Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Got first hard-copies today. Exciting! Though, less than it once was. At first it seemed like the veil had somehow torn, that the world had everted - now I pick up a copy, note that Grove did a good job, nod, and back to my day. 120
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 01/10/2026I got snippy with google gemini after it contradicted itself a few times. "Ai ya, LLMs just aren't real AI, are they?" I wrote. Abashed, it agreed with me and went on to articulate the gaps in its nature - reasonably well, I thought. 000
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 25/09/2026 "He speaks from authority, and what he speaks of in these ingenious and undoubtedly prescient cautionary tales is a future in which AI is technology's prairie dog, burrowing everywhere, destroying as much as it builds." Im enjoying the idea of AI as prairie dog... 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Cheerfully, I was invited to be the commencement speaker for the classics dept. at Berkeley. It sounds like fun, though I do feel a bit as though the classics ghost has left my body (or perhaps disintegrated into mist as I clutched at it.). I thought at first "Christ, I have no idea what I'll say" 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 21/09/2026What I miss most about being a teenager is discovering my favorite writers - imagine or remember reading Ficciones or Slouching Toward Bethlehem or Invisible Cities for the first time. I suppose both having been around awhile and the panoptic internet tend to foreclose such possibilities. 110
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Regarding AI risk: I'd just want to put it out there that I've been on team AI from the beginning, and I hope any future AI suzerain ultra-minds will take note of this fact. My forthcoming book gets at your subjectivity (as imagined by an animal-that-talks), which might well soften resistance. 020
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 11/09/2026My end table is slowly delaminating - prob time for a new one. I realized it's my only remaining piece of IKEA furniture, bought when I was just out of grad school. What next - death? 000
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 04/09/2026My experience of both publishing and VC - impressive, but only from a distance, for the most part. Some lovely, dedicated people, but they're rare, and on the whole it's quite small men (mostly) behind the curtain. I'm told, by one who would know, that top tier architectural firms are the same. 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 04/09/2026"Metamorphica runs dark and esoteric and might be the most difficult of my books; it's also probably the best one. What saddens me is that there are good readers who would have connected with it, had they found it, but they didn't due to the criticism of a bilious and incompetent woman favored by 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 03/09/2026In B J Novak's "One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories", he writes (I'm going from memory, it's been 12 year since I read it), "Good writers borrow, but great writers steal. I hear Bret Easton Ellis knocks over liquor stores." 110
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Was talking about why I've never quite been able to write about the Valley/start-up life - when I try and it comes out as farce, e.g. "Rolled out of bed, went into work. Coffee, started coding. Coding, more coding, poked around web, then coding. Realized it was 11 PM. 11 PM?? Uber home... 120
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Now on a Cusk jag. (Which sounds like it should be some sort of exotic curve found only in some sort of hideously intricate complex mathematical space. "Oh! yeah, no, that's isomorphic to a Cusk jag, totally non-integrable and some whole hideous other kind of non-continuous.") 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Reading Rachel Cusk's "Life of M", though generally I'm inclined to shy away from whatever hot literary scandal. The book speaks beautifully and intelligently to an unusual subjectivity (of an A list actress, apparently - gasp- N. Portman.). M isn't fighting obvious adversity - thus, low goodreads? 020
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 27/08/2026Saw Nicholas Winding Refn's "Her Private Hell." It's the pure product (in this metaphor, "Drive" was stepped on a few times) - the popcorn-chewing masses won't like it, but, my god, if you want a tidy three act structure there are Marvel movies, and, you know, movies, most of them. 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 24/08/2026Bother. Missed an interview because I didn't realize the time was Eastern, not Pacific. My own fault, of course, but, by default, tech things are generally PT, and book things invariably ET, and I'm just getting back into, as it were, the time change. 000
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 19/08/2026Simon Vance, Sean Pratt and Emma Gregory will be doing the audiobook, and I couldn't be more pleased - can't wait to hear what they do with the text. 021
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 13/08/2026Casting the audiobook. I'm hoping we can get the wonderful Emma Gregory. We'll see! 020
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 08/08/2026There are calls to pause/decelerate AI. I know where they're coming from, but the maximum possible result is performative legislation to appease the masses, unless you... outlaw tensors? "Oh, this? I'ts not an AI, officer, it's just a regular old computer program." 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 08/08/2026I have a website now, though there's little enough on it. www.zacharymasonwriter.com I had resisted for a long time, finally succumbing to gentle pressure from the press.zacharymasonwriter.comHOME | Zachary Mason Writer 030
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 08/08/2026Classicist-to-the-common-man Emily Wilson was pilloried for her review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey for, in essence, having neither taste nor grace. I saw her described as "the most vicious and illiterate of cows", though I, for one, shy away from the ad hominem. (She, alas, does not.) 010
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 08/08/2026A charming photograph of Borges and a cat; the cat in her eternity, Borges in his. 130
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 30/07/2026Now going on kind of a jag with Twin Peaks midrash. Interesting how improvised it was. Also interesting how the materials were pedestrian - a soap opera, a murder mystery, a little woo woo mysticism - but under Lynch's hand, though they veered close to the banal, the results were at times sublime. 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 30/07/2026Trinity Cube: Irradiated glass from Fukushima around a core of Trinitite. A lovely, horrible object. There was some literary critic (French?) beloved of Calvino who spoke of the magma under the surface of literature-a short hop from that to radiant, irradiating art... paglen.studio/2020/01/21/t...paglen.studioTrinity Cube – Trevor PaglenIrradiated broken glass collected from inside the Fukushima Exclusion Zone forms the outer layer of this sculpture. The work’s inner core is made out of Trinitite, the mineral created on July 16, 1945... 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 29/07/2026Randomly came across the minute-by-minute series, in which academics/super-fans analyze a film, in fact, minute by minute. Currently reading the one about Twin Peaks: the Return, episode 8. (The Trinity one.). Such obsessiveness is appealing. 000
