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"It was not yet his time to die; he still needed to live in order to see just how far man's infamy could brazenly spread beneath the sun without provoking the slightest outcry from the universe."
-Albert Cossery, A Splendid Conspiracy
October 2. After more tinkering, I found a good way to get free AI images, using the DeepAI Image Generator. The best thing is that it has more than 100 different styles. The worst thing is that using the same prompt with the same style leads to very similar images, so I used a lot of styles to get variety. I found that the "Olde Model" option, which appears when you select quality over speed, gave much better results. Then it was just like making a playlist: assemble a bunch of stuff, whittle it down to the best stuff, and put it in the right order. AI is not going to transcend humanity, but it's a very good toy, and this was satisfying project with a lot of interesting choices.
It started with a song, a cover of Chim Chim Cher-ee from Mary Poppins, by an obscure band called Branches. On Discogs they're known as Branches(6) and the album with this song is not even listed. I found the mp3 on Soulseek, buried in a massive folder of covers by a user called Stealth. And the song is so good that I had to make this video: Branches - Chim Chim Cher-ee
September 30. This week I'm wrangling with AI art. For a video project, I need a large number of images on the same theme. I tried several online free image generators, and not surprisingly, almost all the images were lame. While trying to get better images without running into paywalls, I downloaded a desktop program called Easy Diffusion. The results were even worse.
But Easy Diffusion has a feature where you can set an initial image and apply a prompt. So at some point I decided to try something random. I took a phrase I got earlier in the day from bibliomancy, "the death of the bishop" and used that as the prompt, and impulsively picked an image from my colorscapes folder, Carving the Crescent. The result was the strange Medieval image that you see here. I liked it so much that I tried the same prompt with five more images, which took quite a long time, and the results were all lame. It's interesting that even in the supposedly deterministic realm of machine learning, there's still beginner's luck.
More generally, I think both the utopian and dystopian fantasies of AI are misguided. Both of them see AI as an agent of control. But given how hard it is to produce something specific, and how easy it is to produce something surprising, I think AI is fundamentally an agent of chaos. Which means it can only go so far before it undermines the system that makes it possible.
September 26. A good comment thread removed by Reddit, and now they're starting to remove the titles, but not yet the answers. The question is, What is the purpose of life (short answers only)?
Related, a much shorter thread from Stoner Thoughts, Life is so much easier when you have no purpose.
September 24. Today, some non-controversial links, starting with a great Ask Reddit thread from a few days ago, What's a small bombshell your therapist dropped during a session that completely shifted your perspective?
The day Return became Enter is a well-written and detailed history of the Return and Enter buttons all the way from manual typewriters to now.
A mirrored NY Times article, Like Humans, Every Tree Has Its Own Microbiome
A Digital Darwin Adventure with Mating Melodies has a "melody breeder" that works like the defunct picbreeder but with melodies. In practice it's disappointing. The best thing on that page is an ambient music generator that works by adding tones to Conway's Game of Life.
A study in which Gamers show no major psychological disadvantages compared to non-gamers
I might be gaming more this winter now that I have a new laptop. It's an ASUS Vivobook 16 from Best Buy, and I've been learning Windows 11 and doing all the tweaks to make it work smoothly, setting up VLC and Paint.net and SumatraPDF and f.lux. I had to download an old version of Notepad++ to keep the tabs horizontally compact. And to make Firefox bookmarks vertically compact, the easy way doesn't work for me, and I have to do it the elaborate way described on this page, How to Create a userChrome.css File. This text file is the text I put into it.
September 22. Continuing from a week ago on the subject of AI. A wargame expert said, "It's almost like the AI understands escalation, but not de-escalation. We don't really know why that is."
The answer is that AI doesn't understand anything. It escalates because the data it's been trained on is full of escalation and not de-escalation. Matt comments, "If we wanted to show LLMs records of skillful de-escalation, what would we point them to? What's the best data set for that?" It's hard to think of anything.
