Swapping out (Warning: some 90s ahead)

 

Seen above: a screenshot of a recent Google search. Specifically, the AI Overview that got spit up in the course of said Google search. According to Gemini, the lyric "Life is hard, and so am I. Better give me something so I don't die" has been appearing in forum posts since 2006 but isn't derived from anything identifiable. 

It is actually not hard to find the source, at all. And now that AI has been embedded in Google searches, these overviews usually do produce germane results for quoted song lyrics. But in this case the AI basically said that it's not really anything in particular. 

You've seen more flagrant AI fails than this one. So have I, although most of them aren't recorded. It's a technology that brings very quick results, but a lot of the time not high quality ones. Aside from factual errors, there's not really a mind there. 

Which is why when you hear about jobs being eliminated in favor of AI, it suggests a certain preference. The question is, "Can LLMs do the job better than humans, or even as well?" And the answer is very often, "No, but who cares?"

Greer has an interesting take on what's behind this. Namely, technology―overhyped as it is―is being used to clear out deadwood that couldn't be gotten rid of any other way. If so, the people making these decisions aren't really more valuable than those their getting rid of/automating, and in some cases much less so. But that's how it often goes.

Center ring

 

In discussions of Einar Jolin, the word "naive" seems to come up a lot. And there's something to that. His faces tend to be cartoony, for one thing.

But if he remained crude in some ways, he was a curious artist and truly applied himself. His pictures have a snap to them and make an impact.

"At the Circus", above, is a nifty composition. It uses its space well. And the horses are gorgeous in their simplicity. You can see why the audience members nearest us are so rapt in attention.

How it plays out

Conservative anti-interventionist Tom Woods has written that "No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain." Which is to say, office seekers love to talk about how they will prioritize American interests and end regime change wars, and then when they actually take office they develop a strange case of amnesia about all these promises. 

So it's happening once again. Sohrab Ahmari:

Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!

Now, I'd be a knave and a fool if I'd ever believed that Bari Weiss's foreign policy priorities were the same as mine. But the anti-woke movement ―and in truth, the anti-lockdown movement as well―did have a lot of people who sounded indifferent to or skeptical about foreign adventurism. Until, that is, it came time to promote a new war.

One of Donald Trump's tragic flaws is that he's incapable of saying "no" to his big money contributors. Of course in the face of that kind of money and those kind of demands, his recent predecessors have only maintained a fig leaf of dignity, and he's just been more blatant. But it's also important to recall that that wasn't the promise.

Plink!

Prepared piano is an interesting method, altering the tone produced by the keyboard by placing objects between the strings. Its modern use has been credited to John Cage, who wrote his piece Bacchanale for percussion ensemble but found it was being performed in a space that didn't have room for one. As the Wikipedia page shows, there were precedents before that.

This performance of a cage piece is a good example. Likely not all good pianists are good at prepared piano. This one gets a lot of mileage out of it.

999

Today I started rereading Pale Fire.

A lot of Nabokov's novels start with author's notes warning the reader not to apply the theories of Freud (identified as "the witch doctor from Vienna" or some such) to the book. This always seemed a little weak to me. If you've written a compelling work, you needn't fear fashionable critical theories. You can wait them out until they're no longer fashionable. 

Pale Fire has no such warning. You could read that as a sign that Nabokov was really in the zone with this one, which he was. What it does have is an epigraph from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, which sets the tone and gets you scratching your head. But I repeat myself.

John Shade, the author of the 999-line poem within a novel, does in one stanza provide a list of things he hates: aside from Freud and Marx, there's also jazz. The same things Nabokov hated, in other words. For all that, there's a certain irony between the real author and the fictional one. Charles Kinbote, another fictional author providing commentary on the poem, is a whole kettle of fish in himself.

Cabin fever

Huh. Okay.

Being stuck indoors all day, and apparently limited to maybe a few blocks tomorrow, is certainly not fun. How are the people who lost power making out, I wonder? 

One odd distraction. There's a car parked in front of one of the houses across the street. It's had its taillights blazing all day, and seems like it will have them going all night, too. If the car has the juice to keep them going. No one seems to know what to do about it, or why the owner has left it like that.

Peak experiences

I read a crime story today. It was about a modern day expedition climbing Mt. Everest, a client determined to reach the top, and someone else in the party looking for revenge against that person. It's a good story in itself―the author's name is William Hall―but it also started me thinking about those who climb big mountains like that.

Some Sherpas do climb Everest without bottled oxygen. Ang Rita Sherpa did so ten times. No sane Western climber would attempt that. It's also true that the the Sherpa culture's religion holds that the Himalayas are sacred. 

There's probably a connection between these two things. Sherpas revere the mountains as loci of godly activity. This encourages a certain carefulness.