Canadian watching from the North, wondering what the play is if Trump does engage in mass voter disruption. Things take months to make their way through the courts, and the previous playbook has been "make things take months until it's the actual day to do a thing and then whoops it's too late to roll back the election results and we just have to put these people into power."
Re Donny’s health and probability of him not being an immortal (🤞🏻): As always, all appropriate thoughts and prayers, assuming there’s a god that can be bothered to do the right thing. Republican Jesus®️ for one seems in no rush to call the Don to his side. Is mystery, but I’m no metaphysician so 🤷🏻.
As for AI, I enjoy Gemini which was, among other things, a big help designing a t shirt for the Mrs. Also had a fun chat with it a couple of weeks ago re NYC’s Mt Sinai hospital and whether it was an awful shit show management-wise. (You can guess.)
Meanwhile, I had a weird “chat” with Nu Siri trying to ascertain whether I was off the waitlist. That I was having the chat meant right there I was off the list but Siri didn’t know that nor how to otherwise confirm that I was. Betas; LOL.
Meanwhile, the bottom line of a trustworthy proponent of AI’s bottom line is that you can’t trust the stuff but must confirm.
Tokens - Jesus, all that La de da and the best they can come up with is a Chuck E Cheese business model.
I made a great living for the last several years working for the world's largest importer of Dutch bulbs. I lost my job last year due to tariffs. Funny how often irony presents as shit luck. Or vice -versa.
AI subjugates intelligence, and causes sloth and laziness.
And it's getting worse.
A data center looks like nothing — a windowless shed off the highway, humming. Inside, the cooling never stops, and the water it drinks is water a child somewhere doesn't.
A new United Nations University report ran the numbers, and they'll sit you down. Last year the world's data centers pulled some 448 terawatt-hours — AI took a fifth — which, as a country, would rank eleventh on earth. The water they drank could fill 1.8 million Olympic pools. Lead author Kaveh Madani says the public still treats all this as software when it is, in fact, dirt and copper and rivers.
Musk proposes to build data centers in earth orbit. Uh-huh. It reminds me of a great record National Lampoon produced in the 70's, called Goodbye Pop. In it, a nitwit Brit rocker (probably Chris Guest) talks about how a record exec said to him, "Look, Keef. We can't afford to send you, and the group, and the London Philharmonic into outer space..."
About the AI thing: one of the things I appreciate about youse guys' writing is that it doesn't reek of AI. Sure, there are several Substacks that don't (Wonkette, the Play Typer Guy, Tiedrich, Heather Cox Richardson) but there are a few that do ("writing that sounds like it's wrapped in flopsweat and regret," if ya know what I mean [those AI similes make me want to break things] and the ultra-short grammatically-questionable sentences broken into separate paragraphs that could be combined into one or two sentences with the use of *gasp* commas).
Personally, I've never used AI for assistance in writing—but using AI altogether can't be helped when it just automatically comes up doing a Google search (and even 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 I don't trust it). Unfortunately, a lot of people immediately assume something is AI-written with the deployment of my all-time favorite punctuation—the em dash. I know you guys use it as frequently as I do but it's probably due to how we all learned how to write and your use of it reads "naturally," if that makes any sense.
Okay, enough of that. I'm just waiting to wake up some morning and find out that the fat orange sack o' shit is brown bread (sorry, I've been living in England too long, that means "dead").
Thanks, Dina! I love the em dash and sometimes feel guilty for using it too much--but fuck it.
As for using AI, I've (as it says in this piece) asked Claude to answer questions about it, but would never use it for actual writing. I know professional, accomplished writers who have used it to summarize interview transcripts and etc., and love it for that. Then again, the excellent TenGrain at Mock Paper Scissors always refers to it as "fancy autocomplete."
I recommend that every AI skeptic follow my links to the two Ed Zitron appearances (his newsletter, and the convo with Chris Hedges). He's smart, really funny, and merciless in his critique of it.
Canadian watching from the North, wondering what the play is if Trump does engage in mass voter disruption. Things take months to make their way through the courts, and the previous playbook has been "make things take months until it's the actual day to do a thing and then whoops it's too late to roll back the election results and we just have to put these people into power."
Shhh. Don't give them ideas.
Re Donny’s health and probability of him not being an immortal (🤞🏻): As always, all appropriate thoughts and prayers, assuming there’s a god that can be bothered to do the right thing. Republican Jesus®️ for one seems in no rush to call the Don to his side. Is mystery, but I’m no metaphysician so 🤷🏻.
As for AI, I enjoy Gemini which was, among other things, a big help designing a t shirt for the Mrs. Also had a fun chat with it a couple of weeks ago re NYC’s Mt Sinai hospital and whether it was an awful shit show management-wise. (You can guess.)
Meanwhile, I had a weird “chat” with Nu Siri trying to ascertain whether I was off the waitlist. That I was having the chat meant right there I was off the list but Siri didn’t know that nor how to otherwise confirm that I was. Betas; LOL.
Meanwhile, the bottom line of a trustworthy proponent of AI’s bottom line is that you can’t trust the stuff but must confirm.
Tokens - Jesus, all that La de da and the best they can come up with is a Chuck E Cheese business model.
I made a great living for the last several years working for the world's largest importer of Dutch bulbs. I lost my job last year due to tariffs. Funny how often irony presents as shit luck. Or vice -versa.
AI subjugates intelligence, and causes sloth and laziness.
And it's getting worse.
A data center looks like nothing — a windowless shed off the highway, humming. Inside, the cooling never stops, and the water it drinks is water a child somewhere doesn't.
A new United Nations University report ran the numbers, and they'll sit you down. Last year the world's data centers pulled some 448 terawatt-hours — AI took a fifth — which, as a country, would rank eleventh on earth. The water they drank could fill 1.8 million Olympic pools. Lead author Kaveh Madani says the public still treats all this as software when it is, in fact, dirt and copper and rivers.
https://thistleandmoss.com/p/what-survives-the-morning-no-brick-just-fire
Musk proposes to build data centers in earth orbit. Uh-huh. It reminds me of a great record National Lampoon produced in the 70's, called Goodbye Pop. In it, a nitwit Brit rocker (probably Chris Guest) talks about how a record exec said to him, "Look, Keef. We can't afford to send you, and the group, and the London Philharmonic into outer space..."
About the AI thing: one of the things I appreciate about youse guys' writing is that it doesn't reek of AI. Sure, there are several Substacks that don't (Wonkette, the Play Typer Guy, Tiedrich, Heather Cox Richardson) but there are a few that do ("writing that sounds like it's wrapped in flopsweat and regret," if ya know what I mean [those AI similes make me want to break things] and the ultra-short grammatically-questionable sentences broken into separate paragraphs that could be combined into one or two sentences with the use of *gasp* commas).
Personally, I've never used AI for assistance in writing—but using AI altogether can't be helped when it just automatically comes up doing a Google search (and even 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 I don't trust it). Unfortunately, a lot of people immediately assume something is AI-written with the deployment of my all-time favorite punctuation—the em dash. I know you guys use it as frequently as I do but it's probably due to how we all learned how to write and your use of it reads "naturally," if that makes any sense.
Okay, enough of that. I'm just waiting to wake up some morning and find out that the fat orange sack o' shit is brown bread (sorry, I've been living in England too long, that means "dead").
Thanks, Dina! I love the em dash and sometimes feel guilty for using it too much--but fuck it.
As for using AI, I've (as it says in this piece) asked Claude to answer questions about it, but would never use it for actual writing. I know professional, accomplished writers who have used it to summarize interview transcripts and etc., and love it for that. Then again, the excellent TenGrain at Mock Paper Scissors always refers to it as "fancy autocomplete."
I recommend that every AI skeptic follow my links to the two Ed Zitron appearances (his newsletter, and the convo with Chris Hedges). He's smart, really funny, and merciless in his critique of it.
Fascinating analogy about the splintering of political factions:
"Indeed, we’re halfway there today, pre-split like a Hershey bar pre-scored into tidy little separate squares for easy snacking and sharing."
Gee, I sure would love to read an optimistic 'what if' tale of what life might be like in a Blue States of America world...hint, hint.
Trump ain't an 80 kind of a guy. He's more like a 4-20's guy, and he has enough of our money to keep all 4 hangin' round for now.