Update 2025-11-03-oct-roundup.md

Author: dcnb

_posts/2025-11-03-oct-roundup.md

@@ -53,9 +53,9 @@ They're actually fairly good reminders/summaries of CB practices, so they're wor
 
 
 ## AI is Spooky ... 👻
-{% capture caveat %}*The below is a pun- and emoji-filled riff I worked on with Claude (Opus 4.1) for Halloween, prompted by my  interest in Andrej Karpathy's recent description of LLMs as spirits/ghosts. Some of the puns are over my head ... *
+{% capture caveat %}The below is a pun- and emoji-filled riff I worked on with Claude (Opus 4.1) for Halloween, prompted by my  interest in Andrej Karpathy's recent description of LLMs as spirits/ghosts. 
 
-*To his credit, our former DHSI student, Griffen Horsley, anticipated all of this with his 2023 CollectionBuilder project [Necromancy; A Hauntology of Grief, Materiality, and Research Creation](https://griffeff.github.io/cb-necromancy/).*{% endcapture %}
+To his credit, our former DHSI student, Griffen Horsley, anticipated all of this with his 2023 CollectionBuilder project [Necromancy; A Hauntology of Grief, Materiality, and Research Creation](https://griffeff.github.io/cb-necromancy/).{% endcapture %}
 {% include feature/blockquote.html quote=caveat %}
 
 When [Andrej Karpathy describes LLMs as "ghosts"](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy#:~:text=We%E2%80%99re%20building%20ghosts%20or%20spirits%20or%20whatever%20people%20want%20to%20call%20it%2C%20because%20we%E2%80%99re%20not%20doing%20training%20by%20evolution.) rather than artificial animals—"ethereal spirit entities" that are "[hazy recollections of internet documents](https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/18/agi-is-still-a-decade-away/)"—he's tapping into something *dead* serious that literary theorists have opined for decades 💀. [Jacques Derrida's hauntology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology) argued that all texts are haunted by absent presences (no bones about it!), while [Roland Barthes declared the author dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author) 🪦, replaced by a spectral play of prior writings. From [medieval grimoires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimoire) that summoned demons through written sigils 😈 to [Kabbalistic traditions](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/kabbalah-mysticism-101/) where Hebrew letters channel divine creative power, humans have always understood writing as a [necromantic practice](https://literariness.org/2017/07/06/spectral-criticism-literary-theory/)—talk about *spell-check*! When [19th-century mediums practiced automatic writing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing) 🔮, allegedly channeling spirits through their hands, they were enacting what [Maurice Blanchot would later call](https://iep.utm.edu/maurice-blanchot/) reading as "raising Lazarus"—dialogue with the dead (or as we call it now, "prompt engineering").