We have had this very discussion about self-driving cars.

We have had this very discussion about AI in audio.

We have gotten to the point where AI is tentatively shuttling passengers around urban hubs, effectively turning an open network into a closed system. Waymo and a couple others have gotten to the point where they can replace a fresh-to-the-country Uber driver, under ideal conditions, within a closed environment. But all the companies that proposed a wide-open adaptive environment are either (A) gone, like Uber or (B) killing people with aplomb, like Tesla.

We have gotten to the point where AI is tentatively adding chorus effects and synthesizing voices but it still can't mix worth a shit. We had a lengthy discussion about how to do a simple recording and not only did you not hear the chair squeaks, but they were so bad I couldn't do anything with them. AI can't either, of course. Izotope tried to prove that my entire industry was doomed in 2010 and released a tool that went so badly they scrubbed it from the Internet.

I'm about to cut a DJ session. You would think that beat-matching and pitch-shifting and crossfading would be the sort of thing an AI could do the shit out of. And yes! Rekordbox has an automix. It's got some fuckin' "AI" tag on it too. And if you want to hear the worst mixes you can imagine, engage it. Fuckin' AI can't even tell the difference between a chorus and a verse.

You're not a coder. Neither am I. I know enough to know that I hate it, but that's based a lot on learning to code in fucking Fortran and Turbo Pascal. You know enough that you'd rather code than pick up a soldering iron, but you're very much at the "genie, make me a thing" phase of the adventure. You never got to try a self-driving car in the beginning; you likely would have survived but also likely wouldn't have pushed it into the corner-cases necessary to ensure life-safety for everyone on the road.

"Push it into the corner cases" is the thing every AI booster refuses to do.

If there's anything I'd want to get built or get changed I had a feedback slack that the onshore devs would process into Jira. If there was anything big that I needed to be implemented, I'd get the onshore junior dev to essentially parse my request into Jira for me, often after a few meetings because chopping my idea into baby-sized steps is never a straightforward task. It'd be well-documented what the desired change was, and what the steps were to get there before it went to offshore. Then a week or so later they'd be working on it and have a bunch of extra questions. Then I'd get a new TestFlight version of the app, I'd do a bunch of testing with that, and would often come back with half a dozen edge cases and misinterpretations. Back and forth, testing, questions, back and forth, testing and then it would usually be fine.

kk in this scenario? For Pro Tools? I'm the onshore dev.

The first months of her job, she was not allowed to write code, instead just having to review other people's code in order to initiate osmosis for the inner workings of EHRs because there is, essentially, no documentation. The entire company from what I gather seems to operate on tribal knowledge, the elders passing down quirks and edge cases that stay in. It is also company policy to forbid writing any documentation in the code. Instead of documentation, they've created a layer cake of processes that code has to go through to be reviewed and checked.

Their problem is a lack of documentation, not the imminent threat of AI. The Birth Center has a 500pp binder of documentation on every fucking thing we do, not because we really like documentation but because we're required to have all this shit documented for certification. Because if we fuck up in the clutch, people may die.

here's the problem in a nutshell:

- Be this company

- Be ready to join the 20th century

- Be stopping down for eight months to fucking document everything

- Be ready to join the 21st century

OR

- Be this company

- Be ready to join the 20th century

- Be feeding your codebase to an AI to generate documentation

- Be spending three years on pins and needles as you spend eighteen months proofreading the documentation and then eighteen months breaking things you missed

From your addendum:

Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?

FUCKING HELL DUDE. Which is faster - writing it yourself or playing minesweeper with someone else's code? If you answered "playing minesweeper" you just tattled on yourself.

Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.

Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic. Using agents well is both a both a skill and an engineering project all its own, of prompts, indices, and (especially) tooling. LLMs only produce shitty code if you let them.

Here's a game I play regularly:

"Hey receptionist - I would like a slide for the billboard that says this."

(crap slide)

"Great. Now apply the discussions we've had about whitespace and readibility."

(Vaguely less-crap slide)

"Okay awesome. Can you mess with the color palate a little?"

(heinously more-crap slide)

"Okay try these RGB values"

(less-crap slide, copy changes, receptionist goes on crying jag)

"No no you're doing great. Er... do this."

(less-crap slide, let's ship it)

I play this game because it's good for her self-esteem. Her roommate is a designer, so she fancies herself a designer. SHE IS NOT A DESIGNER. We've had all sorts of discussions about rule-of-thirds, read-three-times, don't-flash, etc. About a third of it is accessible to her at any given time. But she has such pride in seeing her work parking-lot sized that it's worth it to me for morale to let her pretend she's designing things, rather than whipping that shit out on my own in a third the time.

I give no fux about Gemini's self-esteem

My expectation is that management will, sometime in the next years, realize that they can actually fix the fundamental problems with their organization and get more done.

Your expectation is that everyone will go "well, it'll make it that last 20 percent no problem so we should adopt it now, and damn the consequences."

Mine is, too.

The difference is I don't think it'll work out.

Your wife is married to a white Ph.D scientist with a wikipedia page. She is, as the MAGAts like to say, a "global elite." Sure, she may not have been married to you at the time but it's not like you ordered her up out of the back of a magazine.

I took some courses at a couple community colleges. I had the tallest degree in the room. "local community college" is not and should not be a wellspring of intellectual excellence.

You're presuming that this test run 40 years ago would have different results and I don't think that's a safe presumption.

My mother taught college-level biology, physiology, anatomy and microbiology for 20 years. My father taught physics in the Peace Corps. My mother didn't disagree with my father's assertion that one week ahead of your students is far enough when you're teaching the rudiments; every time she taught a new course she had to learn a new course.

The authors don't name "Kansas Regional Universities" 1 and 2 but considering two of the three teach at Pitt, it's a safe bet Pitt is one of them. If you check their notable alumni you see a lot of football players. Here's where the students were on "a ton of books that weren't part of their educational curriculum":

Each taped reading test began with a brief questionnaire in which subjects were asked to give authors and titles of specific nineteenth-century American and British literary works and to explain briefly what they knew about nineteenth-century American and British history and culture. The purpose of these questions was to see how much literary and/or cultural knowledge the subjects possessed. According to Wolfgang Iser in The Act of Reading, one’s ability to read complex literature is partly dependent on one’s knowledge of what he calls the “repertoire” of the text, “the form of references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or to the whole culture from which the text has emerged” (69). With Bleak House, this knowledge is crucial.

The results from the questionnaire revealed that most of these subjects could not rely on previous knowledge to help them with Bleak House; in fact, they could not remember much of what they had studied in previous or current English classes. When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own. The majority also could not [End Page 4] access any detail on the information they recalled; they could mention the Industrial Revolution, for example, but could not define what it was. These results suggest that the majority of the subjects in our study were not transferring the literary texts or information from previous classes into their long-term memories.

You're talkin' undergrad English majors at a party school who were not answering quiz questions, they were jawboning about Dickens with peers:

Our next step was the individual think-aloud study. Each subject was tested in a private, one-on-one taped 20-minute session with a facilitator. We made sure that the facilitators were not familiar with the specific subjects whom they were testing. For the KRU1 study, the facilitators were English graduate students; for the KRU2 study, the facilitators were English undergraduate students from KRU1. During the sessions, subjects were asked to read out loud and then translate each sentence of the passage from Bleak House. Subjects were encouraged to go at their own pace and were not required to finish the entire passage. Those who were uncomfortable reading out loud had the option to read silently.

