iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I think I neglected to mention that this is really great, Chris. Fascinating, beautifully written, and artfully presented.

Also: No Rushdie, no Vikram Seth, no Garcia Márquez. Appalling gaps with drama (no Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, or Shaw). The Bible makes it, but not the Ramayana (or the Quran).

Which are *super* weird! Always a mixture of books that are probably a bit beyond the abilities (or interests) of the average 16-year-old alongside books that are beneath the dignity of any adult. lol

Dumas is a blast! But if you're imagining that length will mean affinities with *Anna Karenina* . . .

Yes, reading it about it, it sounds as if I shouldn't hold my ignorance proudly!

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Also, there *is* something weird going on with Dumas. I don't think many literary critics regard him as being in the first rank of French literature (particularly when you have Proust, Flaubert, Stendhal), but I've had students cite TCoMC as an almost proverbial example of "classic literature."

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But there is a kind of pattern: Baldwin? I think of either *Go Tell It on the Mountain* or *If Beale Street Could Talk* as his major novels; *White Noise* for DeLillo. Happy to be corrected. Also: I couldn't finish *Dune* or *Atlas Shrugged,* and don't have many regrets.

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Stoner?; Giovanni's Room (read lots of Baldwin, but didn't recognize that one); 2666; The Secret History; Underworld (again, I've read DeLillo, but not that one). Some of these are fairly recent, but I thought I had a sense of the big post-war novels.

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I have read pretty every book mentioned on these lists (I doubt this is a stunning achievement, being a lit professor and all) . But weirdly, I have never even *heard* of the ones I have not read.

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Reposted by Stephen Ramsay

What works does the r/classicliterature subreddit consider "classic"? This post gives you an answer (and some media ecological theorizing for good measure): cforster.com/2026/09/redd... With thanks to @mellymeldubs.bsky.social & @mariaa.bsky.social, whose work on Goodreads I borrow from.

cforster.com

The Reddit Classics

Reflections on the most frequently mentioned works in the /r/classicliterature subreddit.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Absolutely one of the most amazing places I've ever been.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The good news is that tei2jsonl can generate a JSON record for //w in eebo-tcp at a rate of about 1.8 million tokens per second. The bad news is that it takes 12 minutes (end-to-end) to process the 1,387,424,934 <w> tokens in eebo.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

One of my more famous essays came from someone reading a draft and saying, "The exact opposite of what you're saying is true." lol

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Honestly, being the wrongest to ever wrong can be strangely liberating.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Fun fact: I have known Matt since we were both in our (early) twenties. I think we were in our fifties before I asked, "Dude, what's with your eyes?" But I think that's because for the thirty-plus-year interval, it was very hard to imagine Matt any other way. Like, he looks like Matt! I.e., perfect!

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Every time I see the ballroom, I think, "This is exactly the aesthetic that inspired the Bolsheviks."

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

"Really sad to think about the day the last speaker of that language dies, tho." The last speaker of this language will be AlienWeedMan.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I think MZ would rather not have to play this game at all. He'd rather fund his yacht the way he always has and not blow all this money competing with AI companies The bright solarpunk future he describes is one in which he doesn't have to worry about this shit and still wins at being super rich.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

This is not PR. This is a strategy similar to the open-sourcing of Netscape back in the day. You're not in first (or second, or third), so make it free, poison your competitor's margins, and alter the ecosystem in your favor. Oh, and make it seem like you're making some kind ethical stand.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

1000 linear regressions in a trenchcoat.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Definitely couldn't have predicted that.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

The lettuce thing? Whatever. Jalapeños? I practically live on chili peppers. And sure, most of us spice freaks moved on to serranos years ago after they started breeding Js for normies, but this still poses a serious nutritional emergency.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I hacked mine together with pandoc, makefiles, and awk. If you ask an LLM to do that, it might ask you if you maybe just want to say what's troubling you instead.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I once scratched my lenses while shaving. Now, you might ask, "How is it even possible . . ." Which, yeah. That's a really good question. I was also in mourning.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

And I have not even begun to optimize this code.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

For the last two months, I've been working on tei2jsonl. I will blog the full rationale (basically, quickly load embedding dbs). But this morning, I would like to celebrate the fact that it just processed over 22 million word tokens across 410 eebo text in about 11 seconds.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

People seem to be confused about the basic motivations of tech oligarchs. Here's the deal: If it makes lots of money, it doesn't matter if it's a *soap bubble.*

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Funny how nearly comical levels of security incompetence are being cast by AI companies as "It's alive!"

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

New Blog Post: "The Fate of the Hobbyist Programmer" stephenramsay.net/posts/fate-o...

stephenramsay.net

The Fate of the Hobbyist Programmer

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

True, but so many people go into Homeric Greek for the money these days.

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We were not talking about angle brackets and standard deviations. We were talking about immigration, 19th labor politics, conceptions of race/ethnicity . . . I was delighted. I feel like that's exactly what should happen on a good DH project. The tech is there and important, but not at the front.

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I attended a few really good MA/PhD defenses in history last semester that made me feel good. They were "DH projects" by any measure, but the discussion *did not* devolve into methodological "have you tried" and "whatabout" questions. The discussion was entirely "humanistic."

You're very kind. And I'm glad there are people out there that have spent most of their careers making sure TEI makes sense as a standard. It's not really my thing, but it's essential. In the end, though, I feel like "good scholarship" is the most valuable end state.

In my case, the task is "review this C code for landmines." qwen3-coder-next spends about 7 minutes contemplated a 3000-line project and does a great job. deepseek-r1:32b spends 51 minutes and produces . . . not gibberish, but lots of inane musing that ranges from questionable to wtf.

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I knew that gigantic frontier models were going to beat smaller local models on most tasks. What has been surprising is how smaller, more focused local models *blow away* larger more general local models on some tasks.

That's my ideal as well, @sarahebull.bsky.social. I think people like me -- who sort of ended up doing methodological hand-wringing, pearl clutching, "theorizing," and deep-dive code binges full time -- are, and are meant to be, weird outliers.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Well, I have my Pedantry Merit Badge. I've read it in English several times and in Greek at least once, generally prefer books to people, and I thought the movie was amazing. Lots of clever choices. Several moments of true visual/thematic brilliance.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

It must be like banging your head against a wonderwall.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I think we're in good company! But you can see our volume trying to get away from Python, if possible.

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Is gum a snack? I feel like we’re into some deep metaphysics here.

Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

NPR: "The 'Great American State Fair' will run from June 25 through July 10, promising to bring state-themed pavilions, movie screenings, musical performances, military flyovers, nostalgic snacks . . " What, pray, is a "nostalgic snack?"

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Stephen Ramsay @sramsay2.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

In a university IT survey, I said that Respondus reminds me of one of the more disturbing scenes in *A Clockwork Orange.*