Category: essays

Austin Kleon interviewed artist Sally Mann and her answer to, “Describe a perfect day,” was spot on:

Every day is a perfect day. I am the luckiest person alive. The unmeasurable, incalculable complications of family and property and animals and career are all luxurious complications: I am lucky to have them and they enrich my life, even as they cause me to grind my molars into shards.

I’m going to remember that phrase the next time I start stressing about remodeling or using the PET PRO URINE REMOVER carpet cleaner. “Luxurious complications” instead!

 

(Bonus, she lifts!  “Now, at age 74, three days a week I lift weights (I mean, heavy weights) and do planks until my whole body is shaking, and weighted squats, lunges, crunches. Two days a week I row, between 8 and 12K, ie between 40-50 mins, and the two remaining days I run 3 miles on a hilly trail on the farm. I hate every minute of it. I never miss a day.”)

For the last few months, work has been going deep into AI “tools” and my fellow writers have talked about how readers think something was generated by an LLM if it contains em dashes. So imagine my delight at this takedown of that idea, absolutely riddled with em dashes in a beautiful way: Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please

“The idea—the terrible, mistaken idea—is that the use of em dashes in a piece of writing is a sign that the text was generated by AI. Some people have been saying this on, guess where, the internet. The implication is that human writers should avoid em dashes for fear of being mistaken for chatbots. No. Wrong. I am here to raze this implication to the very ground and salt the earth where it stood.”

As the author notes,

“If generative AI does have a predilection for em dashes, though, the reason is simply that many human writers use em dashes. Your chatbot also uses commas, just as human writers do. A chatbot does not have a consciousness. It does not “know” how to write, in any meaningful sense. It doesn’t have a style, because style requires thought, preference, and taste. A gen-AI chatbot is trained by scanning gargantuan amounts of text. Based on the patterns it detects in that text, it then assesses the probability that certain words and syntactic constructions will occur in proximity to one another.

[… ] In other words, it’s not accurate to say that the use of em dashes in a text is a sign that the text is AI-generated. It’s more accurate to say that the prevalence of em dashes in AI-generated text is a sign of how reliant the AI companies are on the human writers they want to replace.”

 

Did you want 14,000 words about why the AI industry sucks (beyond the environmental harms or the real risks to vulnerable individuals, that is)? I give you Ed Zitron’s “The Hater’s Guide to the AI Bubble.”

This is my very abbreviated summary, but in the Hater’s Guide he explains that 1) companies pushing AI aren’t making real money from it (or are actually losing money); in part because 2) essentially there is no breakout or standalone AI software or service; and 3) the whole “AI industry” is actually just based on buying and selling GPUs:

Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon and Tesla aren’t making much money from AI — in fact, they’re losing billions of dollars on whatever revenues they do make from it. Their stock growth is not coming from actual revenue, but the vibes around “being an AI company,” which means absolutely jack shit when you don’t have the users, finances, or products to back them up.

So, really, everything comes down to NVIDIA’s ability to sell GPUs, and this industry, if we’re really honest, at this point only exists to do so. Generative AI products do not provide significant revenue growth, its products are not useful in the way that unlocks significant business value, and the products that have some adoption run at such a grotesque loss.

And that’s where we get the bubble, which…seems bad! (This unrelated quick explanation on adjusted job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics included this fun nugget: “Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, says Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.”)

Zitron’s conclusion in his hater’s guide articulates so much of what I also dislike about AI:

There is an overwhelming condescension that comes from fans of generative AI — the sense that they know something you don’t, something they double down on. We are being forced to use it by bosses, or services we like that now insist it’s part of our documents or our search engines, not because it does something, but because those pushing it need us to use it to prove that they know what’s going on.

… generative AI also brings out the worst in some people. By giving the illusion of labor, it excites those who are desperate to replace or commoditize it. By giving the illusion of education, it excites those who are too idle to actually learn things by convincing them that in a few minutes they can learn quantum physics. By giving the illusion of activity, it allows the gluttony of Business Idiots that control everything to pretend that they do something. By giving the illusion of futurity, it gives reporters that have long-since disconnected from actual software and hardware the ability to pretend that they know what’s happening in the tech industry.

And, fundamentally, its biggest illusion is economic activity, because despite being questionably-useful and burning billions of dollars, its need to do so creates a justification for spending billions of dollars on GPUs and data center sprawl, which allows big tech to sink money into something and give the illusion of growth.

I don’t remember how I ended up on Jocelyn K. Glei’s mailing list but I’ve been getting her emails for years now. I skim a lot of it but last week’s subject line caught my attention: “Uncertainty training.”