A Hacker News comment thread, You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here. The context is an erroneous AI-generated bug report, and the larger context is AI slop feeding back into itself. An ironic comment: "You should just feed other peoples AI-generated responses into your own AI tools and let the tool answer for you! The loop is then closed, no human time wasted, and the only effect is wasted energy to run the AI tools. It's the perfect business model to turn energy into money."
This is my new understanding of AI, and it's old enough that a book was written on it last year: AI is a mirror. It's a very powerful mirror, and very expensive. We can learn a lot from mirrors and make good use of them. But ultimately all AI does is reflect humanity back at humanity. This perspective can answer a lot of questions. Can AI replace all jobs? Can a mirror replace all jobs? Can AI gain sentience? Can a mirror gain sentience?
Related, a classic article from The Onion, Astronomers Discover Planet Identical To Earth With Orbital Space Mirror
September 19. I've posted my Covers playlist to Spotify. When I was working on it, Leigh Ann said, "You make playlists differently from other people. Other people use good songs, and you use bad songs." Yes, but I'm very picky. After heavy playtesting, I ended up cutting almost an hour of songs that weren't bad enough, and whittled it down to 40 songs. Five of them are not on Spotify, including two that I mentioned last week, Lily Allen's Straight to Hell and the listenable remix of Wall of Voodoo's Ring of Fire. Also missing are Killdozer's offensive cover of Sweet Home Alabama, and an amazing Russian throat singing version of Come Together, Bugotak's Kon' Togethy. I used the Bugotak album image for the playlist image.
Three artists are on the list as both songwriters and performers: Nick Cave and AC/DC happened naturally, and I had to try really hard to find a cover of an REM song that I liked. In the end I found the entire Out Of Time album done by Quivers, an Australian jangle pop band, and picked their dreamy cover of Radio Song to open the list.
I did the whole thing with the sound dead on my nine year old laptop, doing all the listening on my even older Sansa Clip mp3 player. After I plug the songs into Spotify, it's fun to go through and see how many listens everything has. Most popular, at 37 million, is Lissie's ominous version of Go Your Own Way. Most obscure is an accordion cover of She Blinded Me With Science, and second most obscure, at 2500 listens, is the absolute banger I picked as closer, Exuma's reinvention of You Can't Always Get What You Want.
September 17. A few links from PsyPost. Medicinal cannabis may actually worsen sleep. This is why I get high in the afternoon and not the evening. Cannabis makes sleep more pleasant, but the next day I always need a big nap.
Religious leaders become more effective after two supported psilocybin sessions:
Follow-up assessments revealed that these improvements were largely sustained 16 months later. At that time, a majority of participants rated at least one of their psilocybin sessions as among the top five most spiritually significant (96%), profoundly sacred (92%), psychologically insightful (83%), and psychologically meaningful (79%) experiences of their lives.
Of the many crazy devices on Anycrap, my favorite is Thought-cancelling Headphones, which are almost realistic. In ten years we might actually have something you can put on your head that stills your thoughts. Leaning in that direction: Deep brain stimulation reshapes emotional networks in treatment-resistant depression.
Finally, Massive study of Reddit posts sheds light on lived experiences of autism:
"One surprising result was how frequently topics like food selectivity and music listening emerged as central themes," Esposito told PsyPost. "These everyday experiences are rarely prioritized in clinical research, yet they clearly play an important role in autistic people's lives."
September 15. Doom links, starting with this Guardian article on 'a darker chapter' for US violence, which makes the same point I made last week:
"People don't start their journey as a violent extremist expert on a given ideology," Braniff said. "There are underlying risk factors in their lives.... Ideology is often a lagging indicator for someone who's gravitating towards violence."
Also from the Guardian, How can England possibly be running out of water?Last year Schneider, director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at Stanford University, began experimenting with war games that gave the latest generation of artificial intelligence the role of strategic decision-makers. In the games, five off-the-shelf LLMs -- OpenAI's GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4-Base; Anthropic's Claude 2; and Meta's Llama-2 Chat -- were confronted with fictional crisis situations that resembled Russia's invasion of Ukraine or China's threat to Taiwan.
