The other maps are like funhouse mirrors
Five fragments for the week of July 6, 2026
Hello from Paris and the first Tuesday in July. We spent an unforgettable summer evening at Linda’s (deconstructed niçoise salad, temporary tattoos for the children, three kinds of scissors called into service, a book pressed into my hands to take home) and I couldn’t believe our luck.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
more robot designs need to ship with some sort of basket or a built-in purse. how will they carry things while multitasking? where will they store their possessions?
– Carmen Gutierrez on X, July 3, 2026. Carmen with the truth bombs! (Related: my long-ago history of pocket-sized technology.)
Say you are done playing SimCity for now. You save your city to a file and quit the program. SimCity only saves the Primary Map. This is because the seventeen other maps are all derived from it. Later, when you’re ready to continue playing, you load up your saved city, and SimCity recreates the secondary layers. The other maps are like funhouse mirrors that transform and reflect different aspects of the Primary Map.
– Chaim Gingold, Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, June 4, 2024. I’ve mentioned this book before, but when Linda handed it to me for a spell this evening, I paged through to this passage and it struck me as so elegant. Constraints, creativity.
Annoying people progress faster because they get more feedback from the world vs aloof people who try to figure things out in private and place a paramount value on not bothering anyone or being seen trying, failing, or not-knowing
– @mossing_pdf on X, July 4, 2026. I also liked this follow-up from Maja: “getting anywhere interesting often requires being a little annoying. everyone is sometimes annoying, it’s all fine. tweet 15 times a day, ask the question, follow up, be seen trying and failing and confused. it’s usually worth it eventually.” The phrase “place a paramount value on not bothering anyone” really hit me in my gut.
Americans, Henry James wrote, “are too apt to think that Paris is the celestial city,” and even if we don't quite think that, some of us do think of it as the place where tickets are sold for the train to get you there. (Ben Franklin thought this, and so did Gertrude Stein, and so did Henry Miller. It's a roomy idea.) If this notion is pretty obviously unreal, and even hair-raisingly naïve, it has at least the excuse of not being original. When they die, [Oscar] Wilde wrote, all good Americans go to Paris.
– Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon: A Family in France, January 10, 2008. The book Linda pressed into my hands, and the sentence from the first chapter that felt all too true as golden hour beamed at us through the tall windows of her beautiful flat.
It's very clear that Fable-class LLMs are starting to feel constrained by "normal" speech and vernacular
"Don't trust smells"
"Calorimetry of learning"
"Nobody's ticket drawer produced it"
"Half receipt pending literature"
"Tying the blind to the tolerance graph"
"Park it fed"
– Conor on X, July 4, 2026. This went a bit viral and seems not to be an anomaly: Fable really does talk this way. As a vernacular lover, I can’t help but love this, too. “Park it fed” has great potential as a conversation-ending move. Park it fed, I said!
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com