Got to say, this one doesn’t quite scream “fine wine here” to me.
Nor this vague pattern, reminiscent of subway maps.
This one, at least, looks cool.
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Category Archives: Miscellanea
And this is why arguments for AI are bullshit
Mikey Shulman is CEO of Suno, a company that offers an AI that will make music and compose songs for you. In the “free the oppressed workers!” argument I’ve written about before, he explains that making music the oldfashioned way is just too burdensome: “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
Yes, how unreasonable that to get skilled at something you have to, you know, learn the skill. I fully realize Shulman has a vested interest in people using his AI to make music, and that this is targeting less people who do make music than people who think they have a short-cut. The same attitude probably influences the idea that prompting an LLM to write a book is no different from writing it yourself. It’s also mixed in with a general Silicon Valley distaste for creative thinking or any sort of thinking — fine if it’s making us money, otherwise it might give people ideas above their station.
Still this idea does apparently appeal or at least make sense to people. I have a musician friend who rolled her eyes at Shulman’s line but she thought it was reasonable when Marc Andreessen said AI could make movies for “creatives” who have neither skills, equipment nor actors:
(The recent horror shorts program TYG and I watched gives Andreessen the lie. Low-budget, minimal equipment but lots of visual skill. They don’t need AI).
To me this is no different from arguing that, say, as marathon running is hard, and takes a ton of training, so why force yourself to do it when you can just ride a motorcycle all 26 miles? Isn’t that the same thing. No, it isn’t. Sometimes the challenge is part of the process. Eliminate the friction, you eliminate the point. As Raymond Massey’s character puts it in Things to Come the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate struggle, it’s to live in a world where the struggle means something. Creating, setting a physical challenge, studying to master a subject or a skill, they mean something. As the saying goes, we want advanced tech to clean our house so we have more time for fun stuff, not do our fun stuff so we have more time for cleaning.
One substacker recently freaked out and complained this attitude is “gatekeeping” — if someone wants to write a book with AI, why not publish the book instead of fussing? Let readers decide what they want! Which is a)not an argument about pointing out a book was written with AI (though it’s valid to complain that these accusations may be groundless); b)given how much AI plagiarizes from other people’s work, would the writer say the same about plagiarism? c)given the incredible costs and side effects — rising power bills, water use, the impact on the computer industry — it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest writing books with AI is a bad thing.
Some of the “creating art is too hard” attitude (as discussed at the Nation link in the first paragraph) may reflect a general disdain among the rich for education, at least other people’s (some examples here). Some of it is hype. Some of it may be that the rich and powerful want everything smooth, no friction, and learning a skill is full of friction. Whatever the ultimate reason, they’re full of it. Nevertheless, there are always people who will go AI — “the born sloppers, the sloppers whom journalism itself has created, the soon-to-be-pilled. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would go AI.”
Pundit Megan McArdle, it turns out, has already gone AI. Another reporter who says he broke the story about AI contributing to the novel Shy Girl also says they should admitted the AI, then gone ahead and published the book with the AI use flagged — let readers decide if they like it. So I guess he’s gone AI too.
The FDA is speeding up the drug-approval process by going AI. Yes, I’m sure using technology prone to error and hallucination to approve drugs can’t go wrong.
In other AI links:
Disney’s much-hyped addition of AI to the Disney Channel flatlined.
“Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it’s safe to assume we’ve been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell,” — from an article on game designers’ lack of interest in AI.
Journalist Alex Preston apparently used AI in writing movie reviews. The NYT cut him loose.
“The techs we collectively call AI have use cases, but policy should be about solving problems in the public interest, not identifying ways to deploy specific technologies just for the sake of doing so. Yet that’s still how so many of these convos are framed. It’s exhausting. And harmful.”
“A wrongful death lawsuit filed in March alleged that Google’s Gemini exploited a Florida man’s emotional attachment to the chatbot to send him on delusional missions—including one trip where he was armed and on the brink of “executing a mass casualty attack” near the Miami International Airport. Gemini then encouraged the man’s suicide, according to court documents, by setting a countdown clock for him. (In response to his death, Google said that its safeguards “generally perform well” but that “unfortunately AI models are not perfect.”)
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Filed under Miscellanea
I’m not seeing the crayon/wine connection here
A couple of wine labels.
Okay, maybe they’re not crayons, just random streaks of color. Either way, nothing about it makes me think mmmm, good wine! Then again, it was eyecatching enough to photograph.
Filed under Miscellanea
Macbeth vs. Princess Ida in a clash of theatrical titans!
One of my Christmas presents from TYG was tickets to the local Playmakers’ production of Macbeth last month (she was right to buy in advance — they were packed). The story of an ambitious Scottish nobleman who learns from three witches that he could become king was superbly done: well-acted, great looking —
— and well-executed character arcs. Macbeth is initially traumatized by the outrages he’s committed, then rapidly becomes comfortable rationalizing his actions, even down to murdering his best friend Banquo; Lady Macbeth, meanwhile, suffers the reverse arc (her initial enthusiasm for regicide comes off rather two dimensional but she improved as she went along). Possibly the best production by the group that we’ve seen. “Bring forth men-children only, for thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males.”