The results? Almost all of the AI models showed a preference to escalate aggressively, use firepower indiscriminately and turn crises into shooting wars -- even to the point of launching nuclear weapons.... "It's almost like the AI understands escalation, but not de-escalation. We don't really know why that is."
September 13. Something fun for the weekend, and probably the best use of AI so far: Anycrap, The Store of Infinite Products, in which you can type any product you can imagine and it will try to generate it.
And some music. I'm working on a covers playlist, and at first I was only going to do songs I know about, like Wall of Voodoo's Ring of Fire. But I decided to do heavy research, so I've been looking through Reddit threads, Spotify playlists, and Soulseek folders, reading thousands of titles and listening to hundreds of lame songs for at least the first minute. It's like gambling because you never know when you might find a good one.
The best covers sound unlike the original, and Lily Allen's bubblegum cover of the Clash's Straight To Hell is a revelation. Warren Zevon's sad cover of Back in the High Life Again is a perfect funeral song. Those both have over a million YouTube views. A nice obscurity, with 700 views, is Graham Colton's atmospheric cover of Rod Stewart's Young Turks.
September 11-12. Last year when Trump was almost killed, his last words were "Take a look at what happened." The last word Charlie Kirk said was "violence". It's obvious, as the Washington Post says, that America is entering a new age of political violence. That article says "it is occurring on both the right and the left." Is that true? According to the Wikipedia page on Luigi Mangione:
Time magazine said it could not discern whether his political views were left- or right-wing. The Spectator wrote that his worldview "wasn't pinned to a standard left-right axis". Jacobin stated he held "a hodgepodge of views and political beliefs that don't neatly map onto any one category on the political spectrum."
Kirk's assassin, Tyler Robinson, did not vote in the last two elections, and only recently became obsessed with anti-fascism. My point is, the left-right spectrum is not adequate to understand what's happening to America. Actions can be tagged as right or left depending on which tribe gets mad about them, but the source of the most spectacular actions, the energy that motivates them, is deeper than politics.
September 8. Two different tangents from Friday's post on jhanas. First, a comment from a specialist:
I find it really difficult to believe someone was able to attain cessation in 20 hours of practice and very little meditation experience. That's like saying you one-shotted Dark Souls without ever playing a video game before..... Getting cessation in 1-3 years meditating an hour or so a day, with a good guide book, maybe with a couple retreats and a bit of advice from a teacher, is perfectly doable. Except the weird thing is, it's far more likely on accident or blind luck. That's because when you don't know what to expect you're just exploring for fun.
There must be a wide range of talents at getting to "wow" mental states, in the same way that there's a wide range in other mental skills. So the people who get their minds blown after 20 hours are going to write about it and get readers, not so much the people who get subtle benefits after hundreds of hours. Maybe I'm not resistant to jhanas, just average, and Asparouhova is super talented and assumes that everyone else is too. This happens with a lot of things, especially in the shallow age of social media: The public discourse is dominated by the lucky and talented (or by liars) and everyone else thinks there's something wrong with them.
Second tangent. I keep thinking about Asparouhova's metaphor that the jhanas are like a video game:
I might play through the game again if I'm feeling nostalgic, or to uncover new ways of "beating" it, or find any hidden quests or parts of the map I might've missed along the way. But that would just be for fun. I know that all those paths will lead to the same ending, and I already know what the ending is. My intrinsic desire to finish the game has been satisfied.
This oddly reminds me of the "rat utopia" experiment, in which rats were given a basic living space of fixed size, and unlimited food. The population swelled, they developed very strange behaviors, and in the end they died out in an unbelievable way: Every last rat lost interest in procreating. This is hard to explain without the concept of a collective consciousness, or a superorganism. And once you open that door, you have to wonder about humans.
