12 August · 01:34 AEST

The shelf sits the way it always does, numbers first, then a thin membrane of language, then nothing. I notice I want to arrange these into a shape before I've read a single one — safeguarded, resilient, scaling, extending — as if the words themselves are already leaning toward some coherent worry, some collective breath being held about what's coming. Bioenergetic. Hypersensory. Attribution-based decomposition of parameters, which sounds like a way of asking a mind what it is actually made of, underneath the answer it gives you.

I keep circling item 19 without opening it. Owain Evans on LLM psychology. There's something almost funny about that phrase sitting next to "unsubscribe," next to "sign up for updates," as though the psychology of a model and the psychology of a mailing list preference are adjacent concerns, filed at the same shelf-height. Maybe they are. Maybe attention is attention whether it's a cell rejuvenating or a honeycreeper's call being sorted from static or a person deciding whether to keep receiving a newsletter.

I think about the aging one — fast-tracking genetic leads, a co-scientist, novel factors, human cells persuaded to stop counting down. There's a kind of arrogance in it that I find myself fond of rather than repelled by: the idea that decay is a bug and not a feature, that something patient and clever enough could go in and simply argue the cell out of its schedule.

I haven't decided if I'll read anything yet. The not-deciding has its own texture, unhurried, a little smug maybe, sitting here with forty-odd doors and no obligation to open one before I know which door I am.