Because we wanted to see how well students could read a complex text on their own, we told the facilitators not to help the subjects interpret the text. Instead, facilitators were there to record how subjects were understanding the material and to stop them every few sentences to request an interpretation. The taped recordings show that facilitators followed this training and politely refused any request for help from subjects. Facilitators also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. If subjects did go to Google or an outside website for help, the facilitator recorded that fact. At the end of each reading study, the facilitator asked each subject a brief series of questions on what the subject thought would happen next and their comfort level in reading the rest of the novel. These questions were designed to see how well our subjects understood the passage and how they perceived their own success with reading the text. All responded that they believed that they could read the rest of Bleak House with no problem.

A follow-up study would be to see if the results are the same with a proctor outside their peer group. 'cuz I tell you what, I'ma slag on Dickens hella less if my conversational counterpart has patches on his elbows.

dooooooooooooooooooooooooood

HOW I BECAME A POOL EXPERT

So I bought this house? And it had a 50' sewer belly. That cost $70k to fix. Then once that was fixed, we discovered another 10' sewer belly. that cost $10k to fix, and involved destroying the concrete between the cleanout and the driveway, bulldozing clear through a bathroom. So okay we're going to fix that bathroom because we have to.

And it also involved getting the pump and filter out of the way. And destroying the concrete they go through. Which provided an opportunity to move them out of the place I'm putting a mud room. So I tricked the plumbers into moving the connections; can I trick them into hooking shit back up? HELL NO. They don't do pool shit. Okay, who does pool shit?

Well, you see, there have been enough greedy pool companies that they call cannibalized each other. Apparently a month before my pool pump needed moving, three of five local pool companies ate shit. One of them demonstrably sucks. I buy my shit from them? But their techs are jackasses and the guys at the store will cop to that. The other one also demonstrably sucks. The first one told me they couldn't get to it this year. The next one came out and told me it would be about six weeks, and probably take an afternoon.

To connect an existing pool pump to an existing pool.

But okay. We'll call. There's a quote. it's $5800. When I ask how one technician for one day is $5800 I'm told who run Bartertown. So okay. You know what? Fukkit. This is something I won't have to deal with ever again. When can it happen.

I have to pay in advance before they can schedule.

Okay, fukkit. You know what? here's a goddamn credit card number. At least it will get done. Hopefully right.

If I pay by credit card they charge a ten percent service fee.

...Uhm holy shit. Can I say I'm going to pay you by check and then I can get on the schedule?

They'll be happy to call me to schedule once the check clears.

At which point I determined that it's one thing to charge me the fuck-you price, it's quite another to tell me to fuck off while charging me the fuck-you price, and still quite another to charge a fuck-you surcharge on the fuck-you price while telling me to fuck off.

So I spent two days with $150 worth of Oatey and elbows and moved my fucking pool pump. Reduced the number of bends by about 30% while I was at it. And no matter the magnitude and direction of my grievance at the various and sundry building trades, "pool fuckers" are absolutely in the ninth fucking circle of hell.

Here's the problem: stupid vocabulary and tortured sentence structure are the hallmarks of advanced reading. That's the register. Much like the commenter, I absolutely dominated early childhood cognitive tests that required you to learn nonsense words, remember them for 48 hours, and then answer questions about their definitions. Problem was, they weren't nonsense words they were obscure English words and I generally knew most of them through reading.

Here's Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, 1926:

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

Here's Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, 1924:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend

of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to

Howth Castle and Environs.

That shit's so impenetrable that if you look it up online the glossary comes with. In fact, early assessment of Finnegan's Wake was that it was a piece of shit:

The initial reception of Finnegans Wake was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of language to open hostility towards its seeming pointlessness and lack of respect for literary conventions. Joyce, however, asserted that every syllable was justified. Its allusive and experimental style has resulted in it having a reputation as one of the most difficult works in literature.

Although the base language of the novel is English, it is an English that Joyce modified by combining and altering words from many languages into his own distinctive idiom. Some commentators believe this technique was Joyce's attempt to reproduce the way that memories, people, and places are mixed together and transformed in a dreaming or half-awakened state.

What happened next, of course, is three generations of English majors climbed that Matterhorn to prove they could, then clapped each other on the back for their mountain climbing acumen, then looked down their noses at everyone who thinks Hemingway has any literary value.

Slowly the book's critical capital began to rise to the point that, in 1957, Northrop Frye described Finnegans Wake as the "chief ironic epic of our time" and Anthony Burgess lauded the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Concerning the importance of such laughter, Darragh Greene has argued that the Wake through its series of puns, neologisms, compounds, and riddles shows the play of Wittgensteinian language-games, and by laughing at them, the reader learns how language makes the world and is freed from its snares and bewitchment.

Take it from a pompous asshole. The key to literacy is to read the works of pompous assholes. The key to being celebrated by pompous assholes is to write like a pompous asshole.

So I guess it's been eight weeks since a house update? steve mentioned he liked them so you can blame him.

Perhaps more importantly there was enough blood in my eye that the ophthalmologist missed a second tear when he lasered me the first time, so my follow-up became "hold still this hurts you more than it hurts me." Speaking as someone who has done three fillings without novocaine, if you're given a choice between a filling with no novocaine or a laser to the eye, pick the tooth. I'm going back on Monday, hopefully not for a third bout of eye lasering. It was edifying to hear that there was so much schmutz in my eye that the ophthalmologist missed a whole-ass tear (bigger than the first, thank god my retina didn't detach out of spite) because it was a fuckin' pain in the ass getting the Russian Woodpecker up and running while staring through 4ml of blood.

That's technically nine antennas, bought as two, a 1-bay VHF that exists almost entirely for PBS and two banked, steerable 4-bays that exist for pretty much everything else. All in all I paid like $500 for absolute broadcast dominance that shows up on my network as four RTSP streams I can pluck down to any device in the house. Theoretically the house gets 82 channels although most of them are worthless and a third of them are repeats. But hey. Downton Abbey and the NFL without any shitty compression artifacts. And now I can put insulation back in the attic. Or I can once I add another alarm capture point and hardwire the remaining fifty dozen window sensors.

