole being to this process that leaves us raw and vulnerable.

But it’s so fucking worth it. From The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer:

To observe someone swept away by the thing they’re most passionate about, most skilled at—what some call “flow”—is one of life’s great privileges. There’s an energy that emanates, a magic. As if they’re opening their hearts up completely and letting themselves communicate with the world in their purest form—unencumbered by insecurities, stresses, and bitterness. Like time is suspended and they’re simply allowing themselves to be.

So allow yourself to be.

Sit down, create your thing. Copy the masters, then change a thing here and there, and slowly bring in more of yourself. Consume widely, figure out what you like and what you hate. And no matter how much you think it sucks, keep going. Keep GOING! Over time, you’ll find your own voice, and you'll develop “killer taste”. Don’t try to conform, don’t try to create for the masses, don’t try to do things you think everyone will like.

Especially don’t try to do things everyone will like. I believe that when you create you have to piss people off. You have to make them angry. Because when people experience strong feelings, no matter if positive or negative, you know you are onto something.

Keep doing that.


  1. As lucky as a machine can get. Though, as we know, so do a million monkeys with a million typewriters; GenAI is just that, on steroids. 

  2. There are ways to use AI correctly, and this is a post I am working on. Stay tuned! 

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
https://cliophate.wtf/notes/everything-been-said https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/iflqznnzlszmpzhw Wed, 07 May 2025 16:40:00 +0200

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

— André Gide, Winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard https://cliophate.wtf/reading/pilgrim-at-tinker-creek-annie-dillard https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/wir6rdg1snjrogc8 Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200
  • Book title: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek
  • Author: Annie Dillard
  • Rating: /5


Where to buy Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard:

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
How to think https://cliophate.wtf/posts/how-to-think https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/wcsb7yyb7ouakgjl Mon, 05 May 2025 11:40:00 +0200 We’ve started outsourcing our thinking to machines that can’t even think. This piece is about fixing that. I break down the four types of thinking that matter, why writing is a superpower, and how silence might be the rarest luxury we have

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When I originally saw this tweet, I chuckled.

Then I realized: I do the same thing, and so do the people around me. That is, we outsource our thinking to a machine, which can’t think in the first place (though that fact is a whole separate piece I am working on).

Since the rise of Generative AI, what I caught myself doing is using tools like ChatGPT or Claude to go through problems. Not as a help, but instead had it spit out an answer that I then (at times blindly) adopted as my own solution.

And going by that post above, and the anecdotal evidence I have, I am not alone in this.


This is not thinking. Again, the machine cannot think. It can only match patterns and emulate writing. But thanks to increasingly sophisticated models, the solution the machine gives us seems like the solution we were looking for.

But if I am not the one thinking, and thus not the one solving the problem (because problem-solving is what thinking ultimately is), I have learned nothing. I have just taken another one's thoughts (and again, the machine cannot think) as my own. I see little value in this.

This phenomenon is, however, not a recent problem, even though Generative AI has exacerbated it. Outsourcing our thinking to other things, or people, is something humanity has been doing forever.

Before Generative AI, we outsourced our thinking to influencers and whatever the algorithmic timelines fed us. Before that, it was to politicians, celebrities, and other people in power. Before that, it was the churches. And before that, it was the shamans. (To be fair, people still do this.)

But at least in these examples, the thinker we outsource to is human. We can, most often, deduce what their agenda is. But what is the agenda of a machine that has been trained by a group of people who probably don’t even understand how that machine works in the first place?

I believe that in this age, at a time when we get inundated with information from all directions, the ability to think is the most important skill we have.

I expect that when, and if, the AI revolution arrives, people who have the ability to think are the ones who will not be left behind. Thinkers will be the ones who will thrive in these uncertain times.

And this is how to think:


I see four parts that are necessary for thought. You need to cultivate all four, because one or two alone may not be enough to form your best thinking.

These are:

  • Thinking in silence;
  • Thinking through inspiration;
  • Thinking by writing;
  • Thinking by not (actively) thinking.

Thinking in silence

AI, algorithmic timelines, and generally just the noise1 we live in, don’t give us the space to think. They hijack our attention and concentration.

This is our fault. Whenever we have the slightest moment of silence—and we call that boredom—we try to fill the void with whatever we can find.

But there is a reason you have your best thoughts under the shower, or as soon as your head hits the pillow. These might be the only moments you experience true silence and boredom.