Of course, my first thought (“Yes! Tell me what to do to make the uncertainty stop!”) was not exactly the point of the email, but I do think it’s a helpful re-frame regardless:

One metaphor that I’ve been working with lately to cultivate a more friendly attitude toward the current state of chaos and disruption is the idea of “uncertainty training.”

Depending on our level of privilege, each of us have had very different experiences of “uncertainty” in this life so far. But now, given the precarious state of our planet, our climate, and our democracy, we all seem to have been collectively enrolled in a new kind of “uncertainty training.”

… On a walk through the woods the other day, I was interrogating this idea of “uncertainty training” — what does that phrase even mean? And what, exactly, would uncertainty training look like?

I suppose the appeal of the “training” reframe is that it creates the feeling of a useful learning program that you are opting into with some long-term benefit in mind. That it’s not just that everything is falling apart and you’re holding it together as best you can, but that there’s some kind of method to the madness, some greater purpose to everything that’s unfolding.

I think the greater purpose is just learning to be human, or how to enjoy life despite the horrors. As she continues:

Going on my morning walk everyday, making a cup of tea, taking time to breathe and come back into my heart, writing in my journal, talking it out with a friend. Assembling tiny little anchor points minute-by-minute, day-by-day, to keep myself grounded and sane.

And maybe, in the end, that’s all that we are training for. To attune more deeply to the medicines we have to offer each other and ourselves, to the practices that help us stay rooted, to our own capacity to breathe in, to breathe out, and to hold more.

Hamilton Nolan’s newsletter this week is a masterclass in insults. Of course, it’s easy when the target is ICE “I’d rather destroy the lives of entire families than have the fellas make fun of me” agents, aka “twitchy, puffed up, goofy ass cops.”

Please, enjoy:

It can be difficult to laugh at riot cops. But we should all try. Because they’re so fucking ridiculous. Hey, nice huge helmet and body armor and fake ass gun and shield to oppose a bunch of skater kids waving around flags. You all are the most terrified group of human beings in the United States of America. You all are the types of people who open carry handguns to go to Buffalo Wild Wings. You all need to stop getting your news from idiots on idiot websites. You all need to read some fucking books and gain a minimal sense of perspective. You all need to embrace the crushing realization that for your whole lives you have been afraid and confused and have embraced a misguided set of macho enticements that have seduced you into believing that manhood depends on looking like some sort of cartoon action figure when in fact it is this look that reveals to the world the deep inadequacy that haunts you every day.

 

As he concludes, “Fuck off, losers.”

 

 

This is from Mike Monteiro, a designer and writer and just all around smart guy. He’s been answering questions and this is in answer to, “How can we stay positive about the future these days?” His replies often have a lot of personal anecdote but they always work out as a metaphor–especially here.

… we couldn’t afford to heat the entire house. So during the winter, we heated what we could. And during those winter months, if you needed heat, you came to the living room …

Sometimes you cannot heat the whole house. The heat rises, it spirals. It escapes through every crack.

Sometimes you cannot be positive about the future.
But what if we redefined what we had to heat? What if we redefined the future to something we could actually manage. Because the future is too vague a term, and filled with too much uncertainty.

What if we could be positive about tomorrow?

[…] Spiraling into hopelessness helps no one. Giving an unhoused person $20 and a winter jacket that’s been sitting in the back of your closet might only help one person, but it also helps one person. When the systemic issues feel too big, we do what we can. When we cannot heat the whole house, we heat the core.

 

I’ve had this article about sharpshooter Elizabeth “Plinky” Toepperwein saved for a while. No reason why I thought of it again! Just an interesting read on a thing a woman could do!

In the days before television or air-conditioning, hundreds of men in suits—and a few women, decked out in Victorian-era dresses and corsets—braved heat and cold to watch Plinky shoot shotgun shells off [her husband] Ad’s fingers and Ad hit a bull’s-eye while standing on his head. Crowds loved to see Plinky “peel” a potato, held by Ad, by chipping it away with bullets. […]

The Toepperweins’ advertisements often extended a special invitation to women, and they came in droves. Syndicated columns touted the healthful nature of outdoor trapshooting and proclaimed that, as Plinky wrote in 1917, “there is absolutely no reason why a woman should not shoot as well as a man.” Some women formed female trapshooting clubs, and tournaments added amateur women’s divisions. Annie Oakley, now in her fifties, joined the upswell by giving shooting clinics for women. When Oakley and Plinky met at one of them, in 1915, the older sharpshooter reportedly told the younger, “You’re the greatest shot I’ve ever seen.”