Another adventure that happened was "well the pool is back up, time to figure out a heater" which went like this

- "huh, the heater I should put in according to calcs requires 40GPM to work. I'm running... less than ten WTF"

- "apparently that's because my filter is full of paint because if you have a painted pool it should be backwashed every week and I haven't backwashed it since August because it unleashes a torrent of milk into my neighbor's driveway"

- "except now it's so clogged that it won't even prime"

- "maybe if I put it in bypass it'll work"

- "huh if I put it in bypass it spews a quarter cup of water out the backwash port which shouldn't be a problem because this pump is rated IPX6"

- "why is it steaming"

- "why is it faulting"

- "why is my new ethernet controller dead"

- "Huh, this must be why you can't by Jandy pumps within a 500 mile radius of Seattle - THEY AREN'T FUCKING RAIN TIGHT AND THEY DON'T HONOR THE WARRANTIES"

- "but if I flip out of Jandy I need to replace a $500 valve and a $1500 sand filter while I'm at it"

- "and that fucking board is $900"

- "and a new pump is $1400"

So. "what size heater do I need" (the previous one cracked like a fucking egg because the former homeowners didn't empty it before the freeze) became "I guess I'm installing a horse trough while waiting two weeks for Amazon to ship me a 1.85HP variable speed pool pump goddamnit." Even the local pool store went "goddamn, klein, this pool is giving you a hard time" (we're on a first name basis and they give me a steep discount because they like my stories)

The pump showed up and changed out without drama because apparently I know what the fuck I'm doing. The pipe coming out of the backwash is clear PVC, specially ordered at $1 an INCH, so that I can actually see what's going on, seeing as it's backwashing on the other side of a wall 20 feet away. And the plan is to backwash into the horse trough until it's clear, rinse into the horse trough until it's clear, let the paint settle out for a day or so and then empty the horse trough either into my now-officially-headlands-of-Lyon-Creek wetlands (an environmental consultant and 4 state officials later) or into my giant Sequoia.

Here's 90 SECONDS of backwashing and rinsing.

There are now nine zones of irrigation. I'm glad I'm not doing any of that. It's plumbing, under the dirt, in the sun. I'm a 2 1/2" hole away from having that shit connected to the Internet because I also activated the last two racks. Garage is wired. I'm running out of CAT5 on one of three spools; I've probably put 2000 feet of data cable into this house already. Part of the reason I'm able to stop down today is I need to order more speaker cable... and nobody is waiting on me right now. The door store had a labor day sale which allowed me to buy eight doors, pre-hung, for $1200. Oh, fuck, we didn't even talk about the beam.

So the living room floor was kinda... spongey? And also kind of a skateboard ramp. It definitely bowed in the middle. Structural came out and looked at it and said "congratulations, you've passed your torture test" and moved on. My Tasmanian Devil contractor kept harping on it, though, and I'm glad he did. Eventually he cut away the sheetrock around the beam and this is what we saw.

So yeah. Not only did the old guy go "my wife thinks it's cold in this room, could you put in a duct" and get a fake duct, he went "it feels like things settled after the Nisqually Quake, could you reinforce the floor" and got a fake beam.

This finally got structural to get off his ass and give me drawings to reinforce the fireplace. Of course, he reinforced the wrong fireplace because he's a lazy asshole who can't read drawings. So when I went "lol that one is slab on grade you ass" (only much more politely) he said "no worries the details are the same" and took three days to correct his bone-head mistake. So now the beam is real and it's got 2" LVL on either side of it with cross-bolts so I said "we're staining that fucker" and now the shop looks like I've been stealing structure from REI

That shit was done weeks ago but I don't have time to dwell on this shit so I don't even have a picture of it done. It's now resting on 4x6 pillars which are resting on concrete footings which had to be cut out of the existing concrete floor and once that concrete was cut away they found MOAR CONCRETE because this house is Hogwart's.

It's never going to be done. It's endless. It doesn't matter that I now have six racks up and running with eight cameras (there will be thirteen, I think) and we're now legit picking out paint. I had nine contractors show up unannounced (the day my eye sprung a leak) and I had to tell them all to move their trucks because cabinets were being dropped off. It also doesn't matter that the big stuff is done and we're to the point of wrapping up. It's dumb shit like "I'm ready to backwash my pool, looks like I need to buy a new pump" and "there's water in the garage now so I can determine beyond a reasonable doubt that the icemaker is broken on this fridge even though it's brand new because it's a Samsung."

The Tasmanian Devil contractor was tasked with demoing some shit. This included a door and frame. He destroyed the frame, despite the fact that we needed it, and tried to throw away the door, despite the fact that it's an apex transitional solid oak 8-core that would cost roughly $3200 to recreate (I looked into it - I had to steal a closet door from downstairs for my new laundry room because I'm not a pay-$3200-for-doors kinda guy and in that one area there are SIX in immediate view so they better fuckin' match). Day before yesterday I tasked him with installing some bypass doors in two closets next week. He asked if we had more trim "because I'm likely to destroy it." WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TOUCHING THE GODDAMN TRIM IT'S BYPASS DOORS. He does great work when it's big and involving power tools? But he also thinks he's a finish carpenter and I have to go "let me show you the fifteen page environmental impact statement you generated by not waiting until my go-ahead before clearing out my wetlands." I'm exchanging bifolds for bypass, buy new trim because EVERYTHING IS DEMO

Check this shit out tho

The last three contractors to come through had either (A) worked on the house before I bought it (B) worked on the house early on and said "Holy shit this place has come along way" "wow you really opened the place up" or "this is amazing."

I think it's gonna be a nice house.

And I'm coming to terms with the fact that what started out as "a kitchen and bathroom remodel" has become the Mount Everest of renovations. It has been edifying to hear one contractor after another go "this is my favorite project" or "I get it now. I see what you're going for. This is fucking cool."

Maybe I'll live long enough to move in. Jury's still out.

I have five more speaker lines to run and the living room can be buttoned back up. That means I need to order speaker wire, which I am not doing while I write this up. Once the speaker wire is up we can fix the drywall in there.

And I can move on to this.

You're not giving a counterfactual, you're restating debunked arguments. That's my point. You have no valid or cogent argument here because you aren't reliant on facts, you're all about the vibes.

We're here in a pissing match because you said - and keep saying - that "The actual problem isn’t college or student loans." Except time and time again, I've given evidence that the actual problem IS college and IS student loans. Here's what I said two fuckin' months ago:

ninety two percent of student loan debt is federal. you fills out your FAFSA you gets your check. This is because first the FFEL then the FDLP guarantee these loans, therefore they are the lowest rates available to anyone.

FFEL was in effect from 1965 to 2010, FDLP in effect from 2010 'til now. Simply put, college students from 1965-2010 had a different financial landscape than college students from 1945 to 1965... and college students from 1945-1965 had the GI Bill. They had the GI Bill, of course, because more than half of young men were enlisted between 1941 and 1945 and letting them into the job force with nothing better to do isn't a great idea, and then we had Korea, and then we had Vietnam but for everyone else there's FEDERALLY GUARANTEED STUDENT LOANS so you could either pay Uncle Sam up front or on the back end.

Businesses decided that it was cheaper to require applicants to have training rather than to train themselves.

You wanna die on the hill that employers just up'n'decided that they felt like requiring a college degree so all of a sudden, everyone went "well shit guess I'm going to Columbia now" rather than recognizing that when a college degree is advantageous and free, everyone goes to college.

There's no grand conspiracy. The Chamber of Commerce didn't have a meeting at the Skull'n'Bones club and say "fuck yeah bachelor's degrees or no typing pool." What happened is the government extended education to everyone at favorable terms and everyone got educated. What happened next is Republicans lost their shit over the idea that college liberals might get a free ride and made it really tough to disburse college debt in bankruptcy, and then a generation later Republicans lost their shit again and made it impossible.

I'm saying all this for a third time in some instances. It's not "especially once student loans were available" it's BECAUSE student loans were not only available it's that they are lucrative as fuck for anyone servicing them. It's nothing like cancer drugs, it's like student loans.