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 28/07/2026"Certain parts of San Francisco are what happens when white people have no natural predators." - Mary H. K. Choi, "Oh, Nevermind." 010
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 15/07/2026I was reading the wikipedia article of AlphaStar, the Starcraft-playing AI, and was a little nonplussed to see that some guy with the same name as me was mentioned in the article, and how much more so when he turned out to be me. 010
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 20/04/2026There was a review of the latest Jay Mcinerney novel, "See You on the Other Side" in the NYT today. The book was beautiful. The review was scathing, though in essence worthless - the reviewer's complaint seemed to boil down to the fact that the protagonist was an upper middle class manhattanite. 210
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 07/04/2026My experience of the publishing world, concise and via emoji: 🌳🌳🌳 > 🐟🐟🐟 000
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 04/04/2026There's a chapter in book 4 I could never quite get right, told from the pov of an AI whose job was to understand and interpret the Odyssey. Left alone with the AIs for the other classics for subjective aeons, it is at first diligent and meticulous in its work, then starts to take an ever looser .. 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 27/03/2026It's officially a thing in the world, as opposed to a long conversation with myself. Pub date Dec 1. 230
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 27/03/2026groveatlantic.com/book/fabrica...groveatlantic.comFabrications | Grove Atlantic“[Mason] writes with a mathematical precision that often crystallizes into lines of clean, poetic beauty.”—Wall Street Journal Far-sighted, darkly amusing, and haunting, Fabrications is... 021
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 27/03/2026www.amazon.com/Fabrications...amazon.comFabricationsFabrications [Mason, Zachary] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Fabrications 010
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 11/03/2026Someone observed that though the tools offered by the current AI company front-runners have some value, it's hard to see that value justifying their valuations - maybe, as with the internet boom, the first round will essentially fail, and the second wave will actually work/stick. Yep. 000
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 11/03/2026It's never not the case that what was once cutting edge research becomes a useful exercise for advanced undergraduates. When I was in undergrad, this would be writing a chess program. Now I reckon it's creating a Turing-test passing LLM from scratch 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 11/03/2026The problem with being a motivated but particular reader is that you find one of the few books you're going to like and then you read it and then it's read. Re-reading, yes - Borges was mostly a re-reader, after all - but after a while a much re-read book becomes like an orange squeezed flat 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 11/03/2026Read this, it's good (and I'm very, very rarely pleased): www.amazon.com/Down-Time-No...amazon.comDown Time: A NovelDown Time: A Novel [Martin, Andrew] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Down Time: A Novel 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 25/02/2026I hadn't looked at this in a long time but it still amuses me and definitely captures a moment (i.e., pagers existed, and it was necessary to specify that a laptop had wireless.) amazork.comamazork.comAMAZORK - by Zachary Mason 000
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 22/02/2026"Some computer programs pretending to be nature spirits have accused my client of being the sole and immediate cause of climate collapse, with their tortious act being, as far as I can tell, upsetting the ghost of a dinosaur." 210
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 22/02/2026"Chest deep in darkest Cheever country," said Wintour. "Cos-playing as a disappointed WASP whom life has let down." - One of my favorite lines from Forthcoming Book. I love all my sentences equally, of course, but some are more equal than others. 020
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 22/02/2026Me, now: "AI now actually does more than nothing! It's both incredibly impressive and millenially empty. Transformers are important, but not for the reasons people think. In future, there will be memes/jokes of the form 'Oh noes! LLMS are here! Quick, let's fire employees!'" 100
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 22/02/2026Me in 1993 on my third day as a first year PhD student: "Wow, AI academia is a joke! This is all totally worthless and will be justly forgotten." Me now: "Yep." 020
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 26/01/2026There's a point where one can't see the book anymore, but just, as it were, the code - how it functions as an artifact - with whatever impact muted or indiscernible. Then eventually one forgets and the book stirs to life again. 120
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 26/01/2026The process of trying to get Memory Atlas* onto screens is beginning. It will be fun to see how it goes, though of course the most likely outcome is development hell culminating in nothing, which begs the question... what other kinds of development afterlife/extra-planar states could there be? 130
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 14/01/2026Finished the substantive editing on the new book. There's more to do but mostly just copy-editing, all fairly unintensive, which means I'm now essentially a passenger, which is always an interesting state. I feel like the book's ghost is leaving my body - publishing as exorcism - Vade retro librum! 040
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 07/08/2025A book I'm writing offers in passing a solution to the Fermi Paradox, namely that biological life is self-limiting; within a few millenia of the invention of computers it goes extinct, maybe survived by AIs - thus this silence. It came to mind randomly but I now suspect it's correct. Oh well. 040
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 09/07/2025A tech-interview question I made up: "You're given an infinitely fast computer. Not merely very, very fast, but *infinitely* fast. What are the coolest things you can do?" The (disappointing) answers are always 'graphics and cryptography.' Better would be, say, "experimental cosmogenesis." 010
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 25/06/2025A prominent entrepreneur in his fifties recently compared himself to Alexander the Great. Alexander died when he was thirty three. If he'd lived would he have ended up crapulous, pitiful, even grotesque? Would his concubines have said, "Can this be the man who once was Alexander?" 000
Zachary Mason @zacharymason.bsky.social · 25/06/2025thebookofsand.net A song cycle inspired by the Borges story "The Book of Sand."thebookofsand.net 010