When we manage to turn off the outside world, we are able to listen to our inner voice. That is thinking. That voice that speaks to you, at times maybe roughly, though that is for another essay, is what thinking is.2

By listening and talking to the inner voice, we can give it problems to solve. We can mentally go through the steps and let our minds untangle whatever we are currently working on. If we feed it with the correct pieces, and let it do its job without interruption, it’ll allow us to solve the puzzle.

This is hard. Thinking is an active skill (though there is a passive element to that, more soon) that burns a lot of energy. The brain alone consumes, on average, around 400 calories per day. To give you an idea: 30 minutes of running burns the same amount. (So feed your brain the nutrients, exercise, and rest it needs.)


I am a strong believer in cultivating silence to let our minds go wild and start forming thoughts. It is not easy, though, modern civilization likes to flood us with distractions. Therefore, I try to find moments throughout the day where I embrace silence. (And I am not talking about absolute silence like you have in outer space. You don’t need 0 decibels; rather, what you need is to not have inputs. White noise is completely fine and might even be beneficial to some. If I struggle with sounds, I listen to a mix of white noise and thunderstorms.)

But embracing silence is hard for me. I struggle with this because I have the tendency to fill the silence with... something. Anything. Not necessarily because I’m afraid of the silence, but because boredom is at times painful. Boredom is just so... boring.

I’m not used to it anymore, so I have to force myself to accept it. And only then can I sit in silence and let my mind work. And every time I give it the space it needs, I am surprised by what that squishy thing in my skull is capable of.

Thinking through inspiration

While the building block above shows how to create space for thinking, it’s inspiration, I believe, that sparks thought in the first place.

Not every thought is worth something. I doubt this is a surprise to you, but if we’d follow every thought we’d ever have life would be pretty fucking weird.

To succeed at thinking, we need to feed our minds the necessary material to refine what happens up there.

This happens through a process I (and I probably stole it) call cross-pollination.

Cross-pollination is when you take a whole bunch of Lego bricks from all kinds of different sources to build your own castle in your mind.

You achieve this by consuming broadly.

But not all consumption is equal.

There is a reason everyone talks about brain rot currently, because mindlessly scrolling through TikTok and watching people do whatever the algorithm gets them views, is not the type of consumption I am talking about.

Rather, we’re talking about content (and it can still happen on TikTok, the medium is NOT the problem) that challenges you.

For me, this content primarily exists as the written word. It is the reason why I read as much as I do. But I also find it in blog posts like these, or newsletters, or at times even on text-based social media like Bluesky or Threads (though let me be real, this is the exception, most content on there is mediocre).

You can find that content also in multimedia formats, be it podcasts, YouTube videos, or (good!) TikTok shorts. Or you find it as a little nugget in some random TV show or movie. Or while talking to other people, or observing nature.

What is important here is that you consume actively. Not necessarily to learn every time you look at something, but by spending focused time with the media.

And yes, for that, you need to put away your phone, turn off your gaming console, or whatever else you are currently doing. NO multitasking. We all know by now that multitasking doesn’t exist. Sit with the material, consume it, and let it feed your thoughts with new Lego bricks.

One very important thing, however, is this: don’t only consume things with which you agree or that you already believe. All this does is feed your idiocy (and we are all idiots) and enforce negative cycles.

Consume stuff you hate. Consume what the enemy created, whoever that enemy is (and then ask yourself, why do you have enemies?). Consume things that are uncomfortable because they might show you truths you want to hide from. Consume broadly and widely, and outside of your comfort zone, because it gives you perspective and shows you things you may not have known.

I am not saying you need to adopt these views. Not if you fundamentally disagree with them, and especially not if they are just plain wrong. Bigots are bigots (and I believe they are bigots because they do not consume what their “enemies” create). But this at least shows you what not to think about.

This is crucial, too. This is anti-thinking, another part of having “good” thoughts. But how do you know what to anti-think if you don’t know what is out there?


Thinking through writing

Yes, I am biased. But I believe that writing is the other necessary skill to succeed in our current times.

Because what writing allows is to sort and distil the thinking you do, break it down into pieces and recombine it with other stuff.

As long as the thinking just stays in your mind, I’d argue that it is worthless. This is especially true for ideas. Everyone has ideas. The world certainly does not lack ideas.

Ideas are not worth anything if they do not lead to future steps.

The first step is to write it down. Because writing is the one other magic trick humans possess.

And before you tell me that Generative AI is taking this from us: LLMs do not write.

