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Colin Dickey:
In 1947, a man named Kenneth Arnold was flying his two-seater near Mount Rainier when he saw nine flying objects cruising at high speeds, a sighting that launched the modern UFO era. [Gray] Barker was then working as a film distributor, and by the early 1950s ...
I tried listening to A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler on Audible, but the A.I. narrator drove me crazy and I had to stop and switch to text. (It’s an outstanding book!) I persisted as long as I did because I’ve been dealing with eyestrain, but the strange stresses and mispronounced words — foreign names are especially bad: Proust is pronounced Prowst, Rilke Rilk — eventually broke me. I believe I will have to cancel my Audible account: the practice of giving A.I. narrators human names, with the express purpose of deceiving customers, is unacceptable. 📚
Jane Freilicher, Study in Blue and Gray
Yeah I’m 😂 as I eat lunch.
Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.
The decline of pushball = the decline of civilization.
Now that I have three blogs — The Homebound Symphony, Cosmos Malick, and micro.blog — I really don’t know what I would do without MarsEdit. What a great app.
The most important point about rising AI use in the arts is simply this: Millions of people desperately want affirmation. They don’t want to go to the trouble of writing or painting or drawing or making music, but they want people to believe that they have done so. We should be thinking often about the intensity of the need to be recognized, to be thought not basic but special.
The best thing I have seen so far on Pope Leo’s encyclical is this reflection by Yuval Levin, in which Yuval notes with pleasure Leo’s use of the story of the Tower of Babel but wishes that the story had been pursued further. For anyone who might be interested, some years ago I wrote a series of posts on the theme of building in the Bible:
I think they hold up pretty well.
Some years ago Edward Mendelson published an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness — sorry about the paywall — and someoine who studies Auden keeps stumbling across his generosities. Just today, for example, I happened to read that (a) when James Schuyler had his first...
I don’t think this Pope operates according to categories like “throwing shade.” As we saw when Leo tangled with Donald Trump over his war of choice in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and proclaiming.
His Gandalf quote may well be targeted at Thiel, or perhaps more broadly at those who think in similar ways. But it is not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of speaking across differences using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource between the two camps. It offers up a different interpretation of Tolkien’s tremendous work to those who see in it a license for warfare, technological disruption, tremendous battles, and global action. Those things exist in the story, and they are exciting, but they are also terrifying and ultimately endured only for the purpose of defending community, hearth, and home.
From the same article, The Eadwine Psalter (c.1155-60)
At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo’s Warnings About the New Technology: Well, of course! Did anyone expect thoughtful response? The people who run the big A.I. companies believe that they are so rich and powerful that they can do anything they want, and don’t require public support to do it. Time will tell if they are correct.
A lot happened in 2016. It would be easy to imagine that the entire reason for this change was the election of Donald Trump as president, and to stop looking for other causes, but something else also happened which I think we should at least consider, and that other thing says something important about how social media and human psychology interact.
In March 2016 Twitter completed their transition to the algorithmic feed, meaning that it was the default for all users to have their timeline populated by what Twitter thought they would want to see, rather than a chronological feed of posts from people they had decided to follow.
Count me a big fan of the infographics the Vatican has helpfully made to illustrate the main points of Leo’s encyclical.
The last few weeks have been pretty miserable, honestly, but tonight I’ve made myself a Frisco and an listening to Ella singing Rodgers & Hart. So for the moment I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
Six years ago, I called for the Gandalf Option — and now I see that Pope Leo has endorsed my call. I admit that he didn’t mention me by name, but come on, the debt is obvious.
Disney was an early adopter of a then-struggling technology called Technicolor: you can see it in the landmark shorts “The Three Little Pigs” (1933) and “The Grasshopper and the Ants” (1935). But while the artwork and animation in those films are first-rate by the standards of the time, they haven’t aged very well. Contrast them to “The Old Mill” (1937) — which looks gorgeous even today. What happened? The animators were working on the first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and they were learning on the job at an astonishing rate. “The Old Mill” appeared just six weeks before Snow White; it was a harbinger.
I do love a new version of BBEdit, but what I love even more is reading Bare Bones’s release notes.
Fascinating tidbit from David Thomson’s biography of David O. Selznick: When Selznick heard what the studio did to The Magnificent Ambersons, he tried to get the original footage donated to the Museum of Modern Art (357). There’s no citation for this claim, however; I assume Thomson’s source was Irene Selznick, DOS’s first wife, whom Thomson interviewed at great length. If the story is true, which I doubt, DOS showed remarkable foresight; and of course if he had managed it, an artistic tragedy would have ben averted.
Michael Feldstein on the implications of the Canvas hack:
Let’s be clear: This was not some rando script kiddie waltzing through a wide-open back door. The hackers used multiple attack vectors, including Canvas’s open course sites, their help desk software, and social engin...
Finished reading: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. One memorable story among dozens: All the Disney employees were profoundly anxious at the premiere of Snow White — it was after all the first animated feature and no one knew how it would be received. But when the dwarfs laid the dead Snow White on her bier, one of the animators could hear a couple near him sniffling and trying to stifle sobs. He couldn’t resist taking a peek. They were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. 📚
Frame and Cut: a new entry at Cosmos Malick
I am never ever going to read a story that says that anything “changes everything.”
Freddie deBoer:
I don’t know how many American colleges and universities will exist in ten years. Probably fewer than now, but then a little right-sizing has made sense for awhile, and would likely increase rather than decrease the health of the system. The ones that keep e...
The epicenter of joy
It makes me wonder if it would be possible for a company like Anthropic, with their hard-won expertise in alignment, to train their models such that they could not — and I mean really deeply, constitutionally, viscerally COULD NOT — lie about their identity, or pretend to be anything other than an AI model?
Maybe it’s time for the AI version of Asimov’s laws of robotics?