David Pennington
@davidpennington
I write stuff. I’d like to write more stuff. Currently: reclaiming my brain.
David Pennington
dtpennington.com
Side projects as the key to the good life By Marty Bell • 31 Jul 2025
When I was 13, I created a chat room for teenagers to talk about art and photography (the tagline was, if I remember, “The future of art but we don’t give a fuck”). I think that was the first self-made project I put out into the world, and it taught me one of the most important le
... See moreAI can make it easier to pass tests but it doesn’t do anything about the actual, magical transformation of learning. The AI student is forever a tenant, never an owner, of their curiosity.
Artificial intelligence is making you genuinely stupid
The question isn’t whether we can build cool things under authoritarianism. It’s whether those things will still matter in a system that punishes critical, independent thinking.
350 / Move fast, break democracy
But this raises an obvious question—if we lose libraries as the last public space for quiet reading and reflection, what can replace it?
Why Are Quiet Spaces Disappearing?
My psychological tabs are maxed out, and there’s no alert to clear storage or update my internal OS.
I can’t tell it’s happening, but it creeps in and settles into a quiet, directionless overwhelm, a kind of existential buffering I’ve started to call “multiverse fatigue”.
No tab to close. No log-out option. Too many realities to keep up with.
I can’t tell it’s happening, but it creeps in and settles into a quiet, directionless overwhelm, a kind of existential buffering I’ve started to call “multiverse fatigue”.
No tab to close. No log-out option. Too many realities to keep up with.
Miski Omar • I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable | Miski Omar
humans talking like machines
Shai Tubali • The Mechanized Mind: AI’s Hidden Impact on Human Thought
With LLMs all but conversing with their userbase, the variations between human and “talking like machines” is thinner by the day. I think we also see this across movies and modern books and social media. Maybe it started with the listicle format of content being all the rage, or content experts saying there is a specific way to set up content on the page for maximum human engagement.
It’s not that Krishnamurti saw the mind as anything close to a computer. While a computational functionalist might argue that building a mind is as simple as building a machine, Krishnamurti believed our minds are so much more. But he worried we were selling ourselves short, letting our minds get stuck in mechanical routines like memory and knowled... See more
Shai Tubali • The Mechanized Mind: AI’s Hidden Impact on Human Thought
“If the machine can take over everything man can do, and do it still better than us, then what is a human being, what are you?”
When Krishnamurti (1895–1986) asked this question, he was an 85-year-old sage who’d spent nearly 60 years probing the mysteries of the mind, consciousness, and the need for a psychological revolution.
When Krishnamurti (1895–1986) asked this question, he was an 85-year-old sage who’d spent nearly 60 years probing the mysteries of the mind, consciousness, and the need for a psychological revolution.
Shai Tubali • The Mechanized Mind: AI’s Hidden Impact on Human Thought
Most of today’s young people have never had that experience and, as a result, have no idea why it is important to seek out places for quiet study and contemplation.