Guaranteed to Make You Simile
TechnologyOn building As…As… with Claude, and an invitation to build your own impossible thing the same way.
Peter Merrens
UK
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47 projects
Author of fiction, essays and popular science, shaped by Armenian-Jewish roots and a life across six countries. Writes from rural Kent under his Medlara imprint, lectures at UT Dallas, and builds iPhone games — As…As… is the latest.
Gallery
The Living Wilstach
ProseA Broadway press agent spent twenty-two years cataloguing sixteen thousand similes. I have turned them into a quarter of a million, and the count rises every January.
The Permissioned Economy
PhilosophyHow post-war Britain nationalised the right to build, why the permissioned economy it created is now stalling the country, and what to do instead.
On Englishness
PhilosophySomeone in a pub told me Englishness cannot be defined. I don't accept that. To be English is to live within paradox: reserve masking passion, modesty cloaking pride, irony guarding sincerity.
When virtue is lethal
PhilosophyOur civilisation is dying, poisoned from within by its own virtue. Five mechanisms, all well-intentioned, all catastrophic in aggregate. A call for the study nobody will fund.
The Speed of Life
ScienceOn consciousness in a motionless universe, and why LLMs sit on the same scale as clams.
AI as an Equity Lever
PhilosophyAI is the equity lever in every domain, and the institutions loudest about equitable outcomes are the ones denying its use. On gatekeepers, Duchamp's urinal, and the poor farmer without an education.
The Ghost Mewed
TechnologyI paid an AI-writing detector £30 to read a horror story I wrote entirely by hand. It was 97% sure a machine wrote it. On slop, detectors, and the loneliness of authorship.
