Couple of links to start off this post:
The Hater’s Guide to the AI Bubble — this shows what’s wrong with the “AI Trade” from a business perspective. Quick summary: 35% of the US stock market right now is held up by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Apple buying hardware from NVidia for their AI projects. They’ve spend $560 billion in the past two years and show maybe $35 billion in profit for it. 42% of NVidia’s revenue is selling stuff to those companies, their stock price relies on continued sales growth, and… that growth is showing signs of slumping. Nobody really has a viable plan to make AI profitable, there’s not all that much room in the market for different AI services, and there have been a lot of really questionable claims being made to convince investors. It’s all going to come tumbling down.
And of course, there are new stories every day about the failure of AI when people attempt to trust it. This stupid thing about AI wiping a database and then explaining that it “panicked and acted without thinking” and disobeyed explicit instructions… honestly it sounds like fiction, and I don’t know if it’s true. The FDA has a new AI that’s supposed to speed new drug approvals, but it just makes up studies that don’t exist and can’t find ones that do. An eating disorder help line, after the employees unionized, fired them and replaced them with a chatbot that gave people horrible awful harmful advice until it was shut down.
And: One in six US workers pretends to use AI to please the bosses
Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower
…
Why Anti-Trans Campaigns Keep Returning to the Politics of Meat — in American culture, beef and (white) masculinity are closely intertwined. (Cis people, are you okay?) The beef industry has been funding anti-trans political ads, some of which compare trans people and cattle.
Reading that has turned me back away from beef. For 7 years starting in my late teens, I was a vegetarian; even since then I generally have eaten less beef than most Americans probably, keeping in mind that beef is much more of a strain on the environment than chicken or vegetables. So this isn’t a hard choice for me. I’m not at a 100% boycott level, but can keep it for special/rare occasions. Recently we’ve had some recipes with Impossible crumbles instead, and I’ve steered clear of ordering beef when I’m out.
I’m slowly putting down replacement planks for the living room floor. The spare planks aren’t super flat, and the original adhesive is grossly sticky to the fingers but not really enough to keep the planks in place. I’m enhancing that with some Loctite spray adhesive, and trying to squash the planks flat as I go. So I’m only doing 1-2 planks at a time. Professionals use heavy floor rollers for this sort of thing, but they are expensive and useless for literally any other task — I’m just using my own considerable body weight and then a collection of random heavy things. A cast iron pan, the dog food bin, a big shopping bag full of Playstation games, the theremin on its weighted stand, the recliner… it’s absurd, but it seems to be working more or less.
I don’t think it’s possible to so thoroughly eliminate the pee scent that a dog’s VNO couldn’t detect it. Nor to so thoroughly seal the planks to the floor that it prevents anything from seeping underneath. So we’re going to have to break Yankee of the habit of peeing in there, and if that means continuing to block access to the room with baby gates, so be it. To our surprise, he hasn’t made any messes in the kitchen or dining room since we blocked the living room — something he used to do on occasion. Fingers crossed. Usually when he stops one neurotic behavior he only exchanges it for a different one…
10 songs now done for Suspension. Since some of them are short by my standards, this comes to 40 minutes. I’ll be doing a few more.
Suspended chords made for easy inspiration for this one, but I’m definitely not sticking strictly to it. In some tracks the connection might be a bit tenuous, in that I have some complex cluster created by Multimod or the “Voice Chorus” detuning in Synclavier V, and then I have pitch shifters tuned to fourths and fifths up, or something along those lines. Or I’m doing a lot of complex stuff but have peaking filters set to resonate a bit more on a sus4 chord.
Current read is Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides. This book was written in 1987, and was the inspiration for LucasArts’ Monkey Island series. Disney bought the rights to the novel, but their POTC movie is a very, very different story with different characters and plot. What it has in common: (1) the Fountain of Youth (2) a daughter of another character (but not the same character), (3) Blackbeard as a Vodun practitioner, and (4) some other pirates, who happen to be in the Caribbean.
We listened to the book in audio form during a road trip several years ago. It only partially stuck with me, because that’s how audiobooks on road trips are… if you’re driving you’re putting more attention on the road, and if not driving you might be dozing. And also, this way I missed out some significant puns based on pirates’ illiteracy and minimal knowledge of Vodun. As with other Tim Powers books, it takes me a little longer to slide into enjoying it at first, for reasons I can’t identify… but I’m thoroughly hooked well before the halfway point.