J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 03/10/2026I’ll never forget A.O. Scott calling The Da Vinci Code “Dan Brown’s primer on how not to write an English sentence.” 010
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 03/10/2026To me the genre that seems ripest for LLM writing is the airport book, the kind of stuff on If Books Could Kill: -Short / padded -Tenuous relationship to the truth -Reinforces existing hierarchies -Weak, often irritating prose -Author clearly running a lazy scam only strengthens their authority 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 03/10/2026I think JCO is saying that even if LLMs could make both kinds of books, romance readers would be more likely to accept them. She sees romance readers as indiscriminate consumers of the novel-as-commodity. This seems to me totally belied by the incredible complexity of romance as a genre system.publicbooks.orgGenre Juggernaut: Measuring “Romance” - Public BooksFor its scale and internal complexity alone, the literary genre of “romance” warrants more study than it has received. 130
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Is romance more “formulaic”? I guess, in some respects, but identifying something as part of a “formula” doesn’t make it easy to write. Witness the many human-authored failures to write a likable-but-flawed heroine. Or imagine telling an action-movie director to "just add a thrilling car chase". 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Consider these two books: 1) A rambling meditation on modern labor written in an uncanny corporate prose style 2) A tightly-plotted love story with compelling characters Which seems easier for an LLM to make? Which one is “literary” and which a romance? 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 03/10/2026JCO is making a (dubious) sociological claim here rather than a technical one (“some kinds of readers don’t care if what they read is by people”), but I do think it's interesting that, on the level of the actual text, LLMs are probably a lot better at simulating literary fiction than romance novels. 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I call mine “Flotsam”. No project is real until I have to make that file for it 130
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026You can see me in the reflection in that first photo. I saw two young tourists in it when I came back to think about it some more. Kelly, the Seine, the paint, “Seine”, the plaque, those kids. Can AI do that (“do what?”). No, it never will. 140
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026This is an offshoot of the famous “my kid could do this” response to abstract art. Most kids couldn’t, sure, but the more accurate response was always: “do what?” The answer to that cannot be automated. 130
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026So if some bot made “Schuykill” and it was just as “good” as “Seine”, why would anyone put it in a museum? Why would anyone care? A machine could have done this decades ago but, just like today, there would be no point. 130
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026This is part of what modernism worked through! The work of art derives its meaning not from form alone but from an entire context. Duchamp must pick the particular toilet and put it in an art show. People must interpret it. Otherwise it’s just a toilet. 1100
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026We could have been making automated Kelly paintings and Coolidge poems for years. But we haven’t, and in fact we never even seriously considered it. 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026But this has been true in modernism for over a century. Duchamp’s “Fountain” was literally mass produced. Modernist poetry like this isn’t random (I love this poem) but very simple algorithms could easily make a “poem” that an ordinary reader would struggle to differentiate from it. 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026The plaque says Kelly used random chance to decide which squares to fill with each color. Seems to me like he must have weighted the odds somehow (the regions appear too river-like to be truly random) but still, this feels like the kind of thing a machine could easily do. It’s even binary! 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026I saw this painting today (“Seine”, by Ellsworth Kelly), and I’m increasingly convinced that modernism holds an answer for us about how AI art will be received if it ever becomes pretty indistinguishable from human art. 1165
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 31/08/2026I work on stuff like this from a literary angle. My instinct is, we know that some facts about actors do not apply to the works, eg Hamlet has not had antibiotics. It may be that the actor is equally performing an indeterminacy of eyebrow hair countability. 030
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 29/08/2026Edmundo Sosa’s heroics saving me from having a really dumb take about how the Angels’ right field wall is weirdly short 000
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 09/07/2026This is a great dataset! Among many other things it contains info about many of the poets I would once have considered (and probably on some level still consider) the *cool* poets. Your Fred Moten, your Lyn Hejinian, your Craig Dworkin, your Elizabeth Willis, etc. Find your own cool poets now! 073
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 06/07/2026Elmer Fudd actually has far more ontological heft than Tilly Norwood because the agency and being of fictional characters are conferred through imaginative acts rather than computational complexity, but Big AI isn’t ready for that conversation… 020
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 06/07/2026An AI “actor” or “performer” is really just a cartoon. They don’t have any more agency or interiority or personhood than Elmer Fudd. 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 05/07/2026Felt like what we really needed was a pop song with no clear connection to the team, to sing at random intervals. But then I randomly sorted 60 yrs of Billboard to pick one and got this—an incredible song, but it goes way too hard for an activity called "footie" www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T9v...youtube.comSly & The Family Stone - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)YouTube video by SlyATFamilyStoneVEVO 010
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 02/07/2026A year since the Clippers scandal broke and the main fallout so far is that Kawhi has managed to flee US jurisdiction 011
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 01/07/2026Harrison's *worst* failure wasn't dying immediately from his own speech but that was his *signature* failure. (His worst thing was, oddly, the same as Lincoln's—picking a contemptible racist VP.) 010
