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Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man;
and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man.
-Gospel of Thomas
July 24. Continuing on AI, I've said this before: The value of anything that AI does, seems to be inversely proportional to the hype. So the most hyped things, like AI becoming actually intelligent, or replacing all jobs, are going to fail spectacularly. Meanwhile, AI is doing cool stuff in areas that are either too specialized, or too silly, to get hyped. An example of the former: AI is designing radio chips that humans couldn't even imagine.
As an example of the latter, I want to go into more detail about my process of making videos, because I haven't heard of anyone else doing it the same way, using free images and being very picky. I just love to exercise aesthetic judgment, and this practice is independent of the source: you can do it with houses or seashells or random paint splatters. Doing it with AI is like walking through an infinite museum.
Before AI, I did the same thing with human-made images, and the human ceiling is definitely higher, but it's also harder to get there. For International Dateline I scoured the Imaginary Colorscapes subreddit and used everything good that I found. For Holiday I scoured Danbooru, and if you think being a human illustrator is a badge of honor, you should have seen Danbooru before AI, it was even worse.
On a scale of 1-10, most human-made images are 1-5 -- but 10s are possible, and finding a 10 among 3s is worth a thousand thumbnails. Most AI images are 4-7, and picking 7s from 6s is subtle. The less I can explain it, the more I like it. It's funny, both my dad and my grandfather loved fishing, and I never got into it, but this is not that different. I keep throwing lines into the deep and seeing what's on the other end. Getting an 8 is only a matter of patience, and 9s are possible.
For prompts, I always start with lyrics from the song. If they're dense enough, I can go line by line. That's not the case with the video I just finished, Hawkwind's Motorway City, which has just one verse, one chorus, and a long outro. I'm matching sounds as much as words, but the full chorus prompted its own images surprisingly well, and the first half of the verse was perfect for a whole other part of the song.
To cover the rest of the song, I had to develop new prompts, and this is a satisfying iterative process of testing different combinations of words until I find one that clicks. The first prompt I tried was "sleek cars zip along winding motorways in a future utopian city." I plugged it into a bunch of styles, and the results were lame. It turns out that AI is bad at speculative cars, because it likes to copy cars that already exist. The image above was the best of those, and it's not in the video, because the image that opens the video convinced me to redo the whole thing as a journey from the POV of the driver. That way I could focus on cityscapes and landscapes, which AI is better at. Fruitful prompts included "a rain-slicked street in a colorful futuristic city" and "zipping away at blurring speed down a psychedelic highway."
Even at the sweet spot I'm only saving around one image in five. They go in a folder for further filtering, with numbers at the fronts of their filenames, so I can test the video by clicking through the folder while listening to the song. There must be an app that makes this easier, but I like low-level work, and I do a lot of fiddly changing of filenames. For this video, I had so many decent rejected images that I stacked them at the end under the prefix "99-". Then whenever I still wasn't satisfied, I played through the 99s and brought some back. One of them kept catching my eye until I decided to "recast" a whole part of the song to make it fit.
You won't guess which one (3:41) because this is so subjective. It's not like Galileo looking through a telescope. I can't prove that what I'm seeing is real, but it's an empirical practice that anyone can do. I use Perchance, but there are other free generators that I haven't tried. I don't use paid generators because they tend to make images more perfect when I want them weirder. Also, cheaply made images have a much smaller footprint. I've done the math and my carbon emissions over nine months are roughly the same as driving a car ten miles.
By the way, the final image contains a pretty accurate front view of a blue 1948 Dodge pickup, and I never prompted any specific vehicle, but I recognized it immediately. An old blue Dodge pickup is what the protagonist drives in the book that most influenced this video, Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks.
July 22. Negative links about AI, specifically about the most common and (so far) dangerous use of AI: generative text. From the Atlantic, Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. If that link doesn't work, most of the article is transcribed in this thread. Basically, the insane wastefulness of data centers is being driven by the cult belief of tech bros that autocomplete will transcend humanity if they just throw enough money at it.