I don’t see how “actually, since you need college to get a good job, people go to college” deals with what I said, which is that if kids didn’t need college for the hope of a good job, then those kids uninterested in academic work would likely make different choices, and this would change everything in the equation.

You're arguing that the problem is on the jobs side, and if everyone just got paid more there would be no problems. You have no arguments whatsoever as to why the price of college exploded in the past 20 years. On the other hand, I've now given you two heavily-documented responses explaining EXACTLY why the price of college has exploded over the past 20 years and you're resolutely at if we paid people more college would be cheaper.

If you could do what most people could do on graduation in 1955 — go get a job pretty much anywhere that paid a livable wage, the demand for college would reduce drastically because people are not choosing college because they have a burning passion to read books on philosophy or English Literature. They want the jobs that the diploma opens to them. If you had viable options for working indoors pushing paper that didn’t require college, I expect enrollment to drop like a rock.

Okay, so what changed since 1955 other than college loans becoming available to all and dissolving of college debt becoming available to none? Elastic inelastic blah blah blah you wanna give causality a try?

Nobody needs a degree to be a spreadsheet jockey, answer phones, or work in marketing.

Fucking hell, buddy, they absolutely do. Here's an undergrad in spreadsheets tearing apart the biggest conservative political theory of 2010:

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's easy. The problem isn't the education, the problem is the cost of education and the cost of education is related to policy.

And don’t get cocky and try to push it too hard. A coding agent is like a big-ass tunnel borer machine when you've been using power shovels. It is strong, sure, hella strong. But it is expensive, it can still get stuck badly, and you need to guide it carefully at all times. And it's not that fast – it's not going to bore through the English Channel in a day. So don't set unrealistic expectations going in. Just focus on how different this stuff is from 2 years ago when ChatGPT came out, and then marvel at how different it is from 2 months ago when the best we had was chat.

Let's talk about Photoshop, shall we?

I suck at Photoshop. Always have, despite taking an in-person course (in Photoshop 2.0!) and at least three online courses. I started hacking at Photoshop when people were still using it to retouch photos, fer chrissake, then adopted Lightroom when Photoshop became too bloated to use on photos, then adopted Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 while still trying to make headway against Photoshop, then abandoned Lightroom when they abandoned cataloguing.

Photoshop, meanwhile, got folded into "Creative Suite" which meant you were heavily penalized for buying Photoshop when for less than double the price you could get five other programs you'd never use. So yeah, you'd pay $1100 or some tedious shit to get the whole thing, then $100 or $200 to update it, but mostly you torrented it because fuck you, Adobe. Then it got folded into Creative Cloud and yeah, you could rent Photoshop for $30 a month but you could rent all of Creative Cloud for $50 a month! But then nobody rented Creative Cloud because fucking hell you can do 90% of what you need in Canva. Effectively for free.

Adobe tried to staunch the bleeding by paying $20b for Figma, but it didn't work. instead they had to pay Figma $1b for letting Canva eat their lunch while they fucked around trying to buy themselves out of a problem. Adobe is dealing with AI by forcing everyone to use it and hiking their prices, which Barclay's thinks is bullish. My kid's art class is learning photo editing in - wait for it - Canva. Her friends do their video editing in CapCut, because of course they do. Meanwhile she is the undisputed heavyweight champion in the world because I spent 10 minutes showing her how to punk around in iMovie.

For you CIO-types, fleets will enable your developers to spend thousands of dollars a day. Even if inference costs plummet, the Jevons Paradox will result in higher usage offsetting those costs. If you don’t believe that, go ask to see your bug backlog; it’s basically infinite.

Thousands a day!? But it's money incredibly well spent! Your engineering org will start to be able to go as fast as you want them to go, for once. Can you believe it? It'll be like being a startup again. You’ll be able to “surprise and delight your customers”, as Jeff Bezos is fond of saying, at an elite level you never dreamed possible.

Who's got two thumbs and knows what Jira is? This guy! Because I beta-test. And in the past ten years, the three platforms I beta test have moved from Jira to Centercode because Jira is bloated and expensive. Two of those companies? Publicly traded. The third? One of the biggest privately-held firms in Hollywood.

I don't know about one of them, but I know the other two have a coder or two in the US working on any given feature and an army of offshore developers. You are now aware that Pro Tools is largely written in Ukraine; Putin really fucked up my beta schedule, albeit only for about four months. So. Are these firms going to trade off AI for offshore development farms? Maybe if it saves them money and time but we've got bugs that we know what they are and we know where they are and we know they aren't getting squished because for the past fifteen years those bugs are a consequence of legacy code that supports this one studio that can't change out this other piece of code and bloody hell if you lose that one studio you're sunk so the entire rest of the world deals with this one rare error that pops up all of a sudden.

Are... you going to explain to the AI fleet why that bug has to stay?

I know four CRMs. How wretched is that? Two of them I know because there have been hints of APIs that allow me to talk to the two CRMs we run, and the two CRMs we run are that most wretched of CRM, known as the EHR. Yeah. We run two EHRs. I know. Because one is good for naturopathic medicine and the other is unparalleled for midwifery. One of the EHRs? It's got two coders. Neither of them like me. They were willing to give me access to their API for long enough to get Zoho running for $10k. I opted out, since they said "we support Zoho" when in fact they meant "our db will theoretically interface with Zoho's db." The other has one coder. His name is Mohammed. I had a great conversation with them once where I explained what an API was. They thought it sounded like a cool idea. They've been working on mobile (yes, I know) for six years now; interfacing with my phone system sounded like science fiction to them.

Now - I know what you're thinking. Mohammed needs an AI! Goddamn right. Just think of what Mohammed could do with a $50k "fleet" of AI agents, other than burn through six months of budget that needs to be passed along to a legion of independent shoestring-budget alpha females. Why, he could create a mobile app! He could integrate with phone systems! He could integrate teleprescription!" I can tell you what he did do with AI. He changed the text box in one of the description fields into an RTF box in one of the description fields and broke everyone's records going back to the dawn of the system; everyone's records are now full of "&nbsp"s everywhere. Took two days to roll things back.

Now - I know a guy. Has worked for Salesforce for like 20 years. His job? Assess your needs, assess Salesforce's stack and custom-build a Salesforce CRM for your organization. His department has been shrinking gradually because Salesforce wanted $150 per user per month to glue my phone system to my EHRs. Now they want $80. "Hey OpenAI, configure this pre-existing Salesforce stack to work with this pre-existing accounting software" is something an AI should be able to do, particularly if you can blame the customer if it doesn't work. Of course, you might end up injecting "&nbsp" everywhere and having to revert.

And we've got a computer science masters' student on our network right now. Her thesis is going to be about tricking the API of one of our EHRs into coughing up useful data we can use to show insurance companies. These are metrics the software is required by law to collect - that whole "HIPAA" thing? It's the Health Insurance PORTABILITY and ACCESSIBILITY Act, there's no "privacy" in there anywhere - and yet, what she gets is blanks and garbage. Masters' student. Thesis project. She's salty that we aren't running EPIC because why wouldn't you run EPIC?