What they do might look like writing, it might feel like writing, but it is not writing. Instead, GenAI outputs text, syntactically flawless text, yes, but devoid of any substance. The machine just breaks down writing into a mathematical formula3, robbing writing of all that makes it magical. (And a lot of us lack the necessary taste to understand that this writing is simply not good. Grammatically correct ≠ good.)

So you need to write yourself. And as the screenshot at the beginning of this essay ironically shows, even writing down your problem as an AI prompt clarifies your thought.


There are two ways to solve problems through writing, and I alternate between the two of them: they are writing slowly, and writing fast.

Writing slowly

I’d argue that to write slowly you have to write by hand. Be it on a piece of paper, or like I do, on one of these fancy e-ink devices.

But through writing by hand, you are forced to slow down, simply because your hand cannot catch up to the speed of your thinking. And this allows you to “de-jumble” the mess in your head before you put it down on paper.

This blog post was first brainstormed on the equivalent of two sheets of A4 paper, and what came out was basically a completely finished post that just needed a bit of polishing (to transform bullet points into proper prose, for example).

I write most of my blog posts this way. I also write my journal by hand every morning, and most of my notes are handwritten, too.

Again, this is to make sense of what is in my head, by giving me the space (and the silence, there are no inputs when I do this) to think through things.

(In theory, you could also use an old-school typewriter. Because if you type too fast on that thing, you jam the keys. This is a great analogy because if you write too fast by hand, you jam your brain.)

Writing fast

Another practice I follow is what I call the brain dump. This has to happen on a computer, either by typing if you are a fast typist or maybe by recording a voice note.

The value of the brain dump is by “emptying” your mind. The goal is not to form perfectly finished nuggets of thought but instead to unload all that is in your mind, all that is taking up your mental bandwidth.

Often, what comes out of a brain dump session is not truly valuable if looked at through a vacuum. It is important that you don’t filter and instead write everything down that comes up, unedited and raw.

When you look at this brain dump, you’ll realize that most of it is trash. That is ok, that is the point of the exercise. You want to get the trash out of your head.

But with a certain distance (I never read the brain dumps the day I wrote them), you may find certain specks of gold. Here and there, you see a nugget that, if you disassemble it, might lead to something. And then I’d suggest you take that nugget and go through it by writing by hand.


Thinking by not (actively) thinking

Because thinking is problem-solving, in theory, the result of thought is a solved problem.

Sometimes you can’t solve the problem when you actively think about it. You just can’t find the solution, no matter how much time you spend on it.

In these cases, stop. Take some distance. Let it rest, do something completely different, and ignore it for a few hours or days.

You may have experienced this before. You struggled for hours to come up with a solution, kept failing, and ultimately gave up.

But then, in the unlikeliest of situations, you had the epiphany you waited for. The complete solution to your problem suddenly came up in your mind as if planted there by some alien life form when you were not paying attention.

This is thinking by not thinking. It is passive. It happens without you forcing it, in the subconscious, while you do other things. I don’t know why it happens. I don’t understand what processes run in our subconscious mind in the background, I only know that I’ve experienced this before.

As a writer, the way I use it is to never hit publish on bigger pieces (like this one) the day I wrote them. I often let them sit and ripen in the back of my mind. When I sit down with them again, I often perceive things I hadn’t before.

The same goes when I struggle to fix a problem at work. Giving myself the space to not think about it is apparently what I need to solve the toughest of problems.

So sometimes, don’t think. Some people seem to be really good at this.


Tools for Thinking

I’m planning to expand this section into a separate post in the future, but here are a bunch of tools and tricks I rely on to help my thinking.

While the above steps are the basis needed to think in the first place, the tools below are what help me have “better” thoughts.

  • Mental models: You may have heard of Pareto’s principle, aka the 80/20 rule, or Occam’s Razor, or Compounding. These are mental frameworks that might not always be true, but that allow you to see things in different lights. There are a lot of them. In theory, all that follows below could be considered a mental model.
  • First principles: Break your thoughts down to the most basic truth. Dig at it for as long as you can until you discover the one raw fact that must be true. Strip away assumptions. Build from there.
  • Socratic Questioning: Ask layered, open-ended questions to clarify, probe, explore and question.
  • 5 Whys: Ask why until you discover the root cause behind a problem. The first, second or even third level is often not the true reason a problem appeared.
  • Inversion: Do the opposite of what you were planning to do. Instead of asking how to succeed, ask yourself how to fail. Then avoid that.
  • Reverse-engineering: Start from a finished system. Deconstruct it to see how it was built, then replicate (and improve) it with your own toolset.
  • Feynman Technique: That’s what I am doing here. I want to learn how to think, so I teach it in simple terms to the reader. When I struggle to explain a part, I find gaps in my knowledge. I go back and improve.

