I've been thinking about Homer's Iliad and Odyssey lately. Not the stories themselves so much as their context. This vast oral tradition that stretched across the Bronze Age Collapse into a benighted world, surrounded by architecture that no one knew how to build, a lost world everywhere intruding into the present but unreachable. It feels like that with AI, as the adopters start developing dementia and coring out their brains. People who cannot fathom doing their own thinking because there is a hole between their ears. Their descendants, if any, might marvel at how a human ever managed to assemble thoughts big enough to build ordinary machines without Super Cyber Mommy. Everything could be a pyramid, an ineffable impossibility only possible outside of Edenic innocence. It's for this reason that I resolutely refuse to use LLMs. Reasoning and communicating are my entire stock in trade. They're who I am. I cannot lose that and stay myself. I would rather die on the beach sieging Troy or inside the walls conquered by a stupid fucking horse than listen to an influencer tell tales of a time long ago when impossible men, god-like men, wrote five-page papers (double-spaced) without the malevolent procedurally derived guidance of a company with a butthole for a logo.