But wait, now they have a new way to make money: Advertise in ChatGPT. There's a huge Hacker News comment thread about this, in which several people point out that Sam Altman said, only a year ago in this video, that selling ads would be a last resort. Also from Hacker News, a thread with a linked article from last year, What if we made advertising illegal?
American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing, while China is poised to win with a more open model. Again, more discussion on Hacker News.
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books, because if AI is trained on recent writing, which might have been written with AI, then you get "model collapse", an admission that this technology is not generating intelligence but veering away from it.
Honey, We Bought an AI Story is by a small publisher who is now struggling to tell if story submissions were written with AI.
The closer we examined that first draft, the more the story's centre seemed absent. The protagonist was active, but lacked interiority. The worldbuilding had colourful details that somehow failed to build consistently. Certain hallmark sentences recurred over and over ("Not X, but Y..."). And the pacing was off, with important story beats given oddly little narrative weight.
Yeah, human writers can do all of those things. I think the most reliable way to tell human writing from AI writing, is that human writing is harder to read.
Related: my novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, has now benefited from a year of polishing. As far as I know only one person has read the whole thing. I've been filling out some underwritten parts, I rearranged part one, and I just fixed a major story error in the Time Pit chapter.
July 20. Happy links. From Ask Reddit, What is the largest, least evil company in the world?
From Suggest Me A Book, Alternatives to a constant growth mindset
A legally complex post from the Flock Surveillance subreddit, We're using SCOTUS to hoist Florida's ALPR dragnet on its own petard
And a World Cup roundup. Assist of the tournament: Cucho Hernandez for Colombia vs Uzbekistan, in which he gets rolled over and still scraps it out for a perfect long-range cross.
Goal of the tournament: Rafik Belghali for Algeria's first goal against Austria. The play starts with a long pass that bounces off the corner post, a defender drags down an attacker, Belghali picks it up, beats one defender by bouncing the ball off his nuts, weaves around two more defenders and buries it.
Honorable mention: Erling Haaland's second goal against Brazil, a casual sniper strike that was widely recognized as having the same vibe as an action hero walking away from an explosion.
Match of the tournament: France vs England for third place, in which England went up 4-0 and France made it interesting.
Team and player of the tournament: Cabo Verde, a tiny island nation, earned 90 minute draws against both finalists, and played eventual champion Spain better than anyone, largely through the heroics of 40 year old goalkeeper Vozinha.
July 18. Just cranked out a page compiling all my favorite deleted and removed Reddit threads, and I've added it to the sidebar on the left: lost reddit
July 16. Yesterday I met with a reader, Elias, who convinced me that I need to go through my archives and add permalinks to every post. It's going to take a while, and this is a good time to do it. Twenty years ago when I made the first archive I decided to name the file "001" instead of "01" in case I ever made it to 100, and here I am.
Continuing on physicalism/psychism, Elias asked, if matter is just a game played by mind, then where do the rules come from? That's a hard question that I was unable to answer in conversation, but now I remember that there's a book that answers it in detail: Physics as Metaphor by Roger S. Jones, a physicist who goes through the fundamental "rules" of physicalism: time, space, matter, number, measure, and describes how they are socially constructed from raw perspectives and relationships.
On Ask Reddit, the most interesting threads are now being consistently removed by moderators. They no longer appear in search results, and the titles get scrubbed, but the actual threads are still there if you've saved the URL. Here are two from yesterday: Professionals who enter people's homes (plumber, electricians, cleaners): what is something the condition of a house tells you about the owner that they don't realize they are revealing? And, What's the first sign you normally notice when your mental health starts declining? Some of the comments (low motivation, clumsiness, sleeping a lot) make me think I've had bad mental health for my whole life.
And one from a few weeks ago: What popular career is actually not worth pursuing anymore?
