AI is currently entering our civilization as a synthetic, dazzling image of a fire projected on a wall, and the tech people are saying “look, it’ll cook everything and keep you warm” as you stand wearing mittens holding a raw steak. Meanwhile, you watch those same people drown the embers of the ancestral hearth fire, around which you once gathered with your family while the chowder-pot simmered, with gallons of freezing water.
There also needs to be accountability: Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg should go to prison. I’m not even sure for what, but these men are clearly the kind of person the world’s folkloric traditions warn us about, demonic and hollow, a threat to the social order. We need deterrence, because right now people look up to these guys and aspire to be like them.
AI serves as a source of cheap and “good enough” intellectual and emotional labor. Since we increasingly don’t provide that stuff to each other through systems because they have been plundered by rich people, AI plays an important social role. It is to thinking and feeling what McDonald’s is to eating.
If we’re living in a crisis of loneliness, bad mental health, and plummeting media literacy, then the arts are the number-one thing that can help solve those issues.
Here is Walker’s article, and here is the Slop Tax proposal from one Mike Pepi, whose Substack-hosted blog posts are delightfully short.
After reading Apple in China and deciding to decouple from Apple, I started asking Google Gemini how to replace my favorite MacOS apps with their Linux equivalents. I have been a vim person from way back but always had Emacs org-mode in the back of mind so a replacement for OmniFocus came first. Replacing MailMate with mu4e — another Emacs addon — was a close second.
Once you learn about the Emacs hammer everything starts looking like a nail, including blog post management. My blogging tool of choice on MacOS is Daniel Jalkut’s MarsEdit, and my experience with mu4e made me think a similar approach could work with micro.blog’s APIs. Now, I know nothing about those APIs nor about Lisp, which is the Emacs scripting language of choice. But Gemini was fluent in both, so it was trivial to instruct it!
It took two tries for each of the main functions I had in mind (full text search, tagging auto-complete, quick copying of the published URL, easy image attachment) but also to get the basic look and feel right, emoji being the most challenging to implement correctly. Even with all that I spent less than 3 hours to have more or less in shape for using and sharing. The single leftover feature, drafts, I don’t use often enough to spend even a few minutes on, but I may get to it at some point.
Microbe.el is available on GitHub. Note that it is completely LLM-generated (Google Gemini) so please approach it with some caution, but also do with it as you please. Many thanks to Manton Reece for creating and stewarding micro.blog and making it as open as it is. Thanks also to Daniel Jalkut for making MarsEdit.
The best description of the conundrum America is in and the future of the American dream I have seen, accounting for the difference between “thin” (superficial) and “thick” culture. Good bit about immigration too:
Our tolerance for thin differences is also why immigration works better here than in other countries. That is especially true of front-row immigrants (highly educated), since they are leaving cultures they didn’t fit into at a thick level (entrepreneurial). They have self selected for being a natural American, at a thick level.
My own thoughts about and experience with immigration and the American dream match the above.
AI begets AI, as previously noted. Papers will be “safer”. Nuance will be lost. The comments to the post are just as enlightening.
No nuance here either. Altman is so unabashedly anti-human that any of his public appearances are right out of a CS Lewis essay or story.
A new RSS reader ↬John Gruber which I am yet to check out. I do like the idea behind it, which tries to tame Dave Winer’s river of news a full two decades after he described the concept. I am less enthusiastic about the website copy: there is so much of it, and it is written in just such a way that it smells strongly of LLM assistance. I don’t think I mind it that much — though my skin still crawls when I see a “not this but that” phrase — and will chalk it up to the font-overload era of 1990s computing when we were just figuring out how to use the many typefaces available.
It warms my heart that Nikola Tesla has a whole shelf for himself at the National Archives gift shop. Thomas Edison? Nowhere in sight. It seems like only yesterday that Matthew Inman felt the need to publish a whole screed on why Tesla was the alpha geek but no, it was 2012, and his campaign bore fruit.
📚 Finished reading: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, a masterpiece that has only become more relevant with time. Not having seen much of the Amazon Prime show I can’t comment on its faithfullness or quality, but I have a hard time imagining it could match the complexity of the original.
🎙 If you have two hours to spare (a particularly long commute, perhaps?) you could do worse than listen to the most recent episode of the Doomscroll podcast with guest David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything. Pairs well with Planet of the Barbarians!
From our visit to the US Capitol: a Corn-inthian column decorating the old entrance.
It took me less that two hours with Google Gemini to create microblog.el, a micro.blog manager for Emacs which can edit old posts, create new ones (even with images), auto-complete tags and perform lightning-fast full text search. What a time to be alive!
Update: It’s out on GitHub!
Notice that I have used the past tense about social media in much of this column. To my mind, it is dead, as I quit it long ago. That is a move to be recommended. (Don’t announce that you are leaving, though. Just leave. You are not Adele cancelling that last Vegas residency of hers.)
Indeed.