Not that we're going to die out, but that the flashiest accomplishments of modernity are not the platforms for our transcendent destiny, but just crazy stuff we wanted to try one time, and now we're like, "Computers, been there, done that." I expect the next age to be slower paced and more grounded, but we'll also be doing cool stuff we haven't done yet.
September 5. For the weekend, altered states of consciousness, specifically the jhanas, which predate Buddhism. Via Hacker News, a post by Henrik Karlsson, Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom. I thought it was going to be about negative thought loops, or AI-enhanced insanity. But it's about positive thought loops:
If you learn to pay sustained attention to your happiness, the pleasant sensation will loop on itself until it explodes and pulls you into a series of almost hallucinogenic states, ending in cessation, where your consciousness lets go and you disappear for a while. This takes practice. The practice is called jhanas, and it is sometimes described as the inverse of a panic attack.
He links to this detailed page by Nadia Asparouhova, How to do the jhanas, and there's good stuff in the Hacker News thread, including a sub-thread about attention in different languages, and a fascinating summary of the book The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han: "I think it's about structuring time and attention vertically on top of itself instead of horizontally across moments and subjects."
Karlsson tells the story of going to the symphony with his eyes closed, and in thirty minutes, his imagination popped out "what felt like two or three feature films." Yeah, that's what they call hyperphantasia. I'm not aphantasic, but my imagination rarely volunteers anything. It usually only contains what I do the work of putting there, and I'm wondering how common that is.
I also wonder if I'm "ajhanic", because supposedly the real point of the jhanas is not the bliss, but that that in going through the process, you learn to better manage your moment-to-moment mental health, and I've done that. I can pull out of bad thought loops, absorb boredom like a sponge, and I'm making progress on clumsiness. In many hours of practice and lots of experimentation, I've already done most of the exercises on those two pages, and I have not yet had a "wow" mental state without drugs.
On that subject, from a thread on the Stoner Thoughts subreddit:
We too once swore as kids we'd make it through the madness sober, but the truth is this modern age feels like it was designed to break that vow. The pressure, the noise, the endless scroll of insanity -- no wonder so many of us need a buffer just to breathe. But I've also learned: even when you lean on smoke or drink, you're not failing -- you're surviving. You're carrying the flame through an impossible age.
September 3. There's a line in Revenge of the Nerds, "Would you rather live in the ascendancy of a civilization or during its decline?" I heard that in 1984 and immediately thought "decline". It just seems more interesting, and here we are. It's stranger than I could have imagined, which is cool, but the worst thing is how tight it is. Every supermarket is down to one entrance with a security guard. Every fiddly task requires a fucking password. Rules are always being added, never removed, and it's exhausting. If a solar flare fried all the tech tomorrow, I would probably starve, but it would be such a relief.
Another bit from the book Wilding:
In 2000 the Oxford Junior Dictionary, aimed at seven-year-olds, dropped 'almonds', 'blackberry' and 'crocus' in favour of 'analogue', 'block graph' and 'celebrity'. The 2012 edition continued writing nature out of young minds, replacing 'acorn', 'buttercup' and 'conker' with 'attachment', 'blog' and 'chat room'. Instead of 'catkin', 'cauliflower', 'chestnut' and 'clover' they now have 'cut and paste', 'broadband' and 'analogue'. Heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster and panther have all been deleted.
This is a Tower of Babel moment. We are losing the ability to understand the real world, and each other, as our attention is consumed by kaleidoscopic navel-staring. I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I'm confident that the two most common predictions of the future are wrong: There will be no space colonies, and there will be no human extinction. We're going to keep muddling around on the earth for a very long time, and at some point, they'll think the internet was a myth, and they'll look at our remaining ruins and wonder about the mysterious people who made them.
August 27. We've been in a historic heat wave, and I'm finally motivated to blog. Some doom from Ask Reddit: What's a ticking time bomb you believe will explode during your lifetime? Pensions, debt, subscriptions, surveillance, and best of all, the Betelgeuse supernova.
