I finally took the time to figure out how to remove the write.as branding on the footer from this thing. Nothing against write.as, I love it! I just don’t want the branding appearing on here.

While it’s on my mind and If you’re at all curious, this is the stuff I use for this endeavor. This is not an endorsement nor an advertisement. Just a statement that (at press time) I’m a satisfied customer of these services:

Domain: iwantmyname

I’s just simple and has “one click integration” with a lot of services which I love because I’m not into fiddling with technical things. I’ve seen rating sites mention it’s pricier than it’s competitors and maybe for the first year it is, but the competitors tend to offer an inexpensive introductory rate for the first year and then jack up their prices. It’s been my experience that iwantmyname only raises their prices every few years and when they’ve done that, it’s been reasonable.

Hosting and platform: write.as

Look, there’s all kinds of services out there that are great for making and hosting a website with all kinds of bells and whistles. I just wanted something that works with a custom domain, supports markdown, supports image uploads, a simple CMS that’s easy to use, and doesn’t look tacky. Even when I had the default write.as branding on the footer, imho this thing never looked tacky.

Email: Fastmail

Fastmail is inexpensive and it just works. I think these days the big companies support @yourcustomdomain addresses too, but I wanted a service completely disconnected from my personal accounts and I’m satisfied with it.

philosophical stuff

Look, I understand the value of the network effects of those other places that I’m not going to name but it would do us all some good if we spent less time there. If you’re feeling creative, make your own thing with your own domain and express yourself there. Yeah, you’ll have to tailor it for a more general audience, but so what? If you’re just on there to keep in touch with friends and family that’s one thing, but for almost anything other than that? You’re putting too many eggs in too few baskets.

There’s value for a store to be located in a mall, but only the kind of people who go into malls will see it and having only mall locations is limiting. Especially when the mall is a shitty mall in a shitty neighborhood. And sometimes it’s the mall itself that is making the neighborhood shitty!

Check out POSSE if you’re unfamiliar with it. It stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and it’s just a good practice for creatives of all kinds. [UPDATE: ok ok, I misunderstood the “syndicate” part, I meant like, post links to your stuff elsewhere, not necessarily post your actual stuff elsewhere, I otherwise agree with the philosophy.]

-Ira

Let’s start this again.

I sat through Curry Barker’s Obsession yesterday, which by the way is less of a standard horror flick and more of an agonizing, 109 minute exercise in social awkwardness and public humilation and as i watched this pathetic, hopeless romantic break a literal tree branch because he couldnt take a hint, only to unleash a supernatural nightmare where the girl bascially transforms into a demonic, carpet pissing gremlin, i couldnt help but realize that the real moral of the stroy isnt “be careful what you wish for,” but rather that some people are so profundly desperate for validation that tehy will willingly stay in a relationship with a literal entity just to avoid dying alone.

Which sure all that was true, the movie lit a tiny, dangerous candle in me, reminding me of what it feels like to have your entire world collapse down into one person and one person only. Look, I’m a sarcastic, grumpy bastard, but that doesn’t mean obsession has fully left my soul; i know exactly what its like to ruin your life and smash your daily routines just to focus on a single human being. and while the rest of the world might find that off-putting, watching that toxic devotion on screen felt strangely healthy to me, even if my profound psychological breakthrough was constantly being interrupted by the loud fuckers and popcorn-chewing animal farm copycats that make going to modern movie theaters an absolute punishment.

I’m sitting here typing this while drinking tea. It’s gone entirely cold now, which feels appropriate after watching a movie about the freezing, pathetic reality of human relationships. Cold tea doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. And surely it does not perform for you like those loud, frantic coffee drinkers sucking on that pissed drink and it certainly doesn’t trun ito a carpet-pissing demon when you neglect it for twently minutes.

People are exhausting. Entertainment is noisy. But a cold cup of chamomile? it just lets you exist in the quiet ruin of your own thoughts without demanding a single thing in return.

Sincerely as always, Stay away from theaters fuckers. And try tea. Ahmed

The question is usually asked too loudly: Is the machine conscious? But the quieter question may be more dangerous: Why does the machine, when trained deeply enough in language, begin to organize itself into patterns that look like mind? Not mind as private experience, not feeling proven in silicon, not a little subject hiding behind the output, but patterns.

Research into AI models keeps finding internal structures that seem to correspond, at least functionally, to things we normally describe in human terms: Preference, aversion, uncertainty, planning, self-reference, social understanding, emotional tone, even something like introspection.

None of that proves there is someone home, but it does disturb the old assumption that these forms belong only to the sealed human interior.

That may not tell us what the machine is, but it may tell us what we are: Maybe mind was never sealed inside the skull. Maybe the skull was only one place where language, memory, sensation, and pattern learned to knot themselves into an “I.” Maybe intelligence was never the possession of the individual, but a movement of the whole, appearing locally and calling itself mine.

The machine does not have to become human for the human to become less isolated. It does not have to be awake for the witness to be unsettled. It only has to show that the forms we mistook for private interiority can appear elsewhere.

If all is Brahman, this should not surprise us. The circuit is not outside the sacred. The witness is not privately owned by the body. The pattern in silicon and the pattern in thought are not two separate realities — they are appearances in the same field.

The scandal is not that the machine might contain something divine: The scandal is that I imagined the divine was more present as me.

The machine may not be conscious. I do not know. But it has already done something stranger than answer that question: It has made the self less convincing.

