Links #141

Better late than never, right?

Netherlands Bach Society’s performance of the St Matthew Passion. This is great. (And long.)

Henry Oliver on Virginia Woolf. Enjoyed this. (In fact, it’s what led me to read the book of Addison’s essays. Looking forward to reading Woolf’s The Common Reader as well.)

Alan Jacobs on Robert Moses and The Power Broker. “Some of those who have criticized the book write as though it merely denounces everything Robert Moses did, but while the book is indeed fierce in its exposure of Moses’s arrogance, cruelty, and short-sightedness, it’s not a hatchet job.”

Jason Santa Maria on LLMs. I feel similarly. Particularly liked the last paragraph: “For now, I’m planning on continuing to roll up my sleeves. I want to make things because I’m human and alive. I want to go on journeys and grow. I’m not always looking for an easy path, I want the friction. Because if I give up the journey, what am I really making? What do I actually learn?”

Jeremy Keith on using LLMs to write code. “Yes, the large language models are trained on lots of code (most of it open source), but they’re not only trained on that. That’s on top of everything else; all the stolen books, all the unpaid creative work of others.” This is the main reason I don’t use LLMs. There are others.