AI is Better Company

pinning this post in case anyone wants to know the low-hanging fruit of how to cancel me, so you can get it over with and fuck off.  pro-AI, not entertaining your need for ideological purity on this one.

***

This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

[Read more…]

Brinkman Rides Again

I said I’d review William Brinkman’s new book – Revenge of the Phantom Press – before it comes out and missed that goal, so here we are on release day the day after release day two days after release!  You can buy that thang, even as you read this!  William Brinkman is the Bolingbrook Babbler man in the sidebar, with his long running tabloid universe.  How does an old school movement skeptic end up writing a series where aliens and lake monsters are real?  Maybe reading all his babblerverse novels will provide a hint.  The first one, The Rift, was torn from the atheoskeptic headlines Law&Order style, recreating Elevatorgate with fictional characters, plus weredeer and time travel.

Increasingly, especially in the self-publishing sphere, you find that the language of storytelling has been broken.  Everyone from Mary Shelley to Dan Brown learned to write in a continuum with Shakespeare.  They knew how to weave a tale that works.  Exposition, conflict, escalating stakes, payoff.  Too many kids these days came up in fanfic spaces where all of these things are optional.  This isn’t to say that a sufficiently advanced author couldn’t break with convention for artistic ends, but the lack of fundamental skills on display nowadays is appalling.  William Brinkman learned to write before the turn of the millennium and it shows.  I don’t want to damn with faint praise, just to express my satisfaction with reading a complete story.  It’s the difference between eating breath mints and eating food.  RotPP is food.

I’m going to just throw out some general observations and wrap with my opinion of the book’s merits.  I’m not going to discuss the plot to avoid spoilers, and because the summary on the jacket is good enough.

I know that Brinkman took pains to make the story stand alone, so that a person can read it without having read the previous Babbler stories.  It’s hard for me to tell objectively how well that worked, having read The Rift and a few others, but my guess is that some elements of these characters and this setting are not going to work for some readers, because they do call for an amount of outside familiarity.  On the other hand, I do think most readers can just deal with those bits enough to keep going, because he does very successfully minimize the sense of being interrupted for info dumps – even more than in the previous book.

At the outset of the book and a few times throughout, the hero is humbled in the presence of women in a way that might feel off, to people with only a little of the backstory.  Even having read The Rift, I kinda felt like he was excessively kicked around.  Our hero Tom is a reformed villain, so alright, makes sense, but if I was friends or coworkers with someone who had recovered from heel status, I wouldn’t want to trigger the sense of shame that had driven him to villainy in the first place, right?  I’d be at least a bit nicer to him.  This is a quibble though, and doesn’t detract overly from the story.

The way the story was constructed ended up having a lot of back and forth travel.  I’m sure there are lots of good stories that do, but it’s kinda funny how much it’s like, go there, no get out, no go back, no get out again.  Still, different enough things happen on each foray that it doesn’t feel repetitive.

I have low-key problems with memorizing white people names, worsened by characters with minimal description, but this wasn’t as difficult for me this time around as it was in The Rift.  Two hundred pages in I had to wonder who “Jenna” was, but I gathered her role in the story from context, so I didn’t have to page back to be fully reminded.

Science fiction and fantasy have some overlap – hence the term SFF – and Revenge of the Phantom Press lives in that overlap.  There’s another term that gets bandied around for fantasy with a contemporary milieu: “magical realism.”  That’s where things are moving in the direction of the literary or surreal.  As a writer I’ve spent a lot of time trying to feel out these lines, and to me at least, it’s largely about explanation.  Does this setting have rules – or does it strongly communicate the feeling there are rules – behind the supernatural events taking place?

RotPP does, and so there’s no question that it’s straightforwardly genre fiction – not literary.  But as a reader who is drawn to the literary, my eye is open for it, and there were a few moments that got surprisingly close.  If you ignore the explanatory elements, just dig the scenery, the first scene in “Little Bolingbrook” can hit like that.

As a contemporary SFF story that emphasizes action and adventure, RotPP is very well-executed.  People love writing these kinds of stories, but there are a lot of pitfalls, and Brinkman deftly maneuvers around the lot of them.  I didn’t get hung up on exposition, I didn’t see any plot holes, no dangling plotlines, no pointless cul-de-sacs.  Set-ups had payoffs, plot devices worked as intended.  Pacing was tight.  You’re never far from an exciting scene, but you’re not overwhelmed by too many without breathing space between.  You could see the movie of this on the pages, but it also doesn’t feel like a failed screenwriter’s consolation project.  The medium of prose is used well.

The most important part of all this is emotional core.  Did the emotional scenes hit the way they were supposed to?  The climax of action coincides with a climax of emotion in the story – which is more than I can say for my own entrant to the genre – and while it definitely had the potential to feel pat and obvious, it actually worked for me.  Later, when the relationship arc of the main characters was complete, I was again able to feel what Brinkman wanted me to feel.