There are many more tools in my toolset, but these are the ones I (try to) rely on the most. I’ll expand this into a separate post down the line, so subscribe to the newsletter or RSS feed to get notified when it goes live!


Thinking is the most crucial skill we need to develop amidst our current, uncertain times. It will help us make sense of the mess of the world, and especially of the mess in our minds.

By becoming better thinkers, I’d argue we become better humans. And by becoming better humans, we’ll be able to make the world a better place.

None of this is easy. It requires a vast amount of effort from us, not only to take the time to think or improve our thinking, but also to reject what interferes with it.

It is probably why a lot of people will not do this. Instead, they might complain, shout at the clouds or simply give up. It is, after all, easier to feel defeatist than to struggle.

Those of us who hone this skill (and thinking is ultimately a skill) will learn a superpower that brings us ahead of the majority.

It’ll make us superhuman, and I strongly believe this.

So, go and practice thinking.


Some notes on AI: I bashed Generative AI, LLMs and algorithmic timelines a lot in this post.

The reason is I strongly believe we should not be offloading the skills that make us human to machines.

But I still use ChatGPT on a near-daily basis. The difference is that I (now) use it to complement my thinking. I use it for research (and then fact-check, because it still hallucinates a lot), I use it as a learning tool, or to see things from different angles by actively asking it to do so. It often fails, but sometimes it helps me.

Generative AI is a tool we need to learn how to use. I keep comparing LLMs to a friend who has a photographic memory and remembers everything. But he is also just plain stupid. He makes shit up. He doesn’t know what he is talking about, but just parrots what he learned by heart. (And memorizing ≠ understanding.) Sometimes he parrots something really intelligent, but that is more a coincidence than anything else. We just give this randomness more weight than we should, as we find it “magical”.

And as for algorithmic timelines: they are mostly shit. Their only worth is if you use them as a marketing tool.


  1. This is not a new development, however. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, back in 62-64 AD, already complained about how noisy Ancient Rome was back then (On Quiet and Study). And he didn’t even have Instagram, TikTok or ChatGPT. 

  2. Some people do not have an inner voice. I cannot imagine what that would be like, as mine never shuts up. But I’d love to hear from you. 

  3. The way LLMs “write” is by calculating what word is most likely to follow the preceding one. But since it was trained on gazillions of data (so-called tokens), it’s rather good at emulating the way humans write. But two things: since we’ve just argued that writing is thinking, and thinking is a human practice, we cannot call what the machine outputs as writing. These machines don’t understand meaning, they excel in (statistical) patterns. And second, the creators of these machines want us to believe that there is more magic in that output than there is. If they can sell us the idea that the machine has created something original by thinking, we’ll have more faith in these tools and thus will throw money in their direction. And they need a shit ton of money. 

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami https://cliophate.wtf/reading/the-city-and-its-uncertain-walls-haruki-murakami https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/tluv2hvq7bkx3xou Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200
  • Book title: The City and Its Uncertain Walls
  • Author: Haruki Murakami
  • Rating: 3.5/5

I have to admit, this book confused me up until the end, then I understood what it was all about, and I think... it's fine. Not Murakami's best book, but a decent book regardless.

Notes & Highlights

However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.


Where to buy The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami:

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
https://cliophate.wtf/notes/ai-tells https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/ialzhpw7s8u5nbzw Sun, 04 May 2025 16:30:00 +0200 Lately, I keep catching myself wondering if certain blog posts I’m reading were written by AI.

There’s this weird, specific style that feels very ChatGPT, no matter the topic.

Either I’m getting paranoid… or AI-generated writing really is everywhere.

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
https://cliophate.wtf/notes/reading-list https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/uopxfys1cldiujbh Sat, 03 May 2025 10:45:00 +0200 I've been continuously updating my book library for the past couple of weeks. What has changed is that it now also includes all the passages I highlighted in the books. Over time, I hope it will turn my library into a searchable database of insights I can use. (The highlights also synchronise with my notes app of choice.)

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker https://cliophate.wtf/reading/the-denial-of-death-ernestbecker https://cliophate.wtf/@/page/j3aeyxjesohp6yjt Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200
  • Book title: The Denial of Death
  • Author: Ernest Becker
  • Rating: /5


Where to buy The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker:

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desk@kvn.li (Kevin Wammer)