Because at my size, EPIC is $30k a seat to buy and $3k a month to operate. And every hospital pays it. Because they have human coders, who solve your problems, who make it all work, and make it so your data can be sent anywhere. EPIC? Epic isn't gonna fill your text fields with "&nbsp."

_________________________________________

Look. You think I might be able to fumblefuck my way through "vibe-coding?" I'll bet I could. I know how to trick Google into giving me what I want, and what limited entertainment I've derived from OpenAI has turned out exactly how I wanted it to. I could certainly do worse. And my phone system has an API, and one of my EHRs has an API, and I'll bet I could "vibe-code" some glue-ware that would open up my EHR when the phone rings, scan for a known phone number, feed a hit into the phone system so the name pops up automatically and open the EHR so that my receptionist can get some deetz about who she's talking to. This is literally the ORIGINAL SIN of CRMs. It's what they were CREATED to do. It is the only reason they fucking exist - CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT.

But what I know? Is if my finger into Google Workspace drops below a threshold of $5 it will stop returning API calls requiring regeneration of the key or else not only does voice transcription fail, the callback to another service I use fails which fails something else and the whole voicemail system goes down. Ask me how I know. Better yet, ask me how long it took to get an answer about this out of Google because the answer is "never" because there's no documentation on any of this shit and you think I'm going to hand over this much mission-critical shit to Microsoft CoPilot or some shit when Mohammed brought down an entire EHR by asking for RTF? Mohammed? Who codes for a living, rather than to just eke out a little extra time to hang out with my wife?

You know what I don't need? A tunnel borer. Because there's buried electrical and natural gas in there and I don't need a fucking tunnel. I need two guys who know how to put in drip irrigation, and I will pay them, and I will manage them, because if you just YOLO into this shit you get surprise landscaping.

Coders? And people who write about code? Suck bawlz at considering where the code lives. What the code does. And I don't know that we'll ever know what knocked out Telefonica?

But my money is on "vibe-coding."

You know... this is still bugging me two days later. Like it personally insulted my daughter or something.

- I worked a closed-door "futurist" session for Warner Brothers some years ago, where the c-suite drones of every duchy of the far-flung Time Warner empire showed up to learn what the hell they were all supposed to do about this "internet" thing. The VP for programming of HBO was there, as well as the content directors for DC Comics and Youtube (he had just been hired away). And we had this one "futurist" who took to the stage to discuss torrenting. He turned to the audience and said "do you guys really believe that some kid with 80,000 MP3s on his hard drive was going to buy those tracks? Do you honestly think he'll even listen to them all? Of course not! HE'S CURATING!" and everyone nodded thoughtfully.

- Trent Reznor once called Oink.me.UK the best site on the internet. Sony was caught seeding their unreleased shit on there, while also demanding it be shut down. The guys into music enough to be on a private tracker, to pay for a seedbox? They're your influencers. The ones who decide "yes, I will listen to this once and seed it forever because this is how my tribe reaches each other" are the ones keeping the system running. When I need new music to play on the radio I pull down every torrent within a laundry list of micro-genres published since the last time I was dry. Anything good enough that someone else goes through the trouble to create a torrent of? It may not be to your taste but you know it reached someone.

- Jeron Lanier basically predicted NFTs in You Are Not A Gadget by pointing out that physical music sales will never come back, and if bands want to make money they need to focus on collectibles and the fan experience.

- I don't often purchase music off Bandcamp. I purchase shirts. Nearly everything is on Tidal and Tidal integrates with Rekordbox so it's easier just to stream it. But that doesn't make anyone any money except Tidal and AlphaTheta.

That's just fandom. The act of curation is the act of appreciation. Seeking out things you like and sharing them is the whole fucking point. The manifesto I wrote that saved my radio show relied on a "push/pull relationship" with music, stating that there were people who sought out new music and propagated it to their friends ("push") and there were people who were more comfortable listening to things that had already been vetted for social acceptance via MTV, Rolling Stone or television licensing ("pull"). I went further and pointed out that goth-industrial was entirely push because the path to mainstream acceptance had exactly one bridge on it - my show.

But I think the reason this bitch really bugs the shit out of me is because of a conversation I had 25 years ago. I dated this girl who was awful, who had a father who was awful, who had two kids with one of his students (she was not awful). 20 years his junior, she was within 10 years of me and the girlfriend, which means her siblings had young children. They tried to relate to us as peers rather than as youth, which was nice, but they were also young parents, which was interesting. I was talking to one of them about mixing in clubs and she said something that hit hard - "oh, sure, you listen to a lot of music now but trust me, once you have kids, you won't anymore. You'll just want the silence. I haven't listened to a band in five years."

Fuckin' haunting, yo. Also absolutely untrue, no basis in fact, etc etc etc but at the ripe old age of 22, here was a lady going "I have turned old and you shall as well, it is inevitable."

I think of the "pullers." The ones for whom Columbia House existed. The "album of the month" club for people who don't want to decide for themselves what they like, who want someone in authority to tell them that they won't be mocked at a cocktail party for liking the wrong things. The ones who had a subscription to Spin Magazine because their friends had subscriptions to Spin Magazine so they could all stick to what they read in Spin Magazine and rest assured that their lives were Spin Magazine approved. And those of us who considered it the anathema of music appreciation? Well, we just never crossed paths.

THAT is what this column is bitching about:

- There's no authority to assure people like this of what's cool

- If they wander out into the wild wooly world they might encounter people who didn't care for Spin Magazine

- They aren't sure what they should enjoy if there isn't someone to give them permission

IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER TO CONNECT WITH THE MUSIC YOU LOVE... BUT YOU HAVE TO LOVE MUSIC.

Spin Magazine, ironically enough, ran a feature entitled "Top Ten Albums Owned By People Who Hate Music." Their argument was that there were some albums that were so universal that people with absolutely no connection to music whatsoever ended up with a copy. I thought of that article when I saw Icona Pop for sale on vinyl at Whole Foods. The article, of course, predated Whole Foods and Icona Pop by decades; their list included Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours."

Bjork is currently promoting a new concert film being released called Cornucopia. She's been releasing new photoshoots and interviews almost every day for the past two weeks. For a musician who normally goes into hiding and only emerges when it's time to promote something, it's been a pretty exciting time to be a fan. However, all the information being put out, promoted on social media and reposted on places like Reddit, have all been a little confusing.

This is a woman demanding that Bjork be less confusing for the ease of her musical fandom.

I ran lights for Gary Numan once. It was the Exile tour, well after Cars. And as I came out to the lighting console, all sixteen channels of it, and moved a pair of drinks out of my space, a couple yuppies grew outraged with me. "This is our spot!" they said. "This is the lighting guy's spot," I said. "Well we were here first!" they responded. "Well you aren't anymore," I said, and they wandered off to find a bouncer, then came back in a huff and glowered over my shoulder.

Until the first song, anyway.

The second song was Cars, but they didn't even stick around long enough to hear it. They came for that song they heard on the radio, won't it be fun to think back to that time when everyone took their musical instruction from Rick Dees or Casey Casem?

It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. I've been noticing this sentiment with society, this feeling of always being mentally exhausted. How many times have we had a discussion with a friend who was recommending a show and our response was, "Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!" The reality is we're not going to watch it because we feel like we have no time to get through everything and we don't fully trust other people's recommendations.

