other people's stuff
bookssongs
albums
films
quotes
readings
search this site
"I said, 'Kiss me, you're beautiful; these are truly the last days.' You grabbed my hand, and we fell into it, like a daydream, or a fever."
-Godspeed You Black Emperor, "Dead Flag Blues"
October 10. Continuing on non-political subjects, an interesting article about why the Yankees always lose in the playoffs. The author lists a bunch of examples of obvious bad decisions about which pitchers to use, and argues that Yankees manager Aaron Boone "is handed an analytical roadmap by general manager Brian Cashman and the front office, and that he follows it, unwaveringly, regardless of the circumstances." Most damning is the accusation that the analytics department doesn't believe in players getting hot. This is an example of how being too smart makes you stupid. Because they're able to run the numbers on a player's entire career, they get fixated on those numbers rather than following the flow of the game.
Something the article doesn't mention is that the Yankees spend their massive payroll loading up on home run hitters, which works great against average pitching. But against playoff pitching, swinging for the fences leads to a lot of strikeouts. Meanwhile the Toronto Blue Jays, who just handily defeated the Yankees, have a low strikeout rate because they focus on making contact.
October 8. I have no ideas this week, but I'm reading two books on the same subject, in very different styles. The subject is entities from outside the reality recognized by physicalism. One book is academic: Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits, edited by Michael Ostling. Academics will never write about what the entities actually are, or even say whether they're real or unreal. They just write very carefully about what people believe, and about what words mean. A sample:
Thus the "demonic" is properly understood less as a specific category of supernatural being than a collective reflection on unfortunate occurrences, on the ambivalence of deities, on tensions surrounding social and sexual roles, and on the cultural dangers that arise from liminal or incomprehensible people, places, and activities.
I can learn stuff from this book, but it's difficult and not fun to read. The other book is for a popular audience: The Eighth Tower, a.k.a. The Cosmic Question, by my favorite paranormal author, John Keel. Keel writes constantly about what the entities actually are, but rather than settling on a truth and defending it, he just spins out wild speculations with no attempt to make them consistent. It's great fun to read. A sample:
Over and over again the Bible tells us how men were instructed to create solid gold objects and leave them on mountain tops where the gods could get them. The gods were gold hungry. But why? ... If the ancient gods were real in some sense, they may have come from a space-time continuum so different from ours that their atomic structure was different. They could walk through walls because their atoms were able to pass through the atoms of stone. Gold was one of the few earthly substances dense enough for them to handle. If they sat in a wooden chair, they would sink through it. They needed gold furniture during their visits.
October 5. I'm going to continue writing about personal stuff, and not politics, until politics does something off-script. For all the apparent chaos, it feels very deterministic.
Anyway, when I did my covers playlist, I had a bunch of softer songs left over that were good enough for their own playlist. So I did a lot more listening to fill it out, swapped some songs between the two lists, and in the end the overflow list is maybe better, and definitely more listenable. I renamed the original list "wild covers", and I was going to call the new one "soft covers", but other Spotify playlists with that title are very, very soft, so I'm calling it Dreamy Covers.
Because the songs all have a similar sound, the order was wide open, so I put them in order of the release date of the original. It's strange that there's a huge gap for most of the 70s, almost like that decade was more about style than songwriting. For the image, I used the best of the sixty plus images that I got by putting the prompt "crimson and clover" into DeepAI, for a video that I decided not to make. That's emerging as my favorite use of AI, not to make it do my bidding, but to pull stuff out of a hat.
The songs are mostly obscure, with more under 100k listens than over a million. Lowest, at 8000, is Please Don't Go by Valentina Gaia. You can listen to sappy songs for hours, I know because I did, and not hear a sappy song that good. I also discovered Larkin Poe, two sisters who have done a lot of very good home-recorded covers on YouTube, my favorite being CSN's Southern Cross.
And I've been listening obsessively to Melissa Kassab's cover of Trucker Speed by Fred Eagleton, a 2012 original that conveniently makes it the closer for the new list.
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.
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.