On not becoming a cyborg

I like this post. I like how it is is written and what it advises.

if you have to hunt for a word in the thesaurus, it’s the wrong word, so I went with it.

That's probably true, but because the thesaurus is not a very valuable source, not because searching for words is a bad way to find the right one. Searching for words in etymological references, research material, and robust dictionaries (like the OED) is, IMO, an excellent and indispensable way to explore the space of articulable thought. Writing just based on whatever words happen to come to mind a fine for instrumental writing (like giving instructions, filing issues, tossing off comments on forums on the web etc.) but anything calling for originatnig or deepening understanding (like specs, essays, treatises, etc.) should involve a lot of time in terminological exploration and formation. AFAIK, if you're not doing that, you're usually just laundering cliches and platitudes, because that is how the "already ready to hand" language tends to work.

The notion of the free expression of opinion, indeed, that of intellectual freedom itself in bourgeois society, upon which cultural criticism is founded, has its own dialectic. For while the mind extricated itself from a theological-feudal tutelage, it has fallen increasingly under the anonymous sway of the status quo. This regimentation, the result of the progressive societalization of all human relations, did not simply confront the mind from without; it immigrated into its immanent consistency. It imposes itself as relentlessly on the autonomous mind as heteronomous orders were formerly imposed on the mind which was bound. Not only does the mind mold itself for the sake of its marketability, and thus reproduce socially prevalent categories. Rather, it grows to resemble ever more closely the status quo even where it subjectively refrains from making a commodity of itself. The network of the whole is drawn every tighter, modeled after the act of exchange. It leaves the individual consciousness less and less room for evasion, preforms it more and more thoroughly, cuts it off a priori as it were from the possibility of differencing itself as all difference degenerates to a nuance in the monotony of supply.

   (Adorno, "Prisms")

I love how there's now a whole cottage industry of people capitalizing on the whole LLM outrage. It was so predictable that this would happen.