This is a lady who wants Bjork to explain the riddles, who wants entertainment to be a puzzle she can solve, who doesn't "fully trust other people's recommendations" unless, apparently, those people work for Viacom. She doesn't want to order a Bedless Bones t-shirt off of Bandcamp because Kadri Sammel's cat might have left cat hair on it.

One of the things I found in the attic was a nasty-gram from Columbia House. Dude was delinquent on some 8-tracks; the one that really stuck with me was Burt Bacharach's Lost Horizon soundtrack. Now - there were a lot fewer ways to connect with music in 1972. It was a pretty forgettable year.

But still.

Speaking as a Billboard-reporting, Nielsen-tabulating, A&R-wrestling radio DJ...

I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.

Everything that ran on 120 Minutes or Amp - a 14-year and a 5-year run, respectively - was on a major label. 120 minutes was the product of the music juggernaut turning to "college radio" when they discovered that they could shove REM down everyone's throats as effectively as Beastie Boys, so long as they shoved it down the right pipe. Amp was the product of Crystal Method and Chemical Brothers colonizing the dance music channels more effectively than the college music channels. Anyone casually referring to Amp is speaking in an extremely specific '90s kid register of speech, an era where online culture was dominated by college kids on dialup. It died about the same time as TRL reverted MTV from countercultural juggernaut to corporate panderbear. If you're sitting there longing for the days when some dude at Columbia told you what to listen to, your problem now is that you've aged out of the demo not that Columbia can't figure out how to shove music down your throat.

The rise of social media has killed the art of curation because, these days, things are rarely curated. Criticism is dead (with Fantano3 being the one exception) and Gen Alpha doesn't know how to find music through anything but TikTok. Relying on algorithms puts way too much power in technology's hands. And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble. Oh, you like shoegaze? Well, that's all the algorithm is going to give you until you intentionally start listening to something else.

To the contrary, my daughter, all of twelve years old, has gotten pretty damn good at tricking new music out of Tidal. That's because the algorithms don't predict content you've seen before - GraceNote has been doing things the exact same way since nineteen diggity two and it's got sound scientific data saying "this song and this song are similar along the following dozen metrics that decades of focus groups confirm track affinity." Spotify and everyone else have a preposterously large corpus saying "since 9/10ths of our listeners who like Nirvana also like REM, we're 100% going to shove REM down your throat." The author is absolutely right in that it's not going to suggest gregorian chants to go along with your REM because it assumes that rogue appearances of Randy Travis are negative for your listening style - "Aphex Twin" and "Squarepusher" are a pairing, "Portishead" "tricky" "Hooverphonic" "Poe" and "Veruca Salt" are such an agglomeration of major-label "indie" acts that I can basically know exactly what year your Spin Magazine subscription expired.

BECAUSE THAT'S THE PROBLEM: You forgot that you used to pay for curation.

Any streaming service worth their salt has a million curated playlists. You can listen to them. Not your cup of tea? Then you need to find a different curator.

Same with movies. Once a week I would watch Ebert and Roeper, who would discuss and review all the releases of that week, including indie and foreign ones. I would also sometimes flip through film magazines or randomly stumble across something cool being aired on the IFC channel or Bravo2.

Fuckin' nothing on Ebert & Roeper was outside a major studio's distro network. If it was on Ebert & Roeper it opened on a thousand screens. That metric has become so useless that nobody bats an eye when Tom Hanks releases a $150m movie on frickin' Apple TV, when Jeff Bezos somehow squanders $90m an episode on Hobbits. I love me some Lola Rennt as much or more than the next guy but (1) it was Sony (2) it had a six month theater run. I subscribe to the Washington Post and the Seattle Times and they both have theater critics. I ignore both of them because fuck you, that's why, but I mean for fuck's sake

How many times have we had a discussion with a friend who was recommending a show and our response was, "Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"

What do you want here, lady

If you pivoted from "I read it in Spin Magazine, it must be good" to "I don't have time to check out a show my friends are recommending" that's a you problem, not a culture problem. Like,

- You can literally stumble across a song on Spotify

- Look it up on Bandcamp

- Find every single person who bought it

- Pick somebody at random and look up every single thing they've favorited or bought on Bandcamp

- See every single person who follows them and see the same thing

- Listen to every single track six times before Bandcamp even asks you for money

But yeah if you're gonna sit there and go nobody is telling me what to listen tooooooooooooooooooo then I know exactly what happened:

1) You gave up everything in favor of social media

2) That was building affinity in order to demonstrate its value to advertisers

3) And now that the advertisers are questioning the metrics

4) Social media is milking you like a goddamn cow and you don't like it.

Anbody sitting there pining for Spin Magazine and waxing nostalgic about Portishead is (1) old (2) tasteless and you know what? If fuckin' Spotify isn't serving you up new shit to go along with your Portishead it's because you don't like it. Here's a Portishead-adjacent band whose new album came out last year:

And I mean... fuck. That's some nostalgic shit right there. 353 whole views! 54k plays on Spotify, 200 album downloads off Bandcamp. Goddamn song is called "Mixtape Days" so it's straight-up pandering to Portishead whiners. Sure doesn't have 47m views, though. If you want the true flavor of this discussion, read the comments on that video, by the way, but hey - how did I find that song? I (1) stumbled across one of their older albums on Tidal (2) followed the band (3) let nine years lapse (4) got a surprise in my "new music" section. GO ALGORITHM This is how you get exciting discoveries like holy shit new Bel Canto or, despite the fact that I almost never listen to Coil and have never played Coil in Tidal, it tells me that The Wraiths and Strays of Paris has been remastered.

I'n'I probably listen to six hours of new music a week. Not "new to me", "came out in the last couple weeks" music. I air about 40 minutes of new music a week. I R A tastemaker. And it's not that fucking hard! All you have to do is have an epiphany like this:

"Huh, it's 2013 and I'm listening to Orb's 'Live '93.'"

"Huh, it came out 20 years ago."

"Huh, the time horizon between me listening to Live '93 when it came out and me listening to Live '93 now is the same as me listening to Live '93 when it came out and the fucking Dark Side of the Moon"

"Holy shit I better find some new fucking music"

And you know what? It's fucking easy. Find a podcast you like. Find a Mixcloud DJ you like. Find a Soundcloud DJ you like. Find someone to follow on Spotify. Find someone to follow on Last.FM. ASK YOUR FUCKING FRIENDS.

And that's where curation comes in. We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.

AND THE CRITICS JUST WANT YOU TO FUCKING LISTEN

"Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"

Speaking as someone who grew up without a college radio station, without MTV's "Amp", who used to have to drive an hour to buy CDs without the opportunity to listen to them, the threshold for discovery has never been lower. here's fucking Angolan industrial music on Youtube. All you gotta do is be willing to go down the rabbit hole instead of bitching about how Spin Magazine isn't telling you how to think anymore.

FFS.

I fuckin' mixed Poe. Nice lady. She's... okay. She added... nothing. If you're nostalgic for this shit?

It's not the industry, it's you.

