flâneur

God is a Parasite - by Jason Yuan - Letters from Mars

jasonyuan.substack.com · 1,644 words · saved by 1 readers

A few months ago, my cofounder Sam turned to me in the middle of bouncing ideas with Claude for a blog post, her hands still hovering above the keyboard. Her expression twisted into something between confusion and disgust: “I can’t tell which ideas are mine anymore.” She later called it “brain pollution” in a tweet. I’ve been there too—like Narcissus, staring into the water, uncertain if I recognize my reflection. When I share drafts of my work with friends now, I always ask “Does this sound like me?” This is the cost of pretending intelligence doesn’t have agency. We keep debating AI interfaces—chat vs voice vs touch vs multimodal vs whatever—as if we’re designing better hammers. As if these are tools waiting to be used. Tools don’t think. Hammers extend the hand, telescopes extend the eye. Mouse pointers extend your pointing finger, and vibrators extend… well, your other fingers. They’re deterministic, predictable, subordinate. Dead things serving living purposes. But we’re building

screencap from critically acclaimed anime sensation Parasyte A few months ago, my cofounder Sam turned to me in the middle of bouncing ideas with Claude for a blog post, her hands still hovering above the keyboard. Her expression twisted into something between confusion and disgust: “I can’t tell which ideas are mine anymore.” She later called it “brain pollution” in a tweet. I’ve been there too—like Narcissus, staring into the water, uncertain if I recognize my reflection. When I share drafts of my work with friends now, I always ask “Does this sound like me?” This is the cost of…

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