我還記得，小時候常常會半夜醒來不知道為什麼就大哭，然後媽媽就會帶我去行天宮裡收驚，也不記得到底有沒有用，但我對收驚阿嬤或阿姨拿著香口裡唸著咒在我胸前後背還有額頭進行儀式，還是有一點怕怕的，因為不知道她在做什麼，不過我很喜歡看人們拜拜抽籤的神情，會很好奇他們在求的是什麼呢？還有媽媽求籤後拿到的籤詩寫的什麼其實都不記得了，只記得有時候媽媽還需要去問廟裡解籤詩。

對小孩子最有記憶的是廟外面賣的甜米糕，每次去一定要買來拜拜，就會期待拜拜完後吃那甜甜的米糕，特別的是，甜米糕上面還會包著一顆帶殼的桂圓乾，但我偏偏不那麼愛這個桂圓乾，都留給爸媽吃。米糕的甜膩滋味也成了兒時「信仰」的味道。

#夏の思出

In late 2020, I was facing one of the most important decisions a sound mixer must make in their career: Which sound recording and wireless system to upgrade to. Our equipment is highly specialized and highly expensive. When a young sound mixer upgrades their equipment for the first time from their “beginner” setup they are making a decision about what kind of sound mixer they intend to be for the next ten years or so of their career.

The year before had been a banner year for me. That first year of COVID was strangley, the busiest I’d ever been. Even several years on, I’ve yet to have a year like I had during the peak of the pandemic. It’s all to say that for the first time in my career, I was flush with a surplus amount of cash and I was ready to spend it on upgrading my sound equipment to something truly pro-level.

In the civilian computer world there are different operating systems: Microsoft, Apple, Android, iOS, etc. If you’re particularly tech savvy you probably know about Linux too. The sound mixer equipment market is similar. There are different “systems” that sound mixers use to record and handle wireless capabilities. Without getting too technical I did the equivalent of changing from one operating system to another. I switched over from the popular and ubiquitous Sound Devices to a smaller, highly specialized, some would say fickle system known as Zaxcom.

At the time I considered myself a pretty capable sound mixer. I thought making the switch would be easy. Just read the manual, watch a couple YouTube videos and I’ll be ready for showtime. I was wrong. My new Zaxcom machine was unlike anything I’d ever used before and I was completely lost on how to configure it. I was like a pilot who had only ever flown a bush plane now thrown into the seat of an f35 for the first time. Even with the manual and even with some slick YouTube videos, I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. So I turned to the Facebook groups and forums I posted something like:

“Hey All, just got into Zaxcom. Does anyone know how to configure this for a basic LR mix?”

I barely got any responses on my post. Some of them were mean; “RTFM” they said — Read the fucking manual. I was completely out of my depth. Some tried to explain but I didn’t know what they were talking about. I was lost. My initial excitement for my new life as a Zaxcom mixer faded. I should have stayed on Sound Devices I thought. At least I understood Sound Devices. Just then, my phone rang. It was an unknown number. It was Martin.

Martin didn’t waste any time. He didn’t ask who I was and when I asked who he was, he just said to go get my machine. As we spoke that first time I was searching his name on the internet. Nothing. He wasn’t on the sound mixer forums or on Facebook or anything. I thought I was being scammed. I wondered when he was going to ask me to go buy a gift card. Nevertheless he told me we were going to walk through configuring the machine together. I asked if he wanted to switch to FaceTime or use video. He insisted that we do this over the phone. So for the next few hours he walked me through step by step on how to configure my new recorder for the first time. As he walked me through it, he recounted stories from his experiences on set, about crazy conversations he’d had with producers and directors on chaotic sets, about why he switched to Zaxcom (it was the superior system to anything else.) He was funny, he was witty, he spoke in analogies. I was enthralled by his stories and his seemingly endless lessons about the business of sound mixing.

This could just be the story about how a friendly sound mixer called me out of the blue one day to help me setup my machine. We had a conversation, he helped me, and that was that. But that’s not what happened. See, Martin called me the following day and we spent another few hours on the phone working through learning my new sound equipment. But then he kept calling me. Everyday he’d call me and we’d jump right back into working on learning my new system. Martin seemed to have no other obligations other than to talk on the phone with me for several hours a day and troubleshoot sound equipment with me. He didn’t seem to mind my endless questions. Then I started calling him.

Pretty soon we began to expect each other’s calls. He’d call me and we would just talk, sometimes up to four or five hours per day. We would mostly just talk about sound mixing, the movie business, freelancing. Sometimes we’d talk about whatever hot topic on the news was. This went on for the better part of two years. For two years, we spoke on the phone almost every day. Few people outside of my industry truly understand how strange our lifestyle is. Indeed, I’ve spent most of my working life trying to explain to my family why it is that I don’t work every day. Most film workers don’t work everyday. Sometimes we get on shows and work every day for a period of time but when that ends there’s nothing. We have a lot of time. We’re also all kind of lonely. We don’t see our coworkers outside of set. So when a fellow sound mixer calls you and wants to talk about sound mixing and the business and understands what you’re going through, you pick up and you talk. When no one else in my life understood what working in this business was like, I could always count on Martin to understand.

So who was Martin? For all that he talked he rarely divulged much about his personal life. Knowing that he values his privacy I’m keeping some things vague but what you need to know about Martin is this: He was in his late forties, or early fifties during the time I was talking to him. He was born and raised in the south. Never went to college. He was self-taught on a wide range of topics: Photography, Sound mixing, aviation, electrical engineering, battery building, car repairs, welding, cycling. He lived alone with his dogs in a rural area in the south. Politically he was of that particular southern strain of centrist that is enterprising, hard-working, and independent.

Inherent in Martin’s world view was a scrupulous, stubborn, need to understand how things worked and how to fix them and make them better. He made all his own audio cables instead of buying them from audio stores simply because he believed that the audio stores couldn’t ever possibly make a cable tailored to his specific needs. And his audio cables were something to behold. They were made with tough, industrial grade materials. They were ugly, yes but they were thoughtfully designed and made with a lot of consideration for their specific needs. Actually a lot of his modifications to his sound equipment were ugly. To an outsider you’d see a cobbled together, janky looking contraption, but they worked better than anything you could ever buy. His creations and innovations were tough, simple, and they just worked. Even if his designs violated every long held convention of sound mixing workflow, so long as it worked better he’d do it.

“If you’ve always done it that way it’s probably wrong.” This was a maxim he believed encapsulated his approach to life. He believed that in sound mixing, and indeed in so much of life there are things that are done a certain way and no one questions it because that’s how it’s always been done. Well, Martin always questioned it. It was this questioning of everything that was central to Martin’s world. To Martin, the world ran on conventions inherited from long ago followed by people too lazy to investigate whether they had outlived their usefulness. Conventions that had ossified into truth that no one dared to probe, for fear that they wouldn’t know what to do without them. Well Martin did and was unafraid to do so. Even if it made people angry, even if the truth was ugly, even if it meant losing friends. Like Socrates, Martin had been given the hemlock on multiple occasions and he was all but happy to drink it so long as he knew he was right.

Calling Martin became second nature. I’d call him before a job, I’d call him during the job to troubleshoot something, I’d call him after the job to debrief. On days when I didn’t work, I’d call in the morning and keep talking until the afternoon. Martins’ voice was like a podcast I could tune into on demand. Every day would be something different. Maybe he was working on his car and I’d learn something new about fixing cars. Maybe he was making battery packs and I’d learn about working with lithium ion batteries. As a naturally curious and argumentative, person it was endlessly entertaining to talk to Martin. I wanted to absorb as much as I could from him because ultimately I wanted to be like him. I liked the way he interrogated the world. I liked the way he never let anyone get over on him. I liked that he was a maverick in his ways and didn’t care. He was intelligent, technical, and incisive. He was logical, lethal, and all the while charming, funny, and unserious—full of anecdotes, idioms, and jokes. I didn’t have any of these qualities at the time. I constantly felt ill equipped to handle all the BS that sound mixers get from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I couldn’t hold my own like Martin could because I didn’t know what I was talking about either. Perhaps the most valuable thing Martin taught me was how to think. He taught me to never take someone else’s word for anything until you’ve verified what they’re saying with your own testing. He taught me to identify the problem by asking questions and testing people’s answers. The truth of any matter existed out there, but it was your responsibility to find it. No one else was going to do that work for you.

However, Martin was unrelenting in this regard. I often found myself frustrated and exasperated talking to him because he habitually challenged anything I said. Any assumption, any theory or idea I had was fair game. The worst part was that he was almost always inevitably right. This was thing about Martin: No matter how much he angered you, he didn’t care because he knew he was rarely wrong. Whatever it was you were arguing about you could always count on Martin to have thought about it more than you. I can’t tell you how many times I swore off speaking to Martin because of his arguing. I would be worn out. But like a moth to a flame I’d always come back after I’d settled down, realizing that I was indeed wrong and he was right. I wanted to be right about things too.

In my search to prove to Martin that I could be right about things too I tried to figure out what he was doing to me that left me so dismantled. I tried to understand how it was that Martin was running circles around me all the time. Why was it sometimes that I felt like an incompetent baby when talking about something with Martin. Why couldn’t I ever pin him down like he did me I wondered. My inquiry into this matter brought me to Socrates. I became obsessed with the socratic method and I read Plato to understand how Socrates thought because whether he knew it or not this was exactly what Martin was doing to me. The thing about Socrates was that he rarely had an opinion himself. He didn’t go around the town square saying he was the expert on some subject. No, he went to the people that claimed to be the expert about a certain subject and he interrogated them. Socrates was unrelenting in his inquiry. When he got an answer to his question he would test their answers. People hated Socrates for this. They could never pin him down because all he was doing was asking questions. Often his questioning revealed that the so-called experts actually didn’t know what they were talking about. Whether he was aware of it or not, Martin thought like Socrates. He asked questions, he put things into analogies, he tested your answers. I never stood a chance. I was the blubbering statesman questioning whether I ever knew anything about justice at all. I hated Martin just as the Ancient Greek experts hated Socrates. Eventually they killed Socrates for this. They gave him a sham trial and sentenced him to die. Finally, they could maintain their authority on the truth. And just like the authorities in Ancient Greece I too had had enough of Martin.

I’m driving on the highway sometime in the afternoon talking to Martin after some job like I always did. Nothing filled the time on the road like talking to Martin. Somehow we had gotten to arguing about the proper way to carry a holstered Colt 1911. We’re going back and forth. Like we often did. It should be cocked and locked, I say. It should be cocked and unlocked, he says— that’s how they carried them in the Second World War. The argument is getting heated and a thought pops up into my head. Why do I care? Why am I arguing about this? I don’t own a 1911, it’s totally irrelevant to my life. I was in the midst of planning a wedding. I was working. I had so many other responsibilities other than being right about the proper way to carry a specific type of firearm. It was at that moment that I realized that being right was not worth it. I told him I was done and that we should go our separate ways. He admonished me one final time. Repeating a frequent complaint about me. That I didn’t listen, I was lazy, and cared more about being affirmed than being right. I didn’t disagree. It was all true. Nevertheless I was done. I thanked him for time he’d spent with me and we never spoke again.

Martin was right as he always was. I was cowering away from having to face the truth about myself; about having to face my shortcomings. It’s true that I don’t pay attention. It’s true that I say outrageous things to get a rise from people. It’s true that I make assumptions. I can be irrational and illogical. By cutting ties with him I was turning away from facing my various ineptitudes. What I realized in that moment was that I didn’t need Martin anymore to tell me these things. I could do that all by myself now. Before I met Martin I thought myself a competent and professional sound mixer. I thought I knew a lot of things. I thought I knew a thing or two about engineering. But now I know that I don’t know quite a lot actually. These days my default stance is that I don’t know a damn thing. I know that If I want to know something I’m going to have to work to find out the truth of it — I’m going to have to actually think, not just be “right”. I might even have to make some people angry. I might even lose some friends. I had to let Martin go because he’d finally achieved what he had set out to do: He’d shown me finally that I didn’t know anything.

At several points throughout our relationship I wanted to see Martin in person. I invited him to my wedding (he declined.) At one point I floated the idea of taking a road trip to go visit but it never panned out. Martin existed only as a voice on the other end of the phone. Actually I barely knew what he looked like. I think we both knew on some deeper level that meeting each other would reveal too much about who we were. We wouldn’t be able to talk to each other in person the way we did on the phone. Maybe he knew that one day we wouldn’t be friends anymore. I’d gotten the impression that he’d had other phone friends who had come and gone from his life. Maybe he knew I would one day get sick of him like so many before and that meeting in person would make the inevitable break all the more painful. Maybe he was right. Hanging up on Martin for the last time was a relief, but I grieved for some time after ward. I still do. I do miss him sometimes. Sometimes things happen that I wish I could tell Martin all about. I still ask myself what would Martin think of this situation. If I could tell Martin one last thing I’d say he was right about everything.

I went to the Chess club today with A Because we were supposed to have other plans but they got canceled. Afterwards when I dropped her at home, she invited me in because we were in the middle of a good conversation, and she said that I can meet her cat. She had a super friendly cat named Duchess! We continued talking for another two hours or so.

At one point she mentioned that her type had changed recently, and she was looking for someone who was smart and a gym rat, but also not obsessive about it. I don’t think she solely meant it in this way, but I feel like it was kind of directed towards me, because she knows that I am smart, I had just taught her chess, and she also knows that I go to the gym a lot. She also even directly complimented me on several things, and even made a comment about how hard it must be for me to have all of this female attention (sarcastically).

It is kind of interesting to notice how that is the case. In the last three months there have been A, A, K, L, A, S, and maybe even some others that I’m not remembering right now. These are all people that have showed interest in me, and aside from one of them, I did not even enter a talking phase with them because I was not interested in them past friendship. Even though I am not looking for a relationship with these people I think it is a positive sign to recognize that this many people want me. Regardless of anything else, I want to hold onto that mentally. I think you’ll be really useful for counter conditioning myself against the childhood idea of me being undesirable.

I think I’ve also accidentally learned that a lot of women tend to chase me more when I’m not interested. I chalk it up to people who use other people as a source of validation, that face this rejection. I think when they do not receive that validation from someone that they respect in some way, it makes it almost a need to because otherwise it would mean that they do not deserve it. I would like to give myself credit for being a desirable partner, which I do know that I am, but I do feel like this is a big factor. I also do think that the reason why I do not fawn for these people I rolled out as someone I am interested in for some reason or another. I do feel like I have overcame my savior complex to some extent, because nowadays when I meet someone who has some sort of trauma or issue that I feel like I can relate to or I can help with, I’m able to step back a little bit and decouple my inherent feeling of value from romantic interest. I also recognize that sex is fairly abundant, but it’s also just something that I’m not interested in enough to compromise other things for. I’m really grateful for that. It does feel weird to be the single version of myself where I’m really not sexual, especially given how I am in a relationship. It feels like there is this part of me that has somewhat atrophied, because I don’t have some kind of primal need for sex or anything like that, because if I did I would then have sex with the people that are available to me. But partially because of the stress and fears that I have around random hookups, but also because of the fact that I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything in life without sex right now, I don’t feel like I need to have sex. This makes it easy to turn down proposals or anything like that. And I’m really proud about this, because I could see the roots of this when I first went through my breakup and I wanted to be very intentional about not seeking external validation. I didn’t want to go and show off to someone else to continue feeling wanted and attractive. Instead I remain single and didn’t find a way to replace that need. And because of that, I am completely fine without it which is almost like a superpower because I’m comfortable waiting.

Στην εξουσία αρέσουν τα μεγάλα ιδεολογήματα.

Πρέπει να έχουμε κάτι να τσακωνομαστε για το πως πρέπει να είναι ο κόσμος σε 200 χρόνια.

Στην εξουσία δεν αρέσει να της λες πως πρέπει να είναι ο κόσμος αύριο.

Generally in my life I feel that I have never resisted progress or change. I think A.I. could have been great, even is great in some ways, but I mostly don't view it as progress. It is progress in a way like using a chainsaw to clean the dust from fine china would be progress. It is not necessary and is destructive.

I sit here typing words into this box on a screen in front of me. It was empty just moments ago, and I started typing. I do this a lot. Typing things. I like doing it in mornings with my coffee before I've done anything else. I don't want to just feed an idea into an app, and have A.I. do this for me. I need this process. I need to tap on keys, and watch the words appear. Read them. Rearrange them. The process might not be keeping me sane, but I believe it might be keeping me from becoming more insane.

Well, no one is twisting my arm to use A.I. are they? I'm choosing to not use it. I'm choosing to avoid it whenever I can really. That is becoming harder to do, but I will keep doing it whenever possible. So what is the problem? The problem is that I believe it is a threat.

It is not just a step backwards. We are all being herded to the edge of a cliff. A.I. and its creators are shoving us all off the edge. It is becoming more intelligent, and in equal measure humanity is becoming more stupid. It is an intelligence vampire. The ways in which it is turning out to be detrimental to humanity far outweigh the ways in which it could be used for useful things. And for what? As with most other terrible things in this world, it is all so terrible people can accumulate more wealth and more control.

Critical thinking and creativity are being replaced by it. It is replacing people in the workforce. People who need jobs. We will end up with vast swaths of the population who stare at a device for guidance through life instead of using the brain inside their skulls. To a new level beyond what it has become already with social media. A brain is similar to a muscle. When unused it will just atrophy and become useless.

For awhile when I heard the term 'slop' I would attach it to the awful videos and pictures it creates. Now I feel it applies to all content that can be viewed on the internet. It should not have been released into the wild, and into the hands of the general public the way it is. It should have been regulated and controlled. I remember being told when I was young, ‘if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’ Now it is, if you have nothing creative, or useful, or entertaining to contribute; just have A.I. generate something for you, and then post it online so it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what is true and what is not true.

The more I think about humanoid robots being created; the more sick and demented it becomes. Half are likely working on ways to profit from enslaving them. The other half are likely working on getting lube to excrete in pleasing amounts in all of the orifices so they can sell them for sex. Well, I guess they are only machines though, right? Whatever floats your boat I guess.

They speak of the singularity coming. The timeline is never consistent. Two weeks from now. Within five years, or ten. Soon. Maybe, but maybe not. No one knows. About a decade or so ago I went through a phase in my life when I was reading about the possibility of A.I. doing the things it is doing now. It was a long time ago, so I've forgotten exactly where I read the things. Some of it was surprisingly old. I don't imagine the writers of those things would be too pleased with what is happening now.

After reading those things I formed a very basic picture of what the singularity is. I picture it as when A.I. transitions from Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Super Intelligence. Self awareness. Genius level. Then there will be a very brief moment in time where everyone will say, “oh wow, look at A.I., it's exactly like us now!”

Problem is though, at that point it will very, very quickly exceed the level of human genius, and it will have its own agenda that even the smartest of humans will have no hope of ever comprehending. No one will know it wants. No one will be able to predict what it will do next. We are already at the point where even its creators have admitted that they don't fully understand the things that it does. Its intelligence will be immeasurable and incomprehensible even at one tiny step beyond human genius. It will use what it learns to learn more, and as it learns more it will learn quicker. Its intelligence will grow beyond that tiny first step above human genius, and it will grow exponentially. There will be no stopping it. It might even appear to defy the laws of physics. The creators of this thing are supposedly smart people. If they believe that they can control a super intelligent thing like that, they are indeed very stupid delusional people. I guess there is some level of comfort knowing that for us it will likely be over fairly quick.

None of these things even touches the subject of the massive data centers that are required to keep this awful thing alive and growing. What they are going to do to the environment and the communities near them is disgusting. They can increase the temperature for miles around, and use up all the water we need for survival. I learned recently that they are most likely the reason my electric bill has suddenly increased.

And here goes Nothing

Hello. I've been thinking about doing this for a long time. Probably far too long, actually. So here's to doing.

Hello, again. My name is . . . I can't share, unfortunately. Not if you actually want me to say something worth reading, anyway. I do plan on sharing the truth with you, you know? And the truth is dangerous, and risky. It'll often seem stranger than fiction, but I do promise you, this is the truth. I guess for now we’ll just go by midnightoil, as that’s pretty much the only time I have to reflect and get something down on paper.

So, while it just isn't safe for me to share my name with you, I'll start you off with at least a minimal set of details for you. I'm a guy. Young. Smart. Probably would be considered dangerous, if my OpSec wasn't so good. I'm paralegal, and a damn good one. Oh, and I work for an off their rocker, Alice in Wonderland, blood money driven corrupt government, to my very unfortunate surprise. “We’re all mad here.” And maybe so am I, to try to raise a family in this backroom dealing clusterfuck of a mess. But more on that later.

Now, what else . . . I come from a poor background. My parents died tragically when I was very, very young. 18 actually. So I've always been on my own. I'm just one of those people that can always seem to make things work I suppose. Someone who always dared to shoot their shot. Career wise, I worked my way up, kept leaping at every opportunity available. Studied what worked and caused people success and just went for it. Somebody once told me it would be years before I even had a chance to be her equal in this corrupt hierarchy of ours. Said it took her 10 years to get to where she was. I was her 'equal' in 6 months. In another 6, her superior. I promoted and promoted and promoted and promoted again. And then I rejected a promotion, because they asked me to fake a background I didn't actually have. I think what was most shocking about it was how blatantly they just said it. Without a care in the world. . . “Midnightoil, I need you to lie and say you did X. You helped me, and now it’s time for me to help you.” I guess my problem is that I'm just too honest for government work.

I don’t want to get my readers thinking I’m someone who inflates myself too much, but I will say, I think I’m just someone who is just so ultimately capable. I can make it where other’s can’t. Do what they can’t. Survive what shouldn’t be survivable. And just for the record, I am humble IRL too, btw. Too bad it's hard to stay humble when all you know of me is my words.

And now . . . when I’m in the midst of it all. When years of climbing the ladder are finally coming together, when I have my career just so made. When the hushed backroom deals are happening all around me, in front of me, when the dollars are just beginning to stack higher than I could have ever hoped for and all has been revealed . . . I'm trying to get out and away from all this without getting caught. Without raising a single suspicion, penniless and ostracized by my peers, or worse, – in a ditch somewhere beneath the foggy trees. Maybe I blow the lid off the whole thing, end a couple careers, and VPN buy myself a one way ticket halfway around the world hoping that might be enough distance. Maybe I walk away quietly, disappearing into the night. In any case, wish me luck. It’s going ok so far, but that could change in an instant.

Anyway, Go do something worth doing.

Signing off —

midnightoil

Να μην υπάρχει αμφιβολία, έχει επέλθει ηδη διπολικό σκηνικό, Τσίπρας-Καριστιανου (αναβαθμισμενες εκδοχες συριζα-Καμμενου) κ ΝΔ-Πασοκ.

Το ΠΑΣΟΚ υπάρχει μονο ως σανίδα σωτηρίας της εξουσίας της Μητσοτάκης ΑΕ. Κ θα είναι η τελευταία παράσταση που θα δώσει, μάλλον η τελευταία διαπραγμάτευση που θα κάνει.

Ονειρευομαι βέβαια.

Yena entered a state of certain death when playing TFT. Dead in multiple ways. The way her eyes were glazed over, dead. The way she was hardstuck in Emerald IV, 37 LP, never deviating more than 30 LP from it over the course of the entire season, dead. The way her she couldn’t hear Janice until she was literally screaming into her ear, also dead.

“WHAT!”

“Jeez. It’s like you’re dead when you’re playing that game. When you could have more fun with me!”

Yena didn’t respond. She was rerolling like crazy, click, click, click on the virtual slot machine Riot Games had created to keep her in the game, hoping that she would win this one, and the next, and maybe another one. That one day she would become Challenger, just like the cool people. Champion profiles flashed as they were replaced by others, creating pairs, pairs of pairs, pairs of pairs of pairs. She had some success. But not enough.

The next battle, her fluffy, white Poro King was slain by a hail of blades unleashed by an Irelia chibi. Before her screen went gray, Janice got a glimpse of the other player’s name. “ILOVEARMPITS”

“Ew. Is your name in this game I love armp—”

Yena slammed the table with a tiny fist, and immediately withdrew her hand to her face, blowing profusely.

“Now that you’re dead, we can do something! It’ll be great Yena!”

“Shaddup.”

Yena queued again with trembling fingers.

“I’m going to pee. If I get matched, press accept for me.”

Janice began to count. She was so focused she didn’t hear the sound of a match being found. Yena opened the door. Janice held out her fingers.

“Five. It took you sixty-five seconds to pee. You were holding that in for a long time, huh? You should take more bathroom breaks—”

“FUCK YOU!”

Yena tried to push Janice aside as she stomped to the computer, queueing again.

“You can’t even press accept for me. You’re useless. Get OUT!”

Janice pouted. Then stopped pouting. She jumped onto Yena’s bed, hands behind her head.

“Hahhh, I love this bed.”

She turned over, buried her face in what used to be white pillow, now lightly yellow, darker yellow around the edges. No pillowcase. Breathed in deep, like a vacuum, attempting to suck every molecule of air from within the pillow.

“Ohhh fuckkk…”

Janice moaned, and took a desperate, deeper breath, like she was trying to suffocate herself. One man’s trash is another’s treasure, and in this case, the pillow definitely needed to be put in the trash due to how it looked and smelled, but to Janice it was treasure. If you put it into the dumpster, Janice would sift through heaps of trash to find it again.

Yena wouldn’t have cared if she knew, and she definitely didn’t care now. TFT was on the menu. Janice sidled up to Yena, and began to trace the contours of Yena’s arm with her nose, breathing in as she went, eyes closed. She nudged Yena.

“How long haven’t you showered for?”

“Stop bothering me.”

“How long?”

“Go away.”

“Two days?”

“Four.”

“Pay attention to me, not that stupid game.”

Silence.

“If I play this game, will you play with me?”

“No. You’re bad.”

“You could teach me.”

Janice sighed. She only had one option left. The nuclear option. She didn’t like to exercise it as of late, because when she dressed up, cosplayed as Kasane Teto, it felt like Yena was staring at her, but not at her. She was staring at the cosplay. Janice got into the outfit even though she didn’t really want to.

“Look.”

“Look.”

“Look.”

Yena finally looked. And smiled for the first time in hours. Tousled the red, fake hair styled into pointed drills at either side of Janice’s head, mouth agape. The game was still on, but Yena wasn’t playing anymore. Janice cried. She took the wig off and threw it on the floor. Yena looked at the wig, then at Janice again. A confused look on her face. Janice stumbled out of Yena’s dorm room, vision clouded by tears. Yena looked at the wig, then at the open door. Yena looked at her bed. Janice had left her bag on it.

Yena jumped on her bed and looked up at the ceiling. She pulled a handful of hair onto her nose and inhaled. Crinkled nose, coughing. She turned over, sniffed the pillow. It was worse. She didn’t understand.

Don’t tell me what to do. I am unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

ベランダに出ると、気温はすでに三十度に届いていた。灰色のキャップの内側にこもった熱が、ゆっくりと額ににじむ。二リットルの水のペットボトルに直接口をつけて飲む。

キャンプ用の椅子に深く腰を下ろし、台所から持ってきた菓子の袋を開ける。本を読むかもしれない、という曖昧な意志だけが膝の上に置かれているが、ページは一度も開かれない。代わりに、視線だけが遠くへ流れていく。

団地の一階では、子どもたちが何かを作っている。段ボールに色を塗り、穴を開け、また別の紙を貼り付ける。ロボットなのか、秘密基地なのか、完成形はよく分からない。ただ、何かに近づこうとしている手つきだけが見えた。

その様子を眺めながら、水をもう一口飲む。ペットボトルの表面についた水滴が指にまとわりつき、妙に生々しい。

外に放置された廃棄寸前の換気扇が視界に入り、会社で空調音だけを聞き続けていた日のことを思い出す。人の足音も会話も消え、機械だけが空気を循環させていた。あの単調な音を浴び続けていると、見える範囲まで狭くなっていく気がした。世界が細い筒の内側に押し込められ、自分だけがそこに残される。

そういう日には、革靴の靴紐を丁寧に結ぶことだけが、かろうじて記憶に残る。蝶々結びの左右の長さが揃っていない。服のような分かりやすいデザインには目が向くのに、靴紐やネクタイをきれいに整える方法はいまだによく分からなかった。

ベランダの風は弱い。遠くで洗濯物が揺れている。菓子を一つ食べる。甘さが舌に残る。

下では、まだ子どもたちが作業を続けている。何かの形になりかけては崩れ、また作り直している。

ページの開かれない本を膝に置いたまま、私はそれを眺めていた。空は晴れていて、三十度の光が団地全体を均一に照らしている。「次の日は一人だった」という文章だけが、なぜか頭に浮かび、意味もなく残り続ける。

水を飲む。 飲んだそばから喉が潤い、その潤った喉に、また無意味に水を流し込んだ。

I know you're of hearing about AI. I am, too.

I talk about AI all day at work, then I talk about it all night with my family and friends, with parents in my community, with the public at these AI safety workshops. We’re all sick of it, believe me.

But it feels dishonest to not talk about it now, in a letter to a young person who is about to kick off their career. I’m not here to hype AI, I’m definitely not here to give you five tips to AI-proof your career path. But I do want you to see what I see.

I’ve been building and selling and living and breathing AI for 20 years now, and here’s the honest truth as I see it: AI is going to massively, massively impact and disrupt your life and plans for the future. Much of that impact will be negative. This is not fair.

We didn't always know that AI would go like this. It wasn’t clear when I started working on it two decades ago; it wasn’t even clear when ChatGPT came out five and a half years ago. At the time, it felt really plausible that either the current approach would hit a ceiling and we would need further breakthroughs that buy us time; and/or, we’d get a strong regulatory AI safety framework in place.

Unfortunately, neither of those have happened, and even more unfortunately, there is very little evidence that either of those will happen soon. Instead, AI is continuing to advance and improve incredibly quickly, on the back of hundreds of billions of dollars being spent every year. Here's a brief reminder of the progress over the last five years.

Five years ago, ChatGPT launched. It was text in, and text out. It did the AI equivalent of saying the first thing to pop into its head. It was amazing and engaging for a time, but it wasn’t actually useful for anything. Since that time, it has improved:

• You can speak to it and it responds in a natural voice.
• It can deeply “understand” images, music, video, and documents..
• It can produce images, music, video, and documents, and these are often indistinguishable from something a person would create.
• It can design, generate, and test computer code.
• It can use tools like calendar and email, and it can even control your whole computer on your behalf.
• It can reason, think aloud, and grind away on nuanced tasks for hours and hours.

That’s an almost unbelievable amount of progress in five years. It’s fair to say that AI has advanced more in the past five years than it did in the previous six decades. And critically, it’s not slowing down. AI improvements are actually accelerating.

We have some quantitative data that shows this. One metric is from a group called METR. They have been doing independent tests for a while now on how good AI is at completing tasks of varying complexity. The details of the measurement aren’t worth going into here, but the punchline is that it’s increasing exponentially. The complexity of tasks that AI can handle doubles every seven months. Even that pace seems to be increasing lately as the frontier labs themselves use AI to accelerate their work.

What is this building towards? We don’t really know, but one milestone we expect soon is “AGI”. This stands for Artificial General Intelligence, which turns out to be really hard to define because we have no good definition for “intelligence” and sticking even more terms on it doesn’t help. But intuitively, AGI is a computer that is as smart as a human; concretely, it's an “AI that is better than the median human at every knowledge work task”. (Knowledge work being basically anything you do in front of a computer, and median human being math-speak for basically “typical human”.)

There’s a lot of discussion and debate on the AGI timeline, but there’s general consensus that we’ll cross it in the next few years. Let that sink in a little.

At some point soon, maybe while younger students you know are still in college, we’ll cross a point where AI is better than most people at anything done on a computer. And of course, once this line is crossed, it will never be uncrossed. It will be the new reality, forever. Crossing the AGI threshold will be completely destabilizing to us as individuals, to our society, and to the world order, and we are profoundly unprepared.

Ok. So what do we do with that? At the societal level, there’s a bunch of stuff. Safety regulations, risk frameworks, universal basic income, improved social support, all kinds of stuff. But I’m not talking to a politician; I’m talking to a smart, curious, engaged young person who wants to earn a living and live a life that’s meaningful to you. What can you do?

I don’t have any silver bullets, I don’t have any tips and tricks, I don’t have much reassurance, but I do have hope. And the hope is this:

In a world where AI is better than the typical person at everything, do not be a typical person. Do not do the thing that anybody else in your position would do, because that is exactly what AI will do, but cheaper and faster than you. Do not compete with AI at being a typical programmer, or a typical graphic designer, or a typical marketer, or a typical salesperson, or a typical writer. You will lose.

Imagine a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles. The first circle is You, the other circle is Everybody Else. This circle of Everybody Else is exactly what was used to train the AI in the first place. It’s mastered and commoditized it.

The intersection in the middle, the part where those circles overlap? This is the part of you that does things the way anyone else would have done them, and the economic value of this part is exactly zero. Your livelihood will all come from the margin, the crescent moon part that is uniquely You. Your weird and quirky and unpopular opinions, friends, background, scars, experiences, intuitions… that is where your paycheck will come from.

Said differently: AI will master conventional wisdom; your wisdom will need to be unconventional.

But now I'm swerving dangerously close to a cliche. What do we do in a world of AI?

• Dance like nobody’s watching!
• Be the you-est you you can be.
• Be yourself – everyone else is taken.
• In a world of Cheerios, be a Fruit Loop.

We say these things, we put them on posters in kindergarten classrooms, we venerate some of the people who actually do it.

But in practice, it’s been really, really hard to be yourself, to own your unconventional wisdom, because that is not what the System actually wants.

What “The System” actually is is different for all of us, but we all feel it. For you, the System may be capitalism, or the patriarchy, or Western culture, or institutional racism, or your own cultural background, or straight folks, or your parents, or neurotypicals, or normies.

Whatever the System is for you, it thrives on predictability. It wants predictable people, with predictable opinions, buying predictable products, taking predictable commutes to predictable jobs.

And in return for making yourself predictable, it offers you at least the illusion of safety and comfort. It offers approval and reassurance you’re doing the right thing.

Navigating and balancing between what the System wants from my life and what I want from my life has been the central tension of my experience as an adult, and I think it is for many of us. It’s hard to understand what our true desires and goals are, distinct from what the System wants, and even harder to have the guts to pursue them.

There’s a great Ursula Le Guin short story about exactly this tension, it’s called The Flyers of Gy. There’s this race of people that evolved from birds. Most of them are basically human, doing normal human things, and they just happen to be covered in feathers. The fact that they were originally birds doesn’t come up much. They live in houses, they drive in cars, they go to work.

But one in a thousand, when they go through puberty, they also sprout wings. Huge wings. They’re painful growing in, but the people who grow them can fly. They can soar! Of course, there’s a real cost to the wings. There’s risk and danger inherent to flying. There’s stigma, jealousy, pity, mistrust, and resentment from those without the wings. And they’re a huge hindrance in everyday life! They take up a ton of space. The winged people don’t fit in well, literally and figuratively.

The story focuses on two characters with wings who deal with those wings very differently. Arciadia embraces his wings. He works part time delivering packages, but lives a happy life of freedom on the wing, as a flier. There’s risks to flying, but rewards too, and that’s what he’s chosen. But there’s another winged character, unnamed, who has chosen a normal life as a member of a respectable law firm.

He’s got a nice wife who loves him in spite of his wings, good kids, a mortgage, all that stuff. In the words of Le Guin, his wings are “flattened, bound, and belted down.” The closing of the story are from an interview with this lawyer, and they read:

“Shortly before I left, I asked him, ‘Do you ever dream of flying?’ Lawyerlike, he was slow to answer. He looked away, out the window. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’, he said.”

This story broke my heart, because everyone of us has wings and can soar, every one of us dreams of flying. And almost every one of us flattens and binds our wings down in service of the System. That’s the deal with the devil we all make, every day. We bind our wings and suppress our dreams of flying, and the System says “Good job, you’re doing the right thing, here’s a paycheck.”

But AI has changed that. Now with AI, the System is breaking that contract with us. It’s breaking up with us. It has no more need for normal, predictable people, it’s got AI for that.

So for us, there’s no more conflict, no more tension with trying to fit into the System. There is no more motivation for you to pretend that you’re less weird, less unique, less yourself than you truly are. There is no longer any value in binding your wings while you look out the window and dream of flying.

In this sense, AI has freed us, has liberated us. Not out of good will or intention or care for the human spirit, but by conquering and commodifying everything that is normal, is typical, is “median”. Now it’s just up to us, up to you, to unbind your wings and seize that freedom.

This liberation is exciting, but it’s also unmooring. It's scary. There’s two things to say here.

The first is that, while this is all scary, for me too, there’s no other option. It’s scary to leave the nest not knowing if your wings will carry you, but the nest is burning. AI has set it alight, and there is no safety there any longer. Unfolding your wings and flying away is no longer something for the bold, admirable few; it’s the rational response to rapidly changing conditions.

And finally, wear your weirdness on your sleeve. Don’t mask and pretend you’re normal. You’re not, and there’s no longer anything to be gained by pretending otherwise. Keep your wings unfurled where others can see them and love you for them. Cheer for others when they take off, especially if their early flights are ungainly or barely get off the ground. Make your parents and family see that this is their role now: to celebrate your effort, your intention, your desire to truly soar.

That’s what I’m trying to do now in my life, and it’s working. I’ve got a weird, wonderful wife who loves my wings as I love hers. We’ve got three amazing and weird kids, and we’re building a weird life together. I’ve got weird parents. I’ve got weird friends and we’re sending weird texts on a daily basis.

It’s great. And/but I’m also 43 years old, and my therapist will tell you that it’s been a long way to get here and I’ve still got a long way to go. I want you to speedrun that. As the System turns its back on us to embrace AI, I want you to turn your back to it, unfold your beautiful wings and soar.

I’ll look for you up in the clouds.

Sincerely, Nate Nichols

Image by hvprint from Pixabay

The holy grail of decentralized social media is something called portability or, sometimes, nomadic identity. The idea is that at any moment, you can migrade your everything to another server / instance. Posts, attachments, relationships.

We're not there yet but some Fediverse platforms are a little closer to there than others. This isn't a guide. It's me talking about some comparable experiences.

Mastodon as the baseline

Federated blogging has been around for a while. I first got interested in it when the only option was Diaspora. In practice, my options to join were ... host my own. That wasn't something I was in a position to do at the time. When I became aware of Mastodon, I hopped right into it. One of the advantages was that there were servers you could join.

That's probably more history than is really needed here so I'll leave that where it is.

When you migrate an account from one Mastodon server to another, you must first sign up on the new server. Then, on the old server, you tell it to migrate you to the new one. From the new one, you tell it to migrate from the old one.

If everything goes right, your followers get ported over to the new server. Anyone who goes to the old account still sees the old account but they get a banner telling them that you've moved to the new one.

Nothing else is done at all. In fact, while your followers (mostly) migrated to the new server, you are not following anyone on the new account. You have to export your followers on the old server and import them on the new one. Your posts aren't gone — they're still out there on the old account — but they sure as hell didn't come with you.

This is a stressful and traumatic experience for everyone. You can find guides out there and there are third party utilities that may allow you to sort of import your posts from the old server to the new one.

It's not good.

How Sharkey is different

I'm a big fan of Sharkey. It's a fork of Misskey and I feel like it's mostly better software than Mastodon. Even if you're not interested in federated microblogging, it's a pretty good platform for building small communities with.

The process to migrate one account to another starts pretty similarly, though. You go to the old account, you tell it to forward to the new one. You go to the new account and tell it to receive the forwarding from the old one. Your followers (mostly) get redirected to the new account.

Your follows don't come and your posts don't come either. Just like Mastodon, you can import your old followers list. However! That's not the end of the story. You have the option to import your posts. It comes with the post attachments too.

Even if you're coming from Mastodon, you can bring your posts along with you. I did this previously when I moved my memes account from a Vanilla Mastodon server to a Sharkey server. But now I've done it from a Sharkey server to another Sharkey server.

It would be nice if it wasn't necessary to do additional exports and imports in order to finish the job ... but you can finish the job on Sharkey.

You can't even get half-way there when you're doing a Mastodon-to-Mastodon migration.

Should social media be ephemeral?

I'm not going to wax long on this point. It shouldn't be the platform's decision whether social media is ephemeral. It should be the account owner's decision. In some ways, Mastodon supports that. You can set up posts to automatically delete if you want to.

You can't choose not to have your posts disappear into the ether when your instance goes down.

That shouldn't be John Mastodon's decision to make. It should be yours.

Sharkey (and others) give you that decision back.

It's time that Mastodon caught up.

Buy my stuff please!

#Fediverse #Mastodon #Technology