I mean, clearly aleina thinks you need to become a flexible entity. I can speak only for myself, but I could use a teleportation portal. Not so much with the thorny mazes and god knows I have enough unexpected traps but you win some you lose some, don'tcha know?

I fucking hate Cormac McCarthy and everything he touched and I've learned to honor that in myself. John Gardner made the point that most "classics" are chosen by educators and that they choose not because the books are good but because they allow educators to make easy, simple points. You have to exercise the self-care to honor your own perspectives and needs - the phrase "I can try to keep to a schedule but just trying to do that seems to cause conflict" tells me that sticking up for yourself is something those around you aren't expecting.

What's important is what you value. If you're not sure what you value, try a few things on for size. When my life upended in 2007 and I found myself transitioning from "I have two projects headlining the NYT business section" to "I am about to go to producing school" to "I am a worthless bum" to "I just mixed live for double the population of New Zealand" in six weeks, I discovered an important inner truth: I love pineapple. And while I had no idea what to expect on a day-to-day basis, I knew that seeking pineapple gave me a concrete thing that generally inched my needle an iota or two towards comfort and pleasure.

The other nice thing about pineapple is it's a concrete thing. there's nothing abstract about "pineapple." "I can try to keep to a schedule" is a long goddamn border to defend, d00d. "I listen to 20 minutes of music before bedtime because it helps me relax" is concrete. If you defend that every goddamn day everyone around you will leave it alone because it's easier for them. They'll push on it initially because what they're doing is testing your resolve but if you reveal your resolve to be stronger than their own they'll give over. That gives you a defensible border - you can expand from "20 minutes of music before bedtime" to "I go to bed at 11, you're welcome to join me".

I'd start with the physical therapy and branch out. Anything you're paying for can have the blame shifted. Also I just started Dragon Age:Veilguard and I'm not sure I like it as much as :Origins but it's fun enough.

https://www.404media.co/american-schools-were-deeply-unprepared-for-chatgpt-public-records-show/

Yeah, that thought occurred to me in the waiting room of the ER. "Man, I sure am glad I'm not on a sailboat pointed at Vanuatu right now."

I had to wait two hours for an ultrasound tech to drive up from Albuquerque when I was a kid. And while a fresh medical student at the University of Washington diagnosed the eczema in my fingernails before I'd sat down, three years previously I'd been made to sit as an exhibit while every third dermatologist in the Mountain West wandered through, asked me to hold up my hands, stroked their chins and left. The consensus was leprosy, until they learned that I'd been cultured for leprosy and it came back negative.

I sat down to a taco salad last night. Then I jumped and looked behind me because there was a giant shadow of a snake on the floor.

Unfortunately the snake jumped, too. And started to dissipate. And was only in one eye. "What does it mean when your eye fills with blood?" I asked my wife. "I don't know," she said, "let's call the consulting nurse line." Which came back with "yep, that's an ER visit, which one are you going to" which we answered with "well that depends, which one is in network" which they responded with "let me connect you with someone who can answer that" and that person responded with "bitch, this is the dispatch line, do you need a cabulance" because this is America.

If you're going to go to the ER in America I recommend Tuesday night, ideally in an up-and-coming commuter neighborhood at some remove from downtown. I was triaged before I could take a seat, had blood drawn within ten minutes, had an ultrasound and a CT scan within an hour and a prognosis within two: not a stroke, not a brain hemorrhage, not a detached retina, visit this ophthalmologist ASAP because.... maybe multiple sclerosis? During the entire 2 1/2 hr adventure my eye filled with Dementors three more times.

The 9am call to the ophthalmologist landed us a 10am appointment which landed us a 10:30 diagnosis of retinal tear ("they always under-diagnose retinal stuff") and a 10:35 optical surgery. Unfortunately I'd had another geyser while I was sleeping and it clotted so I have a persistent black jellyfish in one eye. My vision is also yellower. I've been told this will dissipate. The guy who told me was Obama's ophthalmologist so he has my trust. I will follow up in a week.

I bring this up because apparently lots of people go "huh, my vision is full of blood, I'm sure that will pass" which means your retina detaches and you aren't looking at two minutes with a surprise laser you're looking at an operating room and a week of lying on your face recovering. So don't sleep on eye shit. 'cuz i guess as you become an old fart your eye jelly cuts loose and starts rolling around and most people never notice but for a lucky few it rips your retina on the way out and that shit won't necessarily heal itself.

There used to be two schools of thought about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. The one the wonks were circling around was "we never should have let all these investment firms come up with these crazy-exotic models of money flow and investment risk because they traded models of the models of the models and the whole world blew up." The one the bros were circling around was "nobody could have seen that coming, d00d." Then Michael Lewis wrote The Big Short and the narrative became "nobody could have seen that coming - except my plucky heroes, d00d!"

I lead with this because "except my plucky heroes" is basic narrative storytelling whereas "we should have leashed our wizards" is advanced narrative storytelling. Basic storytelling is necessary to get the point across to The Stupids. Advanced storytelling might actually change things. The basic storytelling allows most of the world to go "well I guess that'll never happen again, good thing they fixed it" while the advanced storytelling, unobserved by nearly everyone, made it hella harder for super-crazy-hyperexotic math to break the world.

And by "super-crazy-hyperexotic math" we might be talking about diff EQ? Because the finance world sucks at math. See this thing? they gave it a Nobel Prize in Economics (which is not a Nobel and never will be) and it's literally "price over earnings times a seasonal coefficient." Which means anybody who can use an equation with an integral in it is a quant. And you don't get to go drinkin' with the boys on Tuesdays if you talk to the quants. Their job is to give us stuff to bet on. I mean sell to investors.

(I'm getting there I promise)

Buried hyper-deep in books that nobody recommends anymore is this very simple fact:

AIG built a model that told them that the odds of housing prices in the United States dropping by an aggregate of more than five percent was a "six sigma event" and described them as such. This makes them sound like they've been reading Taleb. What Taleb meant was "six or more standard deviations away from the mean" but what Taleb really meant was "nobody could have seen that coming, d00d." Taleb starts Black Swan with the assertion that nobody could have predicted Hitler, despite both Churchill and Wilson expressly predicting Hitler at the Treaty of Versailles, in public speeches.

This only matters because AIG used that model to insure the policies of Goldman Sachs, Chase, Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns and all the rest. And those policies underwrote their risk of mortgages going bad. And the riskier those mortgages were, the more of a premium those bonds paid to the bondholders. And the more the premium paid, the more money everyone made. Including AIG.

Who argued, based on fuckall, that the sun was more likely to go nova in 2009 than that housing prices would dip 5%.

NOW

I would argue that not a single "quant" argued that a housing dip was less likely than the sun going nova. But a whole lotta quants put together position papers and equations and arguments and justifications for finance bros to blast clear through any safeguards or lending requirements. What's the Mencken quote that was actually Upton SInclair? “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Mencken gets credit because Paul Krugman credited him erroneously in 1989. Krugman went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

So the problem you will encounter is that the smarter you are, the better you are with numbers, the more easily you can manipulate them, the more likely you are to be asked to lie with them. The finance industry uses math the way RFK uses science - they cherry-pick stuff they don't understand to sell to gullible regulators who already want to believe. The actual money-making portion of the program is back-room deals and insider trading.