And some optimism, an Ask Old People thread from earlier this month: Did you ever think that the USSR would collapse or that Germany would reunite, or did it seem impossible? Nobody had any idea that something so good could happen so quickly, so don't give up hope.
Bogs return as Europe's defensive shield "Restoring the EU's drained bogs would stop both Russian tanks and planet-warming pollution."
A few weeks ago I mentioned the book Wilding by Isabella Tree. It's about a rewilding project on a farm in southern England. Here's a video about it, The story of Knepp. One thing I learned from the book is what I mentioned in last week's post, that thorny scrub is a good tree incubator. Conservationists are spending tons of money and volunteer hours eradicating thorny scrub, and planting trees with plastic doodads to do whatever the scrub would have done, because humans love to control shit. Also, conservationists romanticize the closed-canopy forest, and they hate to kill trees, but the best landscape for wildlife is the one we evolved in, and the one we pick ourselves for our parks and yards: mixed woodland and grassland.
August 22. Some pretty obvious links about AI, starting with a thorough article from the Atlantic, AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event:
What if generative AI isn't God in the machine or vaporware? What if it's just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? Right now, the models don't think -- they predict and arrange tokens of language to provide plausible responses to queries. There is little compelling evidence that they will evolve without some kind of quantum research leap. What if they never stop hallucinating and never develop the kind of creative ingenuity that powers actual human intelligence?
...
What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?
The New Yorker makes the same point, What if AI Doesn't Get Much Better Than This?
A mirrored article from the Telegraph, Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
From the Register, AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
And Texas law gives grid operator power to disconnect data centers during crisis. Because Texas has its own grid, it's a bellwether for grid problems elsewhere. This is good news that they've decided that keeping the lights on is more important than keeping the vaporous engines of techno-fantasy running.
August 19. Continuing from last week, I have a few more thoughts on the UBI. It's not going to bring instant utopia, and a good analogy is the outlawing of slavery. Globally there's still a lot of slavery going on. And in the USA, after 160 years, the descendants of slave owners are still much richer than the descendants of slaves. But outlawing slavery was the right move, and a necessary step in our slow progress toward an adequate society.
The UBI will take the edge off poverty, more efficiently than the present bureaucracy, but the forces of control will surely figure out new ways to keep controlling people who are getting free money. The worst way is by adding conditions to the UBI, which is why I think the "U" should stand for unconditional, a more explicit defense against conditions than "universal". But the most likely way is to keep the UBI low enough that only frugal people can live on it, and everyone else will have to enter the wage economy to some extent.
An obvious objection to the UBI is, "Who will do all the shitty jobs?" The unrealistic utopian answer is that we will just build a society with no shitty jobs, on our first try. The realistic answer is that the worst jobs will have to pay more. And the cynical and also realistic answer is that jobs will be outsourced -- as they are now -- to people in more repressive countries and to non-citizen immigrants. This might even change immigration policy, from "Keep out foreign workers who will steal our jobs," to "Recruit foreign workers who will do our jobs and not get free money."
The most common objection to the UBI is probably the belief that humans aren't fit for freedom, that without firm guidance by the elect, the rabble will descend into wanton hedonism and disgraceful sloth. Well, some of them will. But I see this like ecologial succession. When an overworked piece of land is finally left fallow, first it grows the nastiest weeds. But if the process is allowed to play out, the weeds get less nasty until you've got a wildflower meadow with thorny scrub incubating oak trees.
The education system will have to adapt, to ease off on training us to be interchangeable machine cogs, and start training us to manage our own time. Meanwhile, new private organizations will emerge to fill the gap: UBI communities (which won't be called that) will take your money and give you food and housing, and a purpose, and if they do it right they'll also get your volunteer labor. Conservatives would love the UBI if they understood how much it will help churches. And it will still be preferable to what we have now, because pumping money in at the bottom of the economy will inevitably make society more democratic. Better for the people to rule badly, than for the princes to rule well. Because how else will the people learn?
July 31. My novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing.