What's really going to bake your noodle is in my circles it's still considered cool to release on cassette so "let's crunk an MP3 down to fit on 1.44MB" is so fucking hipster that not even the Witch House people bother

I just...

had a huge get land in my lap as a DJ. It's weird. It's like being the bar owner when Garth Brooks shows up for a secret show like he did back in the '90s except the show isn't for four days and you can't tell anyone. Like, we're putting out press releases under embargo so that nobody knows what crazy shit is gonna happen at midnight on a Sunday.

And it looks like a letter I wrote a couple-three weeks ago is going to make about 50 hard-working women about $30m a year. Which is CRAZY but a couple people i know who between them have been the head of benefits for like six giant corporations you've heard of said "normally this would be commissioned by inside counsel to get drafted by outside counsel by the company you're sending it to, not the other way around, and they honestly couldn't have written something this good. They're going to have to pay it and if they don't the insurance commissioner is going to have their hides."

People are moving through their lives — increasingly lived online

I think this is the key. People are not increasingly living their lives online.

Li'l story. I've got this radio show. There's a DJ who used to be on the radio show who didn't like that the radio show existed after he left. He controlled the Facebook page. We asked for it nicely back and he blew it up. 1500 followers gone.

So we rebuilt another Facebook page (because ugh) and my Extremely Online co-DJ invited 1100 of his closest friends - all in the "scene" - to like it.

We got 36 follows.

Theoretically I have like 1300 followers here. Realistically? I think I've got five. Maybe six. Someone referred to Threads as elder-care for brands the other day; it's for people who want their Twitter to be more Facebooky but with Instagram subtracted from it. Judd Legum & Crew are freshly outraged by right-wing media networks on Facebook without noticing that Facebook is so terrified by the long-term prospects of Facebook that they've blown $44b trying to make face computers happen.

People scroll through Tik Tok but it's not like they're looking for (or getting) deep engagement. Instagram has become a scroll of clickbait; Twitter has been burned to the ground and Youtube is busily reinventing public access television. I don't think we've lost the ability to see reality, I think we've lost the ability to give a fuck about anything we see online.

Low-quality clickbait like this propagates because it's (1) cheap to make (2) poorly remunerated (3) effectively unmoderated. That's a combo for sheer disinterest. Say what you will about 4chan, it had commitment. Nowadays the only people who really give a shit about "online" are people who have steadfastly refused to touch grass since 2016.

Lazarus deepfaking their way into $25m? That's an opsec problem, not a deepfake problem. If you phone in the important shit, any important shit will be phoned right back out again. Banking has always been stupid and the banking sector has always been ripe for plunder. And the thing of it is it's all nerfed out because of dumb bullshit like this - there's an "undo" button on SWIFT and any bank where a junior employee can launch $25m without recourse deserves to lose $25m.

I think there's a growing divide between the shit the Online think is important and the Grass Touchers think is important. And the Grass Touchers are right.

I had a discussion with an old buddy about LLMs yesterday. He's writing fiction and is using ChatGPT like a rented mule.

He's got a character who's modeled on Andrew Tate but he wants him to be annoying, not a villain, so he'll type "give me ten things a sexist asshole would say about women that aren't awful." He's got a character who's a vampire so he'll type "give me a list of insults a vampire would use against townsfolk." Or he'll be analyzing plot points and he'll say "give me a list of movie scenes that would radically change the movie if they were absent."

In each one he goes through and picks what he likes. In the last one he argues with it. I pointed out that he's basically using ChatGPT like an extended thesaurus and he agreed. I also pointed out that if you ask an LLM "give me the stochastic mean of this vector through a set of points" you are using the LLM as it was intended to be used - it will give you the mediocrity every time and, because it's basically a hyperadvanced Magic 8 Ball every now and then it will be brilliant. But - I pointed out - when you ask it for an opinion it will fall down every time because it has absolutely no handles on any of its inputs and outputs. You can't ask it to tell you what scenes are crucial because it has no understanding of any of the concepts underneath. What it has is a diet of forum posts that it will never give you straight.

Shall we play "how can chatGPT do my job?" 'cuz they've been trying to AI automate my job forever.

See this guy? they were about $1500 back in '94. And what they do is analyze the audio signal passing through them looking for feedback, and then they drop one of eight filters on it. You can adjust the sensitivity to feedback, you can adjust the latch, you can adjust the release, you can adjust the aggressiveness. They were really big until about 2005 or so when it became cheap and easy to TEF sweep a room and ring it out to EQ out the frequencies that cause things to ring - I'm sitting here surrounded by ten speakers at 85dB and having spent an afternoon mapping and collating and inserting between 4 and 15 filters each channel I can't get feedback if I hold a condenser in front of left main.

Could an AI have done that? fuck yeah. That would have been delightful. But not without me moving the mic sixty times so what time am I actually saving?

That active seeking feedback reduciton thing has made it into machine tools - each servopak on my mill has more filters than that Sabine. And in general, the approach everyone takes is "set as many as you need to kill steady-state, use the roaming ones carefully" because who knows what modes you'll run into with this or that chunk of aluminum strapped down getting chewed up.

Everything I've got is already a waveform. We've been using Fourier transforms to operate on them for 40 years. My life is nothing but math. And despite the fact that GraceNote has literally released every song they know about as training data, telling the AI "make my mix sound better" still fucking failwhales. Like, on a basic, simple level. It understands what the sonogram of a song should sound like but that's like reconstructing a fetus from an ultrasound. What you get is uncanny valley nightmare fuel.

I don't need the mediocre middle of a million mixes, I need excellence. And excellence comes from humans because it is, by definition, not the mean. Anyone expecting that a machine purpose-built to give you a statistical average can give you only the good outliers is going to be disappointed for the simple fact that the machine doesn't understand "good" or "bad" it understands "highly rated" or "much engaged with." The machine thinks this is the best Jurassic Park cover ever made:

And the only way you can deal with that is to nerf it out on a case-by-case basis.

You could argue that LLMs are good for facts but not opinions but the problem is its method for handling facts only works for opinions. Are they useful? Yes. Are they a tool that will make big changes to a few industries? I don't see how they can't. Am I honestly excited to see their actual utility? You damn betcha. But where the world is now is this:

People who don't understand AI inflicting it on people who don't need AI to the detriment of people who don't want AI.

That's it. That's the game.

It's fucking exhausting. Doubly exhausting when you have to do it twice. Your cat was probably trying to do you a favor.

I think the BLM analogy fits and doesn't fit in a number of ways, so I question the utility in modeling everyone's turmoil around October 7 on BLM. I'll address it as far as it's useful, though. For example: Defund the police.

This is an opinion, but I believe slogans should be immediately obvious. This is, in my opinion, the problem wypepo have with the phrase "defund the police." It requires explanation. "Disarm the police?" That one's obvious. "Demilitarize the police?" equally obvious. Black Lives Matter chose language that spoke to those who already have affinity for them, not those who were on the fence.

Your argument is that "defund the police" means to stop "Increasing the police budgets to solve brutality." I agree with this position. I get it. But "defund the police" when shouted from a crowd does not mean "stop increasing police budgets to solve brutality" it means ACAB. it means "we can get along without police at all." It means "dissolve the carceral state." It's a step away from "storm the Bastille" not "let's de-escalate police violence through selective reductions in spending." And when shouted at people with "blue lives matter" stickers on their car, it means "fuck you."

There has been an appalling amount of antisemitism in response to October 7. Not anti-Zionism, good ol'fashioned Jew-hating bigotry. There has been a lot of triangulation around how any atrocity committed by Hamas is justifiable, about how any death in Gaza by anyone under any circumstances is a war crime. And while I believe the answer to the correct amount of reprisal for October 7 is zero (0) bombs, I also knew - Hamas also knew - Iran also knew - Russia also knew - that the number would be higher than that. And I also knew - as did Hamas, Iran and Russia - that whenever Israel opens a can of whoopass international hate crimes against Jews skyrocket. that's the point.

Black Lives Matter had a very simple cause - stop killing black people. It's a really easy one to agree with on the face of it and the reason it didn't get nearly enough done is the entrenched power of police unions and the political makeup of policing in the United States. And the fact that BLM's position was "defund the police" ie ACAB.

Shouting "defund the police" at a bunch of indemnified, entrenched police unions was never going to fucking accomplish a thing. De-escalation training? A drawing down of military hardware? SWAT rotation rather than dedicated squads? All of these things would make a difference. But to the people shouting "defund the police" they were a bunch of ineffectual, quisling half-measures. Nobody wanted to think about it, they wanted to shout slogans.

You've got this idea that the government of the United States is all-powerful and that Biden could somehow bring Israel to heel. It's worth pointing out that Netanyahu has never said a single polite thing about Democrats and that the only thing keeping him out of jail right now is his coalition. There's a path forward here - a tricky, game-playing, polticking path - but shouting "defund Israel" is not dissimilar from shouting "defund the police."

And I don't think anybody shouting it cares.

I think BLM was a spontaneous, loosely-organized movement that - and I hope I'm wrong about this - lacked the vision to push for lasting change and as a consequence, faded out of existence. I think the Left's position on October 7 is a spontaneous, loosely-organized movement that doesn't want the complications of geopolitics to interfere with its anger.

And I do - honestly and truly - feel that the butts-in-seats at State and above know more about this than I do, have more experience with this than I do, and feel the violence in Gaza as much or more than anyone else. I was wrong about Garland. I could be wrong about this. But I've done a fair amount of reading on Israel, Palestine and how we got here over the past 20 years and I don't see the slogans as helpful.

sigh

The point is that until 2019, everyone was fucking cool with the Armenian Genocide except Armenians.

The point is that until my lifetime everyone was fucking cool with the extermination of Native Americans.

And here you are - conflating "half the budget of NASA" and "so they can bomb children" without pausing to give any air whatsoever to the complications of the existence of Israel because it forces you to grapple with uncomfortable thoughts.

I'm probably done with this shit. There's way too much desire on your behalf to go "but but but intifada" in response to any good-faith discussion. So I'll just say this:

I have been leaning into my Jewish heritage my entire life to criticize Israel. Can't call me anti-semitic when I bring up my Jewish grandmother! I was giving speeches against Israel before you were fucking born and the most infuriating, alienating aspect of modern politics is any discussion of "well here's how we got here" is invariably met by someone going "nope I've been thinking about this since yesterday and I've solved it."

So congratulations. Cling close to your absolutes. Shine thy platitudes and buff thy maxims for yours is the way.

The baths of Tiberias, where Joseph and Bessie Shoolman were enjoying a respite having successfully fled the Pogroms of 1881, were Ground Zero in the Nakba. Their granddaughter? Was kicked out of Radcliffe for being a Jew.

So come at me with "simple" again.

Anyway, the Israel stuff is pretty new.

sweet, sweet summer child

The Fundamentalist position on Israel has always boiled down to the Red Heifer which has to be born in "the Holy Land" to signify the Rapture and Tribulation. They've been there since like '77, a cursory reading of charismatic eschatology will say as much (I recommend the Left Behind series as it's basically "Rocky & Bullwinkle's Guide to the End Times"). "Fuck yeah Israel" also annoys the Zoomers who may/may not be sucking down a CCP's worth of Palestinian propaganda but either way are here for the outrage.

In the milieu you're examining? The individual talking points don't even matter. You say so yourself you just refuse to hear yourself saying them. It's all about owning the libs/triggering the snowflakes while the Zoomers are dutifully lining up behind the philosophy of "if it bugs my grandparents it's my jam".

And the thing you're missing is that, with dwindling victories among the populace, both sides are turning inward. The fucking NRB convention? The fuck even is that? Fucking 5,000 attendees is what that is, or roughly eight percent the attendance of the Northwest Flower & Garden Show which you have also never given a shit about but which is organized by the Seattle Orchid Society which my 80-year-old father-in-law is a board member of. Like, my wife has organized conventions for 5,000 people. Herself. In her spare time. They're "let's see if we can get Larry to do the keynote" level operations and here's the former president of the United States out here going "woo hoo red heifer" and selling fucking high tops.

Yet you're eating it fucking up as if it were the burning of the Reichstag.

I read the chat with 'bl00 and spence, and I think my cynical takeaway is that once a country can make nuclear weapons, they can do almost whatever they want to any non-nuclear regional powers, using the threat of proliferation.

This was argued in as many words by the Iranian foreign minister in 2008. He said, in effect, Bush put us, Iraq and North Korea in the Axis of Evil. North Korea has nukes and is still here. Iraq did not and is gone. Our instructions are clear.

Again, though, that's too simple. The United States has maintained an ambivalent, adversarial relationship with Israel when it benefits us - America fucked Britain over to help the Jews and recognized Israel two years before Britain. But then when the Israelis and British got too big for their britches the Americans fucked them both over (in no small part because it fucked Hungary). There's ample evidence that the CIA/NRO knew damn well the Yom Kippur War was bound to happen and let Israel get a little bit fucked before airdropping a fuckton of foreign aid and that frankly, the fall of Iran as a vassal US state caused America to give Israel too much leeway.

Israel is useful to the US. Need some Iranian physicists assassinated? Israel. Need an Iraqi reactor bombed? Israel. Need to shoot down some Soviet MiGs? Israel. Palestine? ... is not. That's really what it comes down to - it's proxy warfare all the way down.

Now. How much are you gonna wanna talk about proxy warfare in Intro to Fuckery? 'cuz it's complicated.

The power of language:

But that familiarity didn’t last. By the end of the first month, the class was split on the definition of “ethnic cleansing”—not only how to define it but who, in terms of the subject doing the action, can be charged with this human rights violation.

For those too young to remember, "ethnic cleansing" was a term unheard of before Slobodan Milosovic. The phrase was coined by the Serbians to describe what they were doing to the Bosnians to say "silly NATO! We're not committing genocide! We're practicing ethnic cleansing! What are you worried about!" It's an example of the power of language that "filling trenches with dead children" was very much genocide, but for the past 30 years everyone has been circling around the crime of "ethnic cleansing" to determine what, exactly, is the prosecutable crime there that doesn't trigger UN conventions against genocide.

It's also worth pointing out that when first introduced, embargoes were considered genocide. After all, they target a civilian population for purposes of death and displacement. Now of course they're the first tool in the kit despite knowing that they hurt the civilian population first and foremost.

The power of language:

The professor called our attention to his use of the term “ethnic cleansing” in his own writing. He wrote that around 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948, an act that today would be considered ethnic cleansing. At first read, this statement seemed bold—he may not have named the Nakba, but his writing gestured toward violence. Even so, his examination felt sanitized. Palestinians “were displaced,” he wrote. But there was no mention of who did the displacing.

The Nakba was the direct result of European genocide and, if you like, "ethnic cleansing." The whole of the post-WWII economy of Europe was powered by confiscated Jewish wealth; the whole of the West German economy was Jewish wealth, the post-war economies of Eastern Europe and the USSR were powered by confiscated Jewish wealth and founded on confiscated Jewish property. The overwhelming majority of post-War American influence was due to massive expansion in the Western states which was only possible due to de-facto confiscation of property from Japanese Americans.

Meanwhile, of course, the 1948 war was in response to a partition plan that allowed Europe to kick the can down the road. If you give the Jews palestine you don't have to give them back Brussels. The British Empire, which had ruled the entire region with an iron fist for generations, was too weak to do anything but withdraw and the end result was genocide.

Jews did the displacing. It's also complicated.

The power of language:

After reading part of the article out loud, a girl who had been fidgeting in her seat said it couldn’t be.

“What couldn’t be?” my professor asked.

“Ethnic cleansing. Because it’s what happened in the Holocaust, so we can’t be charged with this,” she replied. Another student cut in. He qualified by referring to himself as a critic of Israel. “There’s a distinction between occupation and ethnic cleansing,” he announced. “It’s an issue of structural power and systematic violence—what happened in 1948 was not ethnic cleansing.”

I can't be guilty. There's no way I have any culpability here I'm just a smol bean. History, on every level, in every country, at any time, is "we did good" and "they did bad." The purpose of history education from a civics standpoint is to sheepdip your populace into the common understanding that defines your collective morals - that's why the southern US skirmishes over slavery every goddamn day and will until the end of time. Nobody wants to be the baddies. It doesn't help that we don't introduce the "are we the baddies" conversation until fucking college because any casual observation of the History Channel will clue you in to the fact that we're the baddies, all of us, at some point or another.

But unless you want to know this shit, there's too much complexity. "I benefit materially and spiritually from the oppression of others" is an ethics question for philosophy majors, not a viewpoint introduced to children and god help you if you try. So here's this poor Intro to Fuckery professor saddled with Mary Jane and Bobby Sue who are pretty sure the Nakba wasn't ethnic cleansing and into that mix you've got a Palestinian auditor who could obviously teach the class? But whose salary and tenure are not dependent on Mary Jane and Bobby Sue.

We're the baddies, all of us, at some point or another.

Munich bombings? Palestinians. Lebanese civil war? Palestinians. October 7? Palestinians. I could very easily make the argument that each of those was justified and retaliatory but I won't. Fundamentally the Israelis wear uniforms, the Palestinians don't, both sides know it's because that would be the end of the Palestinians and the Israelis get to sit there going "checkmate."

The power of language:

The word “complicated” is often used to describe the occupation in Palestine, a word that insists that occupation is untouchable—Palestine’s history is too complex, there are too many moving parts, it’s a puzzle that can never be solved. But this word is condescending—a distraction. It wants us to feel small, worthless, and petty in our investigation. It demands power structures remain in place, allowing some to speak while requiring others to stay quiet.

"Simple" implies it can be fixed. "Complicated" implies that it can't. It's been nigh onto 80 years and the world can't agree on borders, let alone what happens after that, and it's not like nobody has tried. Ben Gurion and Maier firmly believed that there would never truly be peace until they had exterminated the Palestinians but they also knew that Hitler held those exact same firm beliefs about the Jews so they didn't shout it from the mountaintops. Meanwhile four generations of Arab states have loudly proclaimed that the only pathway to peace is the eradication of Israel which - c'mon. You're going to triangulate around the phrase "ethnic cleansing" and ignore that it's a stated goal of Hamas' charter? Bartcop argued the simplest solution would be to give the Jews Oklahoma and I'm not sure he's wrong, despite the obvious distaste Israel would have for replacing Jerusalem with Tulsa.

"Complicated" masks the fact that in a simpler time, both the Palestinians and the Jews would be extinct. That "simpler time" wasn't so long ago.

And that really gets to the worst part of the Israel/Palestine conflict: both sides plead simplicity and if you disagree, you're a murderer.

IN MY ADULT LIFE I have watched the phrase "ethnic cleansing" be born, ridiculed, argued, enshrined and defined. What started out as "you murderous asshole that's genocide" has become "well, but let's figure out if this is bad or bad-bad" and it's nothing more than a way to justify sitting back and doing nothing. A lot of that is because "genocide" was used to set what the Nazis were doing apart from what everyone throughout history has always done, which was generally just referred to as "winning." And yet there are still Palestinians, and there are still Jews, because as a civilization we no longer permit that scale of win.

If it were simple it would be solved already. That it's not means any argument put forth for solving it in Intro to Fuckery is likely to be eliding some important details.

To the contrary, I started taking semaglutide (generic Ozempic) because a doctor friend of my wife's commented online about how much success she was having treating depression and mood disorders with it. I've been on it four? months now? And I gotta say it takes the edge off. More than that, I've lost like fucking zero weight which, combined with everything else, made me start to go "hmmm I dunno maybe the fact that the miracle weight loss drug is doing nothing should draw my attention to how much thinner I am than nearly all of my contemporaries and how pleased doctors are to see me despite my constantly bemoaning my health."

I wanna call it weird shit but it's not. All it does is mess with your sense of hunger - in my case, a lot. I think for people who just straight gorge themselves it keeps them from gorging themselves. For me? It's basically antabuse for food. And like everything else. I've probably had three shots of alcohol in four months and I basically can't eat pizza anymore without regretting it hours later. Like, I can't handle fat or grease most of the time. Fried foods are pretty much straight out.

The real drag is that it basically makes hunger and nausea feel about the same so you're at "I kinda feel like I'm coming down with the stomach flu, I should probably have a handful of granola." When I was coming down with stomach flu I tried to blame it on the semaglutide and spent some time on forums seeing if I was right; you look at most of the True Believers and they are putting up with GNARLY symptoms and cheering each other on. Shit like "yeah I now take GasX and pepto three times a day it's great!"

The Reuters "study" is Reuters going through an adverse data database and finding 265 cases in fourteen years - if vaccines had side effects incidence that low the Wakefield zombies would never have risen from the grave. They have zero controls and don't report how many negatives they find. The Nature study has an n of 1.6 million.

Yeah I fucking love this. "Sam Altman asks the Saudis for eight trillion dollars" is, to the WSJ, "Sam Altman fundraising off his latest AI idea."

You could ask Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, GE, UnitedHealth, Meta, Pfizer, Anthem, GM, Coca Cola, Ford and intel for all their cash on hand

Then ask Nasa for their entire 2023 budget

Then strip out the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines for two years

Then liquidate Saudi Aramco at current market cap

Then fully absorb Nvidia

and still be 600 billion dollars short

of making Sam Altman's newest plagiarism idea real.

Yeah the best advice in nearly any endeavor is "hire the best expert you can afford and do what they tell you" and if you are paying artists for a campaign that is fuckin' awesome. No shade intended.

The business model of all these AI companies, on the other hand, is "get people who would never pay experts to pay us because they don't believe in expertise."

Here's the TRUE issue:

1) LLMs lose money whenever you use them.

2) ChatGPT plus is $20 a month. Midjourney is $10 or $60 a month. Copilot is $30 a month. Stable Diffiusion is $9 or $49 a month.

3) Photoshop is $23 a month. Premiere is $23 a month. Animate is $23 a month. Audition is $23 a month. All of them combined is $60 a month.

4) Adobe Stock is $30 a month.

Fundamentally, "make me an image that might have too many toes that might just be a bad rip-off of a license-protected product" is consumer-cost-competitive with "find me an image that was created by humans under crystal-clear licensing terms." And fundamentally, "draw a fuzzy monster that is either kneeling or squatting, I don't care" is more expensive than "here is an absolute bazooka of a content tool in any medium you care to work in."

And that is why none of this shit is being sold to professionals - it's nowhere near the costs-benefits breakpoint where they'd consider it.

You know what fucking sucks about being a creative professional? You're surrounded by other creative professionals who are so fucking egotistical that they're 100% certain they're a creative genius while you're a button pusher. They'll slave away for weeks on something visual and then when it gets to the audio their every instruction is "no more like this. no more like that. No do it more like that. Can't you just give me your sessions and teach me how to use your software you're clearly a fucking idiot oh oops did I say that out loud?" I "worked" with this guy Jesse - friend of a friend - who was a graphics guy on Jimmy Kimmel. He wanted a sound effect for something - I think it was a brain ray zapping Bryan Cranston or some shit for half a second in a 2-minute throwaway bit before his interview. So I spent 20 minutes coming up with a brain ray zapping sound effect. Mutherfucker called me during lunch and left a seven minute message about all the changes he wanted. I noped out and said "sorry, Jesse, no bid" and the only award his short film ever got? Was for sound. That I did. It's fuckin' awesome. It's a werewolf in wrestling gear painted gold for some reason. But the idea that I might know what I'm doing is absolutely fucking unthinkable to a certain segment of creative.

All this AI bullshit is for that guy. The dipshit who prefers to shout at other professionals rather than trust them, who has no respect for the expertise of others, who can't fucking wrap their head around the idea that art requires artists.

And they don't have enough money to support it. Fuckin' every AI company out there is losing money at prices that make Creative Cloud look like a bargain and their solution is to ask for 10% of global GDP to fix the problem.

Dude we had this discussion just a couple days ago:

And I say this as an apex predator in a field that has already experienced an "AI-like" mass extinction event: there are far fewer professional mixers now than there were ten years ago but not because AI can do it, but because the massive proliferation of untalented executives who don't understand post-production made everyone read their television. If you don't need it to actually sound good, you've been able to do it at your house since shortly after Nirvana's "Nevermind" came out. If you need someone to pay for it, I'm right here with $30k worth of Pro Tools.

Are you arguing that my direct and existential experience with exactly this issue somehow disqualifies my opinion?

Nobody thought that computers would mean the death of stores, until they enabled people to shop from home and get it delivered.

To the contrary - EVERYONE thought Amazon was coming for their livelihood they just knew there was nothing they could do about it. Barnes & Noble was blocked from buying Ingram because it would have created a vertical monopoly; Amazon was allowed to eat everyone's lunch because they didn't have stores.

Robots were never supposed to replace workers in restaurants, except now even mid scale restaurants have discovered that it much cheaper to put a Wi-Fi enabled iPad on the table than pay a human to take your order.

The first time I read about the downfall of cheap service was in Newsweek in 1987. There's kiosks and there's table service and I think you will find that aside from the pandemic, hospitality employment has been growing steadily since WWII. McDonald's is definitely employing fewer workers per store but that's never really been considered an overly-desirable job and really - what have we lost?

AI is taking over a lot of office jobs now too.

Which ones? I recognize that my experience is a count against me but I've got more employees than fingers at this point. How much of your payroll have you farmed out to AI?

I mean we NEED mailroom staff, because all the people who work in offices started in the mailroom (in the 1980s) except now there hasn’t been a mailroom since 1990s because people realized that they could reduce their labor costs by using emails instead of inter office memos hand delivered by humans.

...is this a Sammy Glick thing? What are you getting at, exactly?

Let's back up a minute: I pointed out that it takes hundreds of skilled individuals to make a movie and you came back with

- retail

- fast food

- mail sorting

And you came back maaaaaaad.

Once more with feeling: Izotope came out with a plugin called "total mix" in 2011 or 2012. Theoretically it would take your shitty Discovery Channel audio and magically tweak it so that it sounded like a TV show. It was pretty comical; a lot of us beta-test for Izotope and that one was something they didn't even tell us about because... you know. We would have been mad.

It was okay though because instead they unleashed it on a bunch of editors who hate us anyway because we insist we need annoying things like "time" and "money" to make their pretty videos sound like television so Izotope didn't need us anymore anyway. Except the editors tried Total Mix and came back with "what is this hickory-roasted bullshit" because even though the "AI" (yes, they used that terminology) was definitely listening to their audio, and definitely doing something, it didn't know the audio equivalent of "cats have four legs".

It was such a catastrophe that Izotope spent a bunch of money scrubbing the Internet of any mention of "Total Mix." You won't find any record of it now - in part because RME's had a product called "Totalmix" for 20 years (nice job Izotope) and in part because mostly what AI is doing these days is data poisoning. And really, Izotope now has a number of garbage products they sell to neophytes - Vea, Nectar, Neutron, Tonal Balance Control and Neoverb are all "AI" products designed to make your dogshit amateur production sound less dogshit. And they do! They make your dogshit sound less dogshit.

But they don't make it sound good.

Izotope, wisely, still sells real tools. They're expensive, they're complicated and you know what? They are fucking chockablock with AI. I've been using RX for more than 20 years now and the stuff it can do is spooky. But it won't do any of that spooky shit for you because you don't know what you're doing. You could learn? You could get as good at it as I am! But you'd have to put in the time, and then you'd want to be paid. And then we'd be right back where we started.

Look. Let's say a robot can do 99% of my job. Let's say you spent $50k on a commercial with absolutely no humans in it. Let's say you're competing against an ad agency that you know has a human who gets a thousand dollars to do an audio polish. Let's be honest - you're going to pay me a thousand dollars. Because I can get you that last one percent that keeps you from losing your next contract.

Machines have been displacing human workers since the mutherfucking plow, dude. The skills change and so does the work. I tell you what, though - an Amish dude with a team of horses is always going to kick my ass in a corn-growing contest no matter how bitchin' my tractor 'cuz the Amish dude? Knows a thing or two about growing corn. Me? I'm gonna google "how do you grow corn" and try and figure out which of five contradictory snippets I should pay attention to. I'm fukt.

It's just a tool. It's feared by people who don't understand tools, and people who understand what happens when you let people do whatever they want with tools.

THAT'S IN LIKE SEVEN HOURS

y'all better come

I would like Zygar to be right. I don't think he is. I read his book - it's basically Plokhi's book but with more apologies and justifications for the Russians being rank bastards going back to the Vikings. His forward and afterward are both pretty much pleas to his friends in Kyiv to stop calling him a monster. And the book, in general, is "Russia didn't solely fuck up Ukraine, there were ex-Soviet Ukrainians who were just as wretched." An interesting point emphasized by both Zygar and Plokhy is that the power structures of the USSR were rife with opportunistic Ukrainians who both recognized that there was no future in Ukrainian politics and also that the Russians, in general, suck at castle intrigue.

The main difference I see between Ukrainian writers on Russia and Russian writers on Russia is the Russians tend to be "we don't have to be dicks" while the Ukrainians are at "but you always are."

The biggest difficulty I'm seeing right now is there are a lot of building owners who take their purchase price in like 2009-2018, extrapolate 6% per year appreciation because that's what the industry tells them they're entitled to, and then utterly disregard that the 4% rate they bought with and the 8.5% prime (11.5% SBA(7a)) that's out there now do not lend themselves to similar payments.

Let's say you bought a $1m building in April of 2017. You put $300k down. You're at $3600/mo ($2600/mo interest-only). You need to come up with $570k in the next two months and your calculations say your building is currently worth $1.8m.

Let's say I'm negotiating to buy a building in February of 2024. I can put $300k down. That $2600/mo interest-only payment and $300k down buys me a... $650k building. Yeah. You financed $700k, I financed $350k, we have the same payment.

Let's say I'm negotiating to buy your building in February of 2024. I can put $300k down. I'm now paying $12k a month ($11k interest-only).

Let's instead say "fuck this shit" and put that $300k in a CD making 5.5%. If I extrapolate out to when the balloon payment would be due (10 years), I've made $200k just leaving my money in the bank.

Let's now say "fukkit let's rent" and you're gonna be super eager to tie me down to whatever you can fucking get because it's good for your cap rate but I'm gonna go hollupaminnit

And go "yeah, that's residential, but go check out that office vacancy rate again fucko" and keep my powder decidedly fucking dry.

You bought a building seven years ago for a million dollars because it was going to be your retirement. You were going to sell it for $1.8, buy another for $1m using a 1031 exchange and live off of $100k a year until it's time to do it again. And here I am, going "payment for payment your property is worth $650k fucko" and that leaves you $70k after your balloon payment.

We're over a million dollars apart. On what was, in 2017, a million dollar building. Who's gonna blink first? That's what it looks like for me.

LOL I'm in the process of buying two commercial buildings right now I have lots of thinks. What ruminations in particular interest you because I could go 2000 words on this without pausing for breath.

Elsewhere on Bloomberg:

The original event mostly caught fire because of the blatant use of AI.

Reality was quite different. It's the cause du jour of the Very Online.

My experience is that the Internet is a good source for "a recipe" while cook books are better sources for "a recipe that works" or "a recipe that is good." Food Network churned out two entire generations of celebrity chefs whose food is passable at best; most online bloggers will make a recipe once, photograph the shit out of it and then be extremely coquettish about whether it's any good. On the other hand, the recipes presented by restaurant owners and caterers and the like are generally presented as loss-leaders to drive up revenue at their physical business and if the recipes suck, that doesn't happen.

If I'm trying something new I'll peruse five or six versions online. If I've decided it has promise I'll delve into the four linear feet of cookbooks at my disposal.

All you need to know about the Supreme Court is in their 2000 Bush V. Gore decision, whereby they say "we're giving this to Bush because we fucking well feel like it, it will never set any sort of precedent, except we know damn well it will, eat it libs."

I'll drop it Monday

Trump in 2016 was a potential. He'd never held office before. He was a protest vote against the political structure of the United States, a savvy billionaire known to the masses through his decisive behavior on reality TV.

Trump in 2024 is a known quantity. He'll be Trump 2020 but still more defiant against norms and rules. He is a protest vote against democracy, a bombastic demagogue known to the masses through his autocratic behavior through four years of holding office.

In 2016 you could tell yourself "maybe this will be better." In 2024 the only people telling themselves that are fascists. And say what you will about the United States, we do poorly with fascism.

Fuckin' Sam Altman makes me miss Adam Neumann

My co-worker would bolt a plasma spectrometer with accelerometers on it to a vibration table with some special isolators between the instrument and mounting baseplate,

that sounds so fucking awesome

and we'd shake them with a sine sweep survey starting from like 1 Hz up through, I dunno, 40 kHz or something like that, and a power spectrogram level was input to govern the amplitude around each frequency. JUST like what you're doing with mics? We do it too.

Well what you're doing is ringing out the frequency response, right? You're trying to find constructive modes that are going to fuck you over while strapped in a rocket. You do that with an equalizer if it's sound or filters if it's an electromechanical system. I've linked this before, the eldritch magic starts at 3:35:

We'd already calculated the approximate normal modes of the instrument from 3D CAD models (we used Ansys)

For the record the last time I used ANSYS it was a command-line program that ran on a DEC Alpha.

By the way, at GSFC, they have like a 10 foot diameter gramophone to just blast shit with.

that sounds so fucking awesome

Which has its uses, heh, though perhaps mostly uncommercializable.

You are grossly underestimating the ease with which bad mixes can be produced.

Hadn't heard any AI tunes yet, and figured there was good reason for it. I don't go looking for them, and a really good one would have found its way to me by now if it existed.

The computer music cats have been doing "generative music" for a long time. It's easy as shit and doesn't require an LLM. Most of them are some form of neural network somewhere; "random ambient generator" has been an off-the-shelf product category for 20 years. Here's a free plugin for Kontakt.

Here's a walk-through for Ableton.

Here this is me buying you a virtual drink. Hopefully the taste goes away.

For the record, I am insufferable but I try hard not to be, believe it or not.

Here's my understanding of it -

An LLM trained exclusively on Khan Academy is going to have a nice fuzzy cloud of "wrong answers" and "things to say to wrong answers." A website with a test on it is going to have a hard-coded, verifiable, 100% accurate "right answer/wrong answer" matrix for any test they run.

The mistake is in thinking that the LLM can be trained to grade papers. It's going to give you a fuzzy cloud of "here's the vicinity of the right answer." That fuzzy cloud, however, beats the tar out of "nothing" when we're talking about automated instruction. The solution space of "right answers" and "wrong answers" leans heavily towards correct approaches when the problem is "provide a list of helpful tips to a seventh grader struggling with solving for X in a simple algebra problem" or "how would you instruct a student who is confusing the ordinate and abscissa."

Online tutorials are pretty shit right now and have been since the dawn of acoustic coupler modems. But realistically? AI should be Clippy. AI was born to be Clippy, that annoying thing you can ignore when it's out of its depth but which can do things like "looks like you're trying to make a table out of this data, would you like me to take a crack at it and then you can beat it to fit/paint it to match?"

Just don't let it judge college admissions essays.

...what prompt?

"So I had the most awesome dream last night"

"okay"

"and I'm going to tell you all about it!"

"uhhh"

"actually it's better than that I had an AI hallucinate a feature film full of all the shit that turns my crank and we can sit down together and watch it"

"my my look at the time surely I must be going"

"ehh that's okay you were never my friend anyway besides thanks to CoPilot I can watch Joe Rogan snuff porn all day you can fuck off"

"kthxbye reallyappreciateit"

I'm actually all for this. I'm sure Sam Altman is, too. Consume hundreds of hours of (paid) AI time generating your own special movie just for you. Will he serve your prompts up to the police if court-ordered? Indubitably. Considering how much colocation there is between Microsoft and the NSA, and considering how much information-sharing there is between the three letter agencies, I can virtually guarantee that shit's already rolling. "Hey Copilot draw me some shirley temple DP porn" "no prob fam I'll work on that while you answer the door I think I heard a knock"

Where it all falls down is the nerds assuming that anyone but their incel asses wants to watch custom movies.

I don't care how far back you go, theater of any kind is a mutual experience. It is a social ritual. Find a movie that's super great? TELL YOUR FRIENDS! Find a movie that's overhyped? BITCH TO YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT! Even a fucking DnD game takes at least two people and it hits its stride with four. Table read of a script with two actors? Weird. Table read of a script with a dozen actors? Sell tickets to the audience.

And look. If AI allows you to generate a film for your eight friends? Great. That's awesome. I hope you enjoy the shit out of it.

But it will never fucking threaten Hollywood.

The reason there are no real indie films left is that in order to make your money back these days you have to appeal to the broadest possible swath of humanity. Thats' why it's nothing but superhero movies anymore - it's the spectacle that makes money and the only controversial opinion in superhero movies is 'do you like superheroes.' Anyone of the opinion that superheroes are fascism is gonna stay home so you don't even need to worry about them.

The incel nerd take is "millions of actors will soon be out of work as we all use AI to generate our own custom movies" and holy fucking shit dude that's why nobody invites you to parties. you don't fucking get it and you won't even try.

123 million people watched the superbowl. The playoffs averaged 40m people - still a record. But what that tells you is that 80m people who don't give the first fuck about football sat down to watch the Superbowl simply because of the spectacle. And look.

Let's say I can build you a custom movie for $10. Let's say I can shoot something with actors in it for a million dollars. I make your movie and I profit let's say $9. I make my movie with actors in it and I charge $2. If I can get a 500,004 people to watch it I make more money. The argument put forth by the AI boosters is "well but those half million people won't come to your movie because they're busy spankin' it in their own personal Apple Vision Pro holodecks"

To which I say

the sooner we can make this happen the better, for all mankind.