The "mathiness" portion of this debacle began with LTCM in 1998. Timeline goes like this:

- 1994: John Merriweather builds a magic new math fund around Myron Scholes' risk model

- 1997: Myron Scholes wins the Nobel Prize in Economics

- 1998: LTCM loses $5b for not predicting that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be economically spicy

When Genius Failed is a good book about that.

Fast forward ten years and everyone who made fun of LTCM (their approach was mocked as "picking up nickels in front of steamrollers") is now discovering the profits to be made if you adopt a Schroedinger's Risk model: things are very risky when making money off them, not risky at all when you're insuring against them. There are dozens of books about what happened next, just watch this instead.

And yes, none of this is relevant to your actual request, which is "how do I do math stuff with finance" and that's not me changing the subject or evading, because the math stuff is all delta gamma zeta options bullshit which isn't really math, it's Advanced Gambling. The book I recommend on finance is A Random Walk Down Wall Street which is now fifty fucking years old but gets to the basics in an extremely accessible way. Here are my caveats:

1) It pretends that markets are perfectly efficient when it's thunderously obvious that they work by insider trading and informational advantage

2) It argues that you make more money by staying in the market at all times rather than admitting that knowing when to fucking bail is a more effective strategy

3) It basically says "don't" about options and exotic mathematical instruments because fucking hell in 1973 John Merriweather was a fresh MBA in the pit at Salomon

Michael Lewis chose Michael Burry as his hero for The Big Short because Michael Burry, autist, went through and read the prospectii of all these credit default swaps and went "wait a minute... this shit only works if the housing market doesn't drop more than five percent!" he was also monied enough that he could go to Goldman Sachs and say "I would like to bet against you, create a credit default swap that pays out when the rest of your shit goes into default and sell it to me." He then got Goldman Sachs to grudgingly pay out after they initially ruled that they didn't have to because the only person who bought this CDO was Michael Burry. I mention this because "it's stupid to presume that the sun is more likely to go nova than for housing prices to drop five percent" isn't arcane knowledge. It's fucking obvious. But the whole "quant" universe of finance is about burying obvious truths in illegible equations so that you can sell them to pension funds.

Now get back to me once you can keep down some apple sauce and oatmeal and we'll continue the purge.

One of my "favorite things" about finance - and by "favorite things" I mean "thing that had I known about it as a child would have colored my impression of the moneyed and their pursuits in a decidedly negative way" - is technical analysis.

"Well of course, klein!" you say. "You're an annoyingly technical person, of course you love technical analysis." Ahhh but here's the thing - "technical analysis" as espoused by the financiers isn't technical, and it isn't analysis. I read a whole goddamn book on technical analysis just to see if there was anything there. There isn't. Burton Malkiel ran a bunch of tests where he gave TA dipshits a ticker that had been generated by a literal coin flip and then asked them how they thought their "analysis" was doing. Some were happy, some were sad, none clued into the fact that they were using all their tools to scry the behavior of a coin toss.

The technical analysts won't even dispute this. They'll argue that technical analysis is so powerful that it can produce false positives and false negatives from random number generators so you'd best try even harder. True practitioners will lock themselves out from all noise sources. Some have even argued that they trade better if they don't know the security they're trading. All that matters is what magic shapes they draw on their graph to determine what the next candle is going to be.

That's literally the way Markov chains work.

The fundamental basis of LLMs is pattern recognition where the process is actually hindered by too much horizon. They work better if they're only looking ahead a little bit. They don't analyze shit, and they can't. They know that in 100 runs of seven times five, the answer is 35, one hundred times over. But if they need to know what seven hundred times five pi is, they don't have 100 runs. So they get it wrong sometimes. Because they're not doing math. They're looking up values in a table and if there are holes, they're extrapolating over the top of it.

I'm willing to bet Apple didn't say "LLMs suck at reasoning, duh" for the same reason they rolled their eyes and coughed up a $3200 nerd helmet - nobody is willing to talk about the emperor's new clothes yet. There is no part of the methodology underlying LLMs that bears even a passing resemblance to reasoning. It's like saying Tesla's Autopilot sucks at conversational Mongolian - Why wouldn't it? Ahhh - but you can set the UI to Mongolian so isn't that conversing?

Here's the other part: It's Pareto principle all the way down. Everything OpenAI or any of the other vendors have ever done is a solid B minus. Everything they do is 80% effort. It's not quite a C? But it's super-close. The ouvre of commercial AI is just good enough not to make your parents sign your homework. But for a lot of stuff, that's plenty. I don't need an A-plus meme, I need a B-minus meme NOW. I don't need an A-plus essay, I need a B-minus essay NOW.

One of the things about being on set is everyone on set can do 80% of everyone else's job on set. We've all been on set long enough that we know the easy steps. Do something hard? yer fukt. You hire the experts because when you're in a pinch, they know what to do. it takes me 15 seconds to explain how to mix major-market house reality television to any schlub who walks through the door - we used to do it as a party trick. Sure, your daughter can sit at the console. Absolutely Miss Celebrity can throw on some headphones. But if things get dicey you'd best get out of the chair quick because I don't even know if I can explain to you how to fix what just happened. Nobody ever asks intelligent questions, they ask the same stupid ones. Except Francis Ford Coppola. He came in and chatted with us (we didn't know who he was at the time, just that the producers were terrified) for a good fifteen minutes and asked some really insightful questions. And yer goddamn right - once I figured out I had been having a lengthy technical conversation with the writer/director of The Conversation I was over the moon.

Marketing schmucks? They don't really understand the Pareto Principle. Some of them are geniuses and they know it. Most of them occasionally catch lightning in a bottle, and that keeps them employed long enough to continue to muddle through. So all their ads for AI are about selling the 80% as if it were the 20%. They don't know, they don't understand it, and they can't tell the difference. The guys writing AI? They hope you can't tell the difference.

Let's talk paint-by-number because I think it's an interesting analogy. The thing about paint-by-number kits is they're generally bought by people who enjoy painting. Painting by number incrementally builds their skills. You do that enough, you might become an artist. I mean, jingle trucks are basically paint-by-number; tell me these guys aren't skilled.

Give 'em a blank spot and they will synthesize. They have their bag'o'tricks for sure but the good ones are novel.

It is physically impossible for LLM-based AI to be novel. It can arrive at an original place on the look-up table but it will never step out of bounds. It will muddle through just fine in the 80% but the 81% is luck only. 85% is a fluke. 90% is virtually impossible.

You mentioned Graeber before, but I'm not sure if that's fair, because the patternmatcher doesn't care if it's matchin' patterns for the next TPS report or at a charity to cure rare cancers. "We've always done it that way" tasks and jobs now have their head put under the guillotine, and they are not few or far between I think. Journalism...yeah, not looking great.

I think with academia and with journalism the problem is nobody needs the 80%. Essays have always been an imperfect analog of knowledge. A journalist can research undiscovered facts and can synthesize unformulated opinions. AIs can do neither but since so much of what both students and journalists produce isn't actually within the purvey of what they're supposed to be doing, the AI can do a B-minus level approximation of that make-work.

That is recognizably a jingle truck. It's not even obviously AI.

holy fuck is it boring tho