little surfer

The useful things AI does will keep happening. You'll still be able to prompt up a single-serving, personal piece of software to perform one task with moderate reliability for your use, and when it stops working, you'll be able to do it again. You'll still be able to transcribe audio, or summarize a document. You'll still be able to use a chatbot as an interactive journal, or as a supercharged spellchecker.

None of that will change – and neither will the limits on all those activities. If you don't know enough about a document or its subject to spot obvious errors in an AI summary, you'll be periodically misled. If you're so desperate or uninformed that you trust summaries you lack the capacity to evaluate in critical situations, you may be led to disaster. If you don't know anything about computers and you turn a piece of vibe-coded software loose on your machine, you might delete something important, or irreversibly expose sensitive data to the public internet.

This is Cory Doctorow in a recent Locus piece. I am always looking for uses in the back of my head. And aside from whisper I have not found any yet.

Paradoxically, it's sort of the best time in history to be using notebooks. As models / agents have gotten better at reading handwriting, extracting your chicken scratch is easier than ever. So that pain of struggling to reread your own handwriting is effectively … gone. Magic. We're living through a weird moment in time. Might as well have a great notebook by your side.

Says Craig Mod while selling you a notebook for 40€. Sure, it is beautiful. But damn. I need to get better at binding my own notebooks. I have been doing it for ages, but looking at this I can certainly up my game!

We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself. The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.

I listened to this and it was really good! Creepy and good. And I certainly can relate to much of it and it is one of the reasons, why I am averse to using the whole LLM thing. Until a use case comes around that works for me. We'll see. I like my little tools.

I am listening through music to play on the radio show today. So here are some cuts from that.

Our protagonist, Neroba, was part of Da Sintezatoros!, a duo from the young Kyiv electronic scene of the 90s and among the first groups to introduce experimental techno in independent Ukraine. Later, producing music for TV ads and commercial jingles, and tracks for Ukrainian pop and independent artists, Neroba slowly accumulated a catalogue of works where his name wasn't prominent.

Synths are such amazing instruments. Holy cow. So sweet and boppy.

Fuck. Some songs are harrowing. This one builds and then releases and it feels horrible and also powerful. Something music can do and that must feel quite different for people who have gone through something like this and people who have not. TW: abuse and rape.

A digital mixtape featuring Sub Pop artists covering Minnesota musicians, capturing a snapshot of Minnesota's long history of life-changing music and to show solidarity with the people of Minnesota. In the wake of the ICE raids in Minneapolis this year, a lot of communities have been hit hard. Families have been disrupted, people have been displaced, and local support systems are under real strain. Proceeds from this compilation will be sent to The International Institute of Minnesota, a non-profit organization that supports refugees and immigrants through resettlement services, English and citizenship classes, job training (including nursing assistant training), immigration legal services, and direct financial support in the current environment.

A German band and a banger indeed.

Right on the edge of being sick. Which is probably being sick already. But the hurt is at the top of the throat, not yet in it. But my head is getting fuzzy.

What should we have for dinner.

Sleep.

I went to an excellent show yesterday. I caught two of three bands at Badehaus in Berlin. First was Between Bodies, second and main act of the night Shoreline followed soon after. Both bands brought excellent energy, some good speeches, humor, pits and singalongs. It was as good as a show gets.

It made me wonder. When did I loose the gusto to jump into the pit? What do I need to make that step. Is it the specific song? Last time I jumped in was at a Kapa Tult show when they played my absolute favorite song of theirs. What is the spark? Or is it my own age, possibly my short breath? I look at those people in the circle pit and I get envious of the joy in their faces. Then I see the big dude throwing arms and think to myself that I am fine where I am.

I love going to shows and that is not going to change any time soon. I miss my more energetic self that would jump into pits and shout along to songs. And then again I haven't been at a show in a while where I was able to shout along and was healthy enough to do the jumping. Maybe John Coffey will bring the magic later this year. Or the Hirsch Effekt in January. Or I just need to stop psyching myself out about it and stop worrying about it.

Tom Johnson of GoldFlakePaint writes about “perfect songs”.

Jason Sloan over at Tributary speaks with Should be Asleep.

Two excellent places to find a bunch of new music for pleasure and enjoyment. The monthly mixes out of GFP are great. Over the weekend I had a great conversation about radio. I have been hosting a radio show for over ten years now and I rarely listen to radio myself. I can't really articulate why. Some part is that I never found my particular taste reflected in a radio show for longer than ten minutes. But then again, isn't that the beauty of radio? The surprise? The letting go and surrendering to someone who knows their shit?

Sometimes you find a band at the end of their life. As happened with Lypurá. Honest emo punk released via Through Love Records. Not every email is worth a click, this one was. It brought me back to feelings long gone. Excellent stuff.

DIRTY OLD POWER out September 25 via AJJ Unlimited LTD.

The new Slothrust dropped yesterday. Going in to actually listen to the whole thing now and they are just really good at guitars and weird lyrics.

Funsover are from Berlin and I did see them live a while ago. They were really good and if you like shoegazey music you'll be right at home!

John Coffey continue to release bangers from their upcoming album. This one is sad, but also full of hope.

Thats some music for now. Part of me wants to continue to play Zero Company and part wants to just languish. I wanna find out how it goes though.

Shit is wild. In 2023 Joanne McNeils Wrong Way came out and I got to read an advance copy. In it our protagonist drives “self-driving” cars. She is lifted into a part of the car, sees what happens inside and drives. The passengers have no clue.

Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.

I return to thinking about that part of the book over and over. It may not be the main focus of the novel. But next to questions about “good” jobs this is what stuck with me most. How we tend to enjoy something and not think about what the parts to it could be.

Cory Doctorow writes about people who ask about AI in works, as a way to make sure it is “good”. It gives me goosebumps.

Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you're not relying on their skill – you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel.

and

My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done “with AI” were never before asked “Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?” It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from bookkeepers. “Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro” is a genuinely weird thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are correct, but caring about how the macros are written is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard.

What are we even doing? I have to remember to cool off. Go outside. Touch grass. Easier said then done. Tired after work. Where to go without spending more money? Need to make myself just sit in the park and read. Make some sort of art. Listen to some great music:

To put it simply: I do not like this world where people are using AI to generate art, music, writing, and software. So I will not use AI.

via I am done using AI. Which makes me think of the blood robots Craig Mod wrote about. The rush of making and also the way skills disappear, when they are not used.

In relation to my own work Luke Plunkett said it quite well in The Work is the Work:

Let's say I'm an office manager or a HR rep, and my job is to settle a dispute between two workers. To settle that dispute is part of my job, it's why I am there. My skills at talking to people and conveying my thoughts and opinions via email are why I am being paid. If I open up ChatGPT and ask a machine how to do it—a machine that does not know how to do it, it only knows how to synthesize one million examples of this, because it is a machine—I am not doing that work anymore. Anyone could have asked the machine that question.

If I try to solve a conflict between two students by consulting ChatGPT I have failed my job. If I let an LLM write my courses for me I have failed. Because it is what I make, what I decide on that got me the job. That makes me a teacher, who sometimes does a good job. But at least I have character. I grow and I learn from some of my mistakes.

And sure, I could do some of my work without thinking anything through. But I have a job that does not allow for that. Even if I let something else plan, I still have to do it myself. And I'd rather fail at doing something I badly planned myself, than try to follow something I had no part in.

Edit: This here was also good. Values are what you do

Values are what you do, not what you believe.

All in relation to Macstories going back to X for cash moneys and what a shit decision that was.