I don’t know why I’m in such a creative writing teacher mode on this review, just completely patronizing, so it’s time to get down to brass tacks.  Worth it or not?  Worth it.  Good stuff, surely the cream of self-publishing.  I recently read a Dean Koontz novel – Midnight – which had a similar action-adventure feel, and gives a good metric for comparison.  Koontz was better with the kind of description that makes a vivid impression (sorry William) but Brinkman’s plot construction was superior, and his story didn’t end with the hero smashing his son’s record collection, so also superior values.

This isn’t the kind of story I’d normally go out of my way for, favoring horror and surrealism.  I ended up reading it because William is my bloggy compatriot on Freethoughtblogs.com.  Even so, I feel he did great work.  I give it four out of five stars.  Check it out if you like action-adventure scifi-fantasy in a contemporary setting, no bullshit.

–

wan light

my cellphone camera is no better at viewing small details than my aging eyes, which is ironic because this phone model has a bulging camera area and is sold on its supposed power.  it’s bullshit.

however, i do think it might have some advantages.  the january daylight has this strange quality for me, some days, where it is both weak and glaringly bright.  i wondered if my phone’s eye would see it the same, but the image was much more sensibly balanced than whatever’s happening on my retinas.

to me, the world outside is dismal, save the tops of cars and wet asphalt, which are blinding, eye-searing puddles and streaks of dull yellow-white.  glad i don’t have to drive.

anyway, hastily working on another article for later today.  wanted to wash the bile of my last post away before i put that up, and melancholy is as reasonable a chaser as anything.

–

Run the Country Like a Business?

Businesses are made to fuck you to pieces and feed the meat to their next victim, so yeah, wouldn’t it be amazing if the government was run like a business?  Oh boy, can’t wait, let’s see…  During the last year Biden was in office dem politicians were making moves towards ending exploitive practices by commercial tax services and make the public aware you can often file for free directly on the IRS website.  I did it for the first time for tax year 2024, which was great, and then… as a gimme to corporate fucklords, the government has ended the ability to file for free on the IRS website.  Can’t do it this year.

Thanks, shitler!  I’d like you to load up a few shotgun shells with broken glass and human feces and rearrange your face with that at your earliest convenience, thanks.  Since you love giving us little gifts like this, let us love you back.

Technically there’s still some way to file for free there but they made it just complicated enough to ensure the maximum number of people are diverted to the businesses that donated to shitler’s campaign.  That ain’t graft, it’s business!  Business is so good for people, god i love business.

Busy busy busy business, love it love it love it.  Yay business.  Corporate States of America, with a CEO cherry on top, oh boy, so good.  So good for us little guys.  CEOrange sure is a man of the people.  God it’s great to live by his fiats.  We should all be grateful.  Make America Grateful Again, weeeeee…

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

kill

 

didn’t go to work today

i didn’t stumble out of bed to the alarm at six fifty in the morning today.  my husband goes to sleep much later than i do and to minimize his disturbances when i go, i try to lay out everything i’m taking with me the night before.  today, i forgot a few items which put a crimp in my morning – my underwear and my glasses, which i would’ve had to creep into the bedroom like the cookie crook for – if i had gone to work today.

i immediately began regretting going to work, wondering if i should or shouldn’t, which is why, as i took my shower, i decided i shouldn’t, and didn’t.  i mused that i’d rather be an anchorite monk living in a box and pondering jeezis all day than going to work.

also conceived of a notion to chronicle this day on which i’m not working, in this fashion.  due to the mangled order of operations from forgetting my underwear i would’ve had to put them on downstairs, and discovering my ride / mother-in-law waiting in the living room, have to awkwardly change into them in the kitchen.

one could say my forgetting things began before the week did.  i normally buy a block of mozzarella on grocery run and slice it for a few weeks worth of snacks, but this week thought i still had some – i hadn’t.

with these inconveniences i would have ended up leaving eight minutes late, which meant the school zone by my house would be more active, which would add another minute of lateness to my commute.

as i’d be typing this on the road, my lower digestive system would’ve started to fuss, reminding me i have at least two legitimate health reasons to not want to go to work today.  i’d also be wondering how much autocorrect could fuck up my post as i type all this.

so it’s a good thing i didn’t go and am not on my way, close to the place, as the sun continues its rise and cars rip by and seagulls cry and crows crow.  i swear crows have doubled or tripled in population within the last few years.  something fucked up is probably happening, bit it’s nice to see some kind of life proliferating.  anyway, lately there have been a huge mass of them on the roof of the building i work in, at dawn all huddled on the edge of the building, absorbing the early light, getting their will up to start hustling.  today i wouldn’t have noticed them, not being at work, also the days getting slightly longer might mean they left that ledge before i didn’t arrive.

as i didn’t approach the building, i didn’t check my blog comments and find an orgy of spambots feasting on my most recent blog post.  gross.

