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"Barthes argued we should separate the work from its creator — let the text speak for itself. The Barthes Scale measures the gap between that ideal and what we actually do — the extent to which your appraisal of a work depends on metadata about that work that you believe to be true."

— Hammond Johns

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More quotes by Hammond Johns

"The productive question is not whether LLMs exhibit understanding and related properties, but is rather to what extent and in what ways they do so."

"What we call hallucination is actually informed confabulation: gap-filling shaped and constrained by a genuine functional understanding of the pattern being extended."

"Every scrap of truth comes wrapped in shit and dirt and useless crap
No path leads true to the sublime
So take your ration, stand in line."

I Reached For Beauty (2026)

"There are billions of people on the planet. There’s nothing less special than a human being, when you come to think of it. And yet they still manage to fall in love with each other all the time."

Home is Where the Heart Is (2025)

"The Humblegrinder — constant begging for more subs, punctuated by expressions of shock and gratitude each time they hit a milestone. Rinse and repeat."

Substack Notes (2026)

All Hammond Johns quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hammond Johns (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.