Music for the weekend, a quite good 2020 dream pop album that's not on Spotify or YouTube, and has only six buyers on Bandcamp: Star Cinema - The Flowers Still
July 13. Doom links. A thread removed from Ask Reddit: What statistic makes you think society is quietly breaking?
A comment that I saw on Best of Reddit which later removed it, explaining what the AI bubble actually is: "The AI bubble is that there simply isn't a valuable enough revenue driver there to actually make the money back that they need to pay down the loans they took to build it in the first place."
Healthcare workers of Reddit: What is a "silent health crisis" that is actively exploding right now, but the general public is completely ignoring?
From PsyPost, ChatGPT's free version is 26 times more likely to respond inappropriately to psychotic delusions. So another way that doom is falling harder on people with less money.
Some Monsters are Real is about the "Godzilla El Niño", with some scary graphs of sea surface temperatures. History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
July 10. A few loose ends on the afterlife.
Epistemological: I don't trust hypnotic regression nearly as much as in-the-wild NDEs. The way reality works, the hypnotist will influence results even with no leading questions.
Ontological: The total of all reports available to us must still be a drop in the ocean of out-of-this-world realms. Eric comments, "Those NDEs have been in the bardo for what? 20 minutes, and now they know all about it?"
Practical: Thinking about the afterlife is a distraction from focusing on the here and now, in which each moment is potentially heaven.
Political: If this world is, metaphysically, a place of pain and hardship, that's why the left can never win. At the same time, this is a place of flux and upheaval where authoritarianism can never hold on for long.
Theological: The biggest perk of physicalism is that you don't have to explain evil, because it's all meaningless. If there's mind behind matter, then why has mind done all this shit? This is usually framed as "How can a benevolent and omnipotent God allow evil?" But I don't believe in that kind of deity. I was raised Catholic, and by its terms I no longer believe in God the Father, but God the Holy Spirit totally makes sense. The benevolence of the universe is omnipresent but subtle. It's like the ocean wearing away rocks, or like the house advantage in gambling. Evil gets a lot of wins, but inevitably, reality bends toward playfulness, aliveness, and feeling good for everyone.
July 8. Continuing on metaphysics, I'm pretty sure that out of all the belief systems in human history and prehistory, there's only one that does not believe in an afterlife: physicalism, a.k.a. materialism: the belief that mindless matter is the fundamental reality.
And yet, physicalism has been undermined again and again by its own experiments. The word "quantum" is thrown around a lot, and I think this is an example of the saying "The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon." The double-slit experiment is just a signpost, rising from physicalism, and pointing to psychism. It tells us that the fundamental reality is not the particle but the observer, that time and space and number and measure are like the rules for a game played by pure consciousness. You don't have to know anything about quantum physics to understand this. Leibniz (who also invented calculus) understood it 300 years ago with his concept of monads:
The only things that could be called real were utterly simple beings of psychic activity "endowed with perception and appetite." The other objects, which we call matter, are merely phenomena of these simple perceivers.
Going back to the afterlife, what happens to the monad that's now being you, when it leaves the game? There's a lot of evidence on this subject from near-death experiences. A common objection to NDEs is that those people must not have been really dead, but this is an example of the No true Scotsman fallacy. People have been dead by every clinical definition, including having no brainwaves, sometimes for multiple days, and have come back with reports.
These reports have less in common than you've been told. Not everyone goes down a tunnel to the light, or is greeted by family members. I heard about a guy who was greeted by John Belushi in a bee costume. Some NDEs are so out-there that the person can't even explain them in words. But this Reddit post generalizes from the bulk of reports: What The Afterlife is Like, Based on 100+ Years of Evidence.
Personally I have a variation of Pascal's wager. Pascal was like, "What if the wrathful Christian God is real? I'd better believe in him just in case." I'm thinking, "What if we get to write our own afterlife?" Surely it's not that simple, but what have I got to lose, if I imagine it in detail? This Reddit thread includes my answer from six years ago: If you actually go to a paradise after you die, but the paradise automatically is set up in a way which will be the absolute maximum best and pleasing experience for you, how would your paradise be like?