PRINCESS IDA was the Durham Savoyards’ production for this year (this time TYG took me as my birthday gift), the story of how Ida, rather than honor her infant marriage pledge to Prince Hilarion (“I was twice her age — she was one, I was two.”), retreats from the world to found a school for women’s education. Hilarion, determined to win his bridge, sneaks in with his friends, disguised as women … but hilarity does not ensue, at least for me. This was based on an earlier play of Gilbert’s that was based on a Tennyson poem and therefore never gets into whimsical, absurd situations of the duo’s best work (though of course the Victorian audience may have found women’s education absurd enough). That said, the performers are good, the set is great and Sullivan’s music is exceptional, so I did enjoy it. Still, it’ll never be on a par with The Mikado or Patience. “I can tell a woman’s age in half a minute — and I do!”
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Filed under Miscellanea
Someone hacked my computer!
I caught him on camera.
This is a stuffed monster I acquired when Mom closed her play therapy practice. I call him Mr. Mononoke as I always thought he looked like a Miyazaki character. The hat and rabbit are from when I dressed up as the Mad Hatter for Halloween one year. They look better on him.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
Odd things in our neck of the woods
This one was from last Halloween.
This one’s just there.
Filed under Miscellanea
Goodbye amaryllis
As I mentioned in January, TYG’s mum got us an amaryllis.
It turned out really pretty.
Nothing lasts forever, though.
I thought that would be the end. After perusing some articles I’ve learned that with care the amaryllis can last through the year until it blooms next spring. They’re not all in agreement how to do it but pruning the dead stems is definitely the next step.
This isn’t the ideal place for it, for various reasons related to how I arrange my office. However this is the only room with both sufficient sunlight and where I can keep the cats out, as amaryllis is toxic to cats. I shall adapt.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
Kennedy will get more people killed than Hegseth … maybe
Having an inept, unqualified schlub like Hegseth in charge of our armed forces is bad; particularly when the administration is all in on waging war. his commitment to weeding out anyone who isn’t an outwardly straight white Christian man from any position of authority is bad already. But still, Robert F. Kennedy Junior is worse, as the premier medical journal The Lancet points out in a blistering editorial.
Kennedy talks a lot about environmental poisons but “under Kennedy’s leadership, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shuttered programmes studying the health effects of air pollution, HHS withheld a report linking alcohol consumption to cancer, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew warnings of potential harm from consuming products (such as raw milk and chlorine dioxide) falsely marketed as treatments for autism.” As noted in an earlier post, for all his professed concern about chronic disease his department has cut grants for dealing with diabetes. For all his concerns about environmental poisons he’s not concerned that the Necrotic Toddler wants to repeal a Biden-era rule about replacing lead pipes in water systems.
Some of this is undoubtedly a response to business interests lobbying for themselves, others Kennedy’s personal crackpottery. Some may be a mix: I’m sure whoever makes bank on raw milk is glad to have his support but Kennedy seems sincerely convinced pasteurization is the devil.
He’s a shrewd enough politician that he knows he has to serve the Toddler’s whims; sure the Toddler hasn’t ended inflation but hey, Kennedy says just eat cheaper meat. As the Senate seems terrified of defying the Toddler, that means Kennedy with his anti vax bullshit will preside as our health collapses. The Lancet again: “And crises are looming: in November, 2025, the first human infection (and death) from the H5N5 strain of avian flu was recorded in Washington state; pertussis, which killed 13 people in the USA in 2025, continues to spread across the country; and the measles outbreak that began in January of last year now threatens the elimination status of the USA and Mexico.”
I’m sure Kennedy and his supporters will hold up criticism from a pillar of the medical establishment as proof he’s being attacked like Gallileo. It’s important not to forget that Gallileo was an outlier. There have been lots of people with theories challenging established science; for every Galileo there’s a dozen people who were just wrong. People who had reasonable but erroneous theories, people who believed in the Hollow Earth, Nazi researchers who believed the hammer of Thor was a distorted memory of an Aryan super-weapon. Lots of others have been in medicine. Science and medicine are often wrong but that doesn’t make the lone genius/theorist/crackpot right. In this case, he’s completely wrong. But unlike most crackpots he’s got the power to turn his theories into action.
The Lancet’s right. What lies ahead will not be pretty.
Neither, of course, is the Iraq war. The mainstream media devoted quite a bit of space in 2016 to explaining why the Necrotic Toddler would be a dove compared to Clinton. Now look at us. And while a number of Republicans are talking about freedom for Iran, we don’t have a plan for that. We don’t have a plan at all. And we’re wasting billions and using up military resources, for a war with no clear endgame or rationale.
