Memory is a moat
Five fragments for the week of April 14, 2025
Hello from just shy of the middle of April. It’s birthday season among some of my closest friends—somehow, we were all born within a few weeks of each other. So: happy birthdays, friends!
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
The best feature of LLMs is the shamelessness with which we can ask the dumbest questions. Which is the prerequisite to intellectual and personal growth.
– Guillermo Rauch on X, April 14, 2025. Don’t miss the replies, where one person follows up to say “that’s not new though it was also the case with googling,” and Guillermo responds “Absolutely not. Google relies on indexing the internet, which means the internet needed to have first created content about the particular version of your confusion. And because the concept is not adaptive, it can't explain it like you're 5, 15, 20, or relate it to your memories.” The internet needs to have first created content about the particular version of your confusion—which in practice meant that someone else needed to feel that confusion first and take action to either ask the question (often on a forum) or get vulnerable and share both their confusion and its resolution in a post. Vulnerability (a close cousin of shamelessness) used to be the bottleneck to growth; now, it’s not.
Memory is a moat.
– Carl Lippert on X, January 20, 2023. I went down the rabbit hole on this phrase after seeing it used matter-of-factly in Allie K. Miller’s thread on ChatGPT’s updated memory feature. I found it both poetic and straightforwardly true, so I wanted to understand its origins. This is the best I’ve found so far through X search, from an AI founder over a year ago—but if you have any more intel on the provenance, I’d love to hear it.
I frequently use photos of myself as reference when I’m struggling with a pose or a facial expression. I also use Google Image search for reference but I find doing the poses myself usually results in a faster and better drawing.
– K. Woodman-Maynard, “1,531 Hours with Gatsby: How I Made the Graphic Novel,” April 6, 2025. KWM and I went to college together and it’s been such a joy to see her work in public. Her weekly newsletter, Creating Comics, is a gem. I also couldn’t help but notice the parallels between her working style and Quentin Blake’s that I referenced last week, right down to the piles of watercolor paper.
I’m not much of an artistic collaborator; I always want to do everything myself. This impulse, consistent throughout my life, is probably stupid, definitely limiting, but/and, it does open up a few narrow, powerful opportunities: and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind shows just how far they can go.
– Robin Sloan, “The master at work, alone,” April 2025. This felt special to read for two reasons. One: Robin’s really following through on making the mini-site for his novel, Moonbound, a living thing—still adding to it, well after anyone could have expected him to. I love to see plans last. Two, this brings me back to a thread that’s deeply influenced my own life, of total authorship…which I picked up from Robin in the first place, almost thirteen years ago now.
Sure, electric bikes aren’t cheap. But I believe they’re a rare object to be well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their often bad software, their defective geometries. Because they open the world. Whatever world may have been nearby, an electric bike brings it nearer. This is worth more than you might estimate. These bikes sing their little songs and the smile on your face makes you look like a village idiot, but what a wonderful idiot to be.
– Craig Mod, “Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life: Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership,” September 2022. Found my way to this essay from the archives thanks to a post from Ben Blumenrose. I’ve always enjoyed reading Craig’s work wherever I encounter it, but coming across this one now had special meaning because I’m almost ready to overcome the heartbreak of our family’s last electric bike being stolen and attempt to love again. There are so many dear moments in this piece, all of which whisper to me “spring, spring, spring.”
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com