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 01/07/2026Trump has tried to replicate each other President’s signature failures, from the hits (internment camps, corruption, losing a war in Asia) to the deep cuts (tariffs, destroying the WH, picking a contemptible racist VP), but I’m still kind of surprised to see him going for the William Henry Harrison. 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 18/06/2026I put the Lynx on as background last night and wound up intently watching the whole thing. Miles uses time and space like no other player I’ve seen. So much fun to watch defector.com/olivia-miles...defector.comOlivia Miles Is The Throwback Point Guard Of The Future | DefectorVertical video makes Olivia Miles look good. Horizontal video makes her look better. Her gift shines in context, on the unadorned and unsoundtracked platform that is the next day’s full-game replay. W... 100
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 16/06/2026It's really funny to me how often Zohran gets helpful advice about how to do something he just did without the advice 020
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 15/06/2026For a second I was trying to figure out why you had a picture of my dog 130
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 15/06/2026Even if this wasn’t an affront to humanity, and even if it was possible to train an LLM on a one-person corpus (no), using solely one person’s words *obviously* doesn’t guarantee you get their views. Example: you can make the phrase “this wasn’t an affront” from this post. 020
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 14/06/2026Brunson is pretty clearly the biggest ball hog of any NBA Finals MVP. No one who shot as much as him missed as often. The size of the dot shows assists/game. He was below the median on that front, so not moving the ball around, either. Singular player—not sure we'll see a winner like this again. 010
Reposted by J.D. PorterHannah Walser @hkpmw.bsky.social · 09/06/2026Idk what’s going to happen tonight, but I was rooting for the Phillies in the 2022 World Series when Sam Alito decided to attend a game, so I know that karma is real 0123
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 09/06/2026When a team invites a dictator to the game it’s good if they lose, is my view 040
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/06/2026I think if every well-informed person in the country can understand jokes about your last four mayors, you have to accept that pretty much anyone who moves to your city can quickly become a "true" citizen of it. Hegemony facilitates assimilation. 020
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 06/06/2026The scale and dispersion of Knicks fans emerging like cicadas for their team’s once-per quarter-century title run shows us just how much pain James Dolan causes almost every year 020
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 21/05/2026Even if Bezos never made another dollar, you could tax him at that rate for 85 years, and he'd still be a billionaire. Doubling his taxes *is* bad policy, but only because we ought to take back much, much more. 100
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 21/05/2026Here's the math: Warren tax = 0 on first $50m + 2% on next $950m + 6% on the rest Bezos is so rich (net worth ~$275b) that only the last number matters, and it comes about to about $16.4b. There are 3.8m teachers in the US, making on average $74k/yr. 16.4b / 3.8m = ~$4.3k 4.3k / 74k = 5.8% 100
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 21/05/2026This is obvious horseshit, but I think it's useful to put numbers to this stuff sometimes. The Warren wealth tax would raise $16.5b from Bezos alone in the first year, which amounts to $4k for every teacher in the US, roughly a 6% pay raise on average. Bet that *would* help that teacher in Queens! 1127
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 19/05/2026I don't know, the last couple sports novels I remember reading are all great 010
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 19/05/2026Much more difficult to list the 100 worst novels of all time 130
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/05/2026Jokić’s style contrasts sharply with the explosive scorers in the NE corner, which includes all the other recent MVPs. SGA shoots the least FT of any non-Jokić of the past 10 years, but he’s still in that region, so the contrast with Jokić might heighten the grifter vibe people feel around his game. 010
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/05/2026One thing I hadn’t realized until I made this is that Jokić takes relatively few FT, especially for a big man. My theory is that it’s because he’s usually just standing there when he shoots. Walton, another floor-general big, is an interesting comp. 100
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/05/2026Answer: He’s on the high end, but he’s not an outlier. He basically played like Michael Jordan last year, and this year he’s kind of like Cavs-era LeBron. 110
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/05/2026How bad a foul baiter is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? See if you can guess which two dots are his on this graph of MVP seasons. Dots are further right if players shot the ball a lot. Higher dots mean players shot more free throws. Answer lower in the thread. 111
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 24/04/2026Enkidu was a great Philly dog. He was confident and self-possessed, loved food dropped on the sidewalk, and looked vaguely like Gritty. What he loved to do, he did, and I was lucky that so often he included Hannah and me. He was my buddy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9II...youtube.comEnkidu BlueYouTube video by Nothing 1111
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 31/03/2026Once again pondering the fact that Penn's motto, Leges Sine Moribus Vanae, is usually translated as "Laws without morals are useless".thedp.comJudge orders Penn to comply with federal subpoena seeking list of Jewish faculty, studentsPenn has until May 1 to respond to the subpoena's requests, but will not be required to “reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific Jewish-related organization.” 040
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 15/03/2026Kobe stans can take some comfort in the fact that he still has the second-longest run on top. Wilt: 11 years Kobe: 10 Admiral: 9 MJ: 6.3 Fulks: 6.2 David Thompson: 5.9 Booker: 5.8 No one else got to 4 years. Frankie Baumolhtz and Mel Riebe got 2 days apiece, so Bam's already out of last place. 020
J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 15/03/2026When Robinson retired 9 years after that, Karl was still around, and got the title back (now tied with Shaq) for that same 1990 game. Finally TMac got rid of him for good by scoring 62 in 2004. 110