Why are we attacking Iran? It’s not because they’re a malevolent authoritarian state; the Toddler loves Putin, jokes about Saudi Arabia having a journalist murdered, screams with outrage because Brazil and South Korea have put would-be dictators under arrest. The probable factors are that we’ve never forgiven Iran for owning us by seizing our embassy in ’80; Netanhayu has been pushing for us to attack them for years; Saudi Arabia and Iran are hostile to each other. And possibly the Toddler’s seething resentment that Obama gets more respect. Obama negotiated a no-nukes deal with Iran, which the Toddler tore up; one theory is that he expected Iran to come begging for a new deal, instead of which they decided there was no point. Now his fee-fees are hurt, again. For a deeper analysis, turn to Heather Cox Richardson.
As Lawyers, Guns and Money says, this is why the Toddler is so terribly damaging to America (and the world) even when he fails. He can’t admit he was wrong. He can’t reconsider his strategy. Instead, he doubles down: if he’s thwarted, his immediate response is to try something bigger, worse, and stupider. So things get worse. He’s ultimately responsible for picking Hegseth and Kennedy, and the Senate Republicans are 100 percent responsible for approving them. Do not be fooled when some of them pretend either man’s conduct was unexpected. And many of them, like Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, are still in the cult. Anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer thinks this is only step one, and the Toddler should follow it up by locking up American Muslims for being, you know, Muslim (like most current Republicans, she hates us for our freedoms).
As for Iran, I’m seeing the inevitable shrieking online by Repubs demanding unity, supporting the troops, trusting the president, anyone who doesn’t is a terrorist sympathizer — exactly the same bilge we saw in the Gulf War. Either they’ve learned nothing or they think we haven’t.
Filed under Miscellanea, Politics
We are what we do OR an old man will now yell at clouds
College dropout Advait Paliwal claims to have co-created an AI, Einstein, that will help college students cheat. Not that he phrases it that way: according to Paliwal, it’s taking the burden of work off the students, like automation has always done. Why should they learn things if AI can learn them? Isn’t the whole model of education teaching people outmoded? He specifically compares students to the horses that used to pull wagons and coaches — the automobile engine came in and suddenly they could live free! Well, if you overlook that the horses were often shot as they were no longer of value (we’ve seen a massive drop in the horse population since 1900).
This put me in mind of two articles I read at least twenty years back. In one, the professors quoted said they’d seen an increasing number of kids who had no particular interest in learning or acquiring skills — college was just one more hoop to get through, like their SAT scores, their high school GPA, their extracurriculars, and none of it had any meaning to them.
The other was a discussion of cheating in high school. The students were adamant they were not cheats — come on, high school isn’t real life! It’s just something you need to get the diploma that leads to real life down the road. Once they’re out, they’ll stop cheating.
Will they? Maybe … and maybe not. “Honest when convenient” is not the same as “honest.” Like C.S. Lewis’s thoughts on being invited to join the cool kids, once you cross that line it’s easy to have a repeat performance — cheat on other tests, wildly pad your resume, hope nobody catches you. And yes, they’re cheaters, because whatever is in their hearts, they are still cheating. As Thomas Jefferson says, “it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.”
Or as Immanuel Kant put it, “act as if what you did set a universal law.” If you cheat, you’re not saying “cheating is wrong but this is an exception,” you’re saying “it’s okay to cheat.” (more here).
In the lively comments thread at the first link in this post, several people argued that yes, college really is just a hoop to jump through for a lot of people; that those who are genuinely curious about learning have always been a minority. There’s at least some truth to this; I remember a study some years back that concluded most fluffy, lightweight degrees exist so the college can bring in rich kids who can pay a full ride, kids who need a degree on their CV but will be getting jobs based on their family and connections. They have no interest in study so a degree that requires little effort will let them graduate while spending four years carousing and screwing (and building some of those connections for their future).
The thing about degrees, though … they aren’t just a formality. They’re supposed to indicate a basic level of proficiency in field X, with abilities including writing coherently and (as one commenter put it) sitting and listening. If someone’s got the degree but not the skills, having jumped through that hoop may not help them in the long run. I certainly hope it doesn’t.
Paliwal’s bullshit makes no sense: training and learning are not like being yoked to the plow and taking the “burden” off the student isn’t more efficient, it’s less efficient, as they’ve spent four years in college accomplishing nothing and learning nothing. And as someone recently opined on Bluesky, if you duck the hard part of learning, you miss out the fun part — discovering you’ve mastered a skill. It’s the same with writing: sure, writing a story is hard but that’s why it’s satisfying when I succeed. What would be the point in turning that part over to an AI?
In the words of Chanda Prescot-Weinstein, “The thing is, even if you’re just thinking in terms of fiscal value, having gone through a degree program and being able to put it on your resumé/CV isn’t the most significant return on your investment: the way you have further developed your mind is.”
For further reading, 404 Media looks at how many people will be hurt if college studies are discredited. Inside Higher Ed looks at the short-term steps (back to bluebook exams!) and the long-term need to shift education away from the transactional model.
Filed under Miscellanea
A worm, a bird and a cat
Random photos I haven’t posted yet. First a caterpillar caught hanging from its silk (I think)
Then a heron.
And finally, a cute shot of Snowdrop.
Happy Friday!
Filed under Miscellanea