So, if the afterlife is so great, what are we doing in this dystopia? There are many answers to this question, which I'm not going to get into, but another thing that NDE-ers generally agree on is that suicide is a bad idea. I can make sense of this with the metaphor of walking out of a movie. You might walk out if it's near the end, you're not enjoying it, and you're ready to go home. But you don't want to walk out during the most intense part -- that's why you went to the movie in the first place.
July 6. Scientific article, The neurophenomenology of a self-induced transcendental visionary state. Basically there's a woman who can enter altered states of consciousness, and they hooked up stuff to watch what her brain does.
Meet The Mushroom That Makes People Have The Exact Same Hallucination: "tiny elflike people".
New study explores the link between mystical psychedelic trips and a reduced fear of dying. They say the mechanism is unclear, but if you've used psychedelics it's pretty clear that your sense of self expands beyond this momentary human identity.
Related: a Reddit post, A Very Brief Outline Of The Evidence For The Afterlife
July 2. A personal note. There's a classic young adult book called Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, in which kids at a spooky boarding school channel the spirits of dead geniuses, and it's not good for them. That's basically my relationship with cannabis. It makes me more motivated, more creative, and more cheerful, but I can feel it wearing down my body, probably by messing with my sleep. I've tried using smaller doses earlier in the day, and it didn't work. So now I've cut back from almost every day to once or twice a week, and because I depend on it for inspiration, I will probably be writing less.
Tomorrow is Bandcamp Friday, and I'm going early into the weekend with some music. The Endless Orbit of Spacemen 3 contains no mention of Hawkwind, but it's a nice article about the second best English space rock band, with lots of links to the Bandcamp pages of artists that they influenced.
Green Lung are a fun doom rock band, I recommend starting with their Free The Witch EP, but this is their latest video, Necropolitan Line.
Living in Seattle in the 90s, I never saw Nirvana, but I saw multiple great bands that never made it big, and one of them was The Model Rockets. One of their songs would have been perfect for my next AI slideshow video, but it turns out someone has already made a fan video, 17 years ago out of video clips: She's On The Cover
June 29. Happy links. Telescope Ranchers is about a business in the darkest part of Texas, where you can send your telescope and telescope-control gear, and control it remotely from anywhere. This is a cool nebula that someone discovered "through a painstaking search of the places of the night sky where nobody looks."
Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
Australians to get three hours of free electricity every day under solar scheme
Some good stories in this Ask Reddit thread, What's a movie cliche that happened to you in real life?
From the Spirituality subreddit, I'm not even going to try to summarize it: A life of pain, thankfully!
June 26. We Haven't Invented Artificial Intelligence at All. The author has a strange writing style. He's really good at dense and precise language, and then he likes to say the same stuff over and over again. His basic point is that generative AI is a translation mechanism that behaves nothing like real intelligence. A key paragraph:
The falsifiability test is clean. If the scaling hypothesis is true, the system's dependence on external human cognitive input should decrease as the system scales. Empirically, the dependence is increasing. Therefore the scaling hypothesis is false on its own predicted trajectory. The hypothesis is not just unsupported. It is contradicted by the labor-architecture the industry has been forced to construct in order to produce each successive model. The thermodynamic signature of intelligence is self-improvement through internal motivation. The thermodynamic signature of LLMs is catastrophic external dependency that grows with scale.
It's funny how almost all the writing and thinking that is being done about AI, is being done about language, and almost none is about images. I think it's because humans tend to take words as true, and images as representational. Even real photos and videos are being dismissed as fake because they contradict the lies of language. And AI images are being rejected as aesthetically empty by everyone who is not actually working with them. I know from empirical practice that aesthetic judgment is indifferent to source. If you're deciding whether you like it, your eyes don't care where it comes from.
Of course the fields of images are different. Human-made images are more varied, trashier, and uglier. If you don't believe me, put any set of words into Google images and also into an AI generator. AI images are smoother and prettier for the same reason an average of faces is prettier than a real face. When I'm judging human illustrations, I'm looking for ones that are not terrible. When I'm judging AI illustrations, I'm looking for ones that do something interesting. The above is an example. Seeing the machine spit out something so chaotic and surreal, after countless bland images from the same prompt, is the "wow" that keeps me doing this.
For my latest video, I ended up using eight human-made images, four illustrations and four real photos. This is the most difficult video I've done so far. The song is over eight minutes with loads of lyrics, many of which do not make good prompts, and I had to develop an elaborate file naming system to keep track of both where the image came from and where I was putting it. This is an incredible song, and one cool thing about it is that it's both utopian and dystopian, just like the real world: Exuma - 22nd Century
June 24. Today, money (and again thanks Chad for links). It's commonly believed that the alternative to money is barter. But historically, barter is rare and short-lived. The real alternative to money is a gift economy. Something I learned from David Graber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years is that trade is something you do with your enemies. Capitalism has made us all enemies. A gift economy requires some level of social and moral awareness, which capitalism allows us to ignore in favor of adversarial bean-counting -- with some exceptions.
At the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous is a nice article about a gift economy among van-dwelling nomads. And this Reddit comment describes the gift economy among the very rich. In between those extremes, we're all caught in the nightmare of money, beaten down by wage labor, or investing to try to catch a ride on the last gasps of unsustainable economic growth.
The Freedom of Enough is a short piece about how Japan is gracefully weathering rural decay, while America falls into misery and crime, because in Japanese culture, "the lowest you can fall is not that low."
And a solution: Why Central Banks Should Give Money Directly to the People. Right now the government adds money to the economy in a complicated way that benefits banks and owners. One day we will look back on this practice as hopelessly corrupt, and it will be taken for granted that money should be added to the economy by simply giving it to everyone.
June 22. Thanks Chad for sending a bunch of good links. Today the bad news, starting with two great posts from the Reality Drift blog: Nothing Is Broken. So Why Does Everything Feel Wrong? And Reality Drift in Everyday Life, about how formerly simple tasks are being filled with high-tech cruft. A minor personal example: For years I could do this blog by simply going to this page on the file manager and typing stuff in. Now they want to give me the "Monaco editor" and I have to switch to "no editor". And now, rather than being permanently logged in, I have to log in every time, and every time I hit "save" I first have to Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C the whole page in case I've been logged out and lose what I've written.
This subject always makes me think about Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies. I haven't read it, it's very dense, but I've seen enough summaries to get the general idea, which seems irrefutable. Systems add complexity incrementally, but it's much harder to remove complexity incrementally. Also, increasing complexity has diminishing returns, until you get what we have now, where the overall effect of new complexity is harmful. Many examples on this page, Worse on Purpose. In the end the only realistic correction is a fast and hard drop in complexity, which history calls a collapse but to people at the time it may feel like the relief of opting out.
An interview with the author of a new book: Why "Progress" Is a Dangerous Idea. This kind of goes back to my Omelas post last week. If you look only at violence and obvious suffering, we've been making moral progress for hundreds of years. But at the same time we've been introducing new things that make us miserable in subtle ways, never mind the destruction of the non-human world. It's hard to measure the suicide ideation of past societies, but I think it's at an all time high right now and still rising, and I predict that Gen Alpha will normalize suicide for the young and healthy, unless we get some other realistic way of opting out.
One more personal note. I recently got the opportunity to drive a Tesla. Driving an all-electric is a lot of fun, and the self-driving mode is impressive, but you're not allowed to get in back and go to sleep. You still have to sit in the driver's seat and make sure it doesn't mess up, and if I have to do that, I'd rather just drive. I've said this before: any use of technology to do stuff that humans enjoy doing is a fad. Once we get over the novelty that a machine can do it, we'll go back to doing it ourselves.