***

actually inside the place of work, which i was not, i would have realized i’d need to do this liveblobbing thing in shorthand notes to be expanded later, so little breathing time as is actually scheduled into any given work day.  this would have resulted in the day’s events switching to past tense.  is this past perfect?  i’m so tired.

i would have gotten into an elevator which insists on showing news stories on its little screen.  there’s one at the building where my storage unit is warehoused, which shows nothing but fluff about sports and cute animals and weather, thank fuck.  this one unfortunately would have been showing some news of the type i prefer to avoid, and in this case totally did because i wasn’t there.  i didn’t see articles about the cow-like italian bovino getting shitcanned, or the magnificently cruel and corrupt dude from fifa acting morally superior to cruel and corrupt amurrica, or whatever whatever.

there are pictures of shitler and couchfucker and some other worthless shit in the security vestibule of my office, which i normally avoid by walking past, careful not to use my peripheral vision, taking a ridiculously long way around, and coming in the back entrance.  this is not optional.  except today, when i opted to not be there.

we used to have our own cubicles where we could have personal decor and our own customizations, but now we’re permanently “hotelling,” taking cubes on the first come first serve, entering our gubmint names in a spreadsheet on a laptop to show where we are.  i would have “crytyped” my name with a few sloppy misspellings.  the keyboard’s clitoris would have fallen off again.

the big boss of the facility who once fatphobia’d me at the last office party i ever willingly attended would have felt the need to say good morning at me.  he knows my first name.  i would have tried to say some shit like “it is in fact before noon” but the mumble surely would not have been fully audible.

in the men’s room would have been putting on my makeup.  morning is the time for a few coworkers to empty their bowels in the last easy-going style moment they’re going to have, and the scent would have been unlovely, but hey, i wasn’t there.

the lost time would have meant horking down breakfast and hopping on the phones as quick as possible, straight into a frenzy of activity.  sometimes emotionally charged, sometimes intellectually challenging, always 2 fast 2 furious, unless i’m not there, which i wasn’t.  not getting my mozzarella with breakfast would have meant starting to tap out near lunchtime and chucking some other kind of snack into my gullet in some transient moment i’d stolen for myself, which i didn’t have to do because i wasn’t there.

***

lunch would have been fortunate to not be as funky in the low end as the morning portended and therefore not lost any precious time to needing to use the bathroom.  the break is still too short and i would have speedwalked everywhere to get my food eaten and get back to my desk timely.

lately they’ve been on us to never ever go over on break time even by a minute, my response to which is giving my reasons for any overage, in the preferred format for documenting off-phone time, with an email to boss.  would have been one minute late back from both 15s and lunch, so an email explaining that tossed together in the last moment of my shift would have been in order if i was there.  but the few minutes they give us to check email and do training videos at the end of the day is cancelled on the busiest days which it was, so it was good i wasn’t there, would have totally forgot to document it taking slightly longer than anticipated to wipe my ass.

***

after the last fifteen minute break, a few calls in, i would have started to get this wiggly feeling, 15:52 hours military time, hard to focus, feeling emotional, like manically sad maybe, very hard to describe.  would have set myself in a mode so that no call drops in when the current one ends.  big sigh of relief when that call ends in a relatively short amount of time, then racing around to go to the bathroom or eat a snack or any other number of things i would have had to do if i had been there and feeling like that which i wasn’t.  passing each other in the hall another coworker whose name i don’t even know would have called me by the short version of my gubmint first name, making for “right back atcha chief” styled awkward moment.  didn’t happen.

would have managed to manipulate the course of last call to end with several minutes to spare, much nicer than the shifts like the day before when i went into three minutes of overtime which is not long enough to get paid for.  my lunch bag much smaller after having consumed all the pop i’d brought with me, i could stuff it in the laptop bag and minimize what i carried on the way out, if i had been there.

same elevator same news stories same aunt-in-law giving a ride home so graciously i can’t mention how horrible the pop music on her car radio is to me, drag the recycling bin in from the curb, and it would have been evening time, but i wouldn’t have had to hear that radio and i  was able to take in the recycling bin earlier in the day at my leisure because i didn’t go and was grazing on food and napping at my own pace throughout the day, like some kind of animal who has never heard of clocks.

***

good thing i didn’t spend any time at work blogging because that’s strictly not allowed.  but not having gone there, or having stayed home as i very much did, i would have ended up in the same place, making a small few meals for my husband and doing some bare minimum chores, the last of which are still ahead of me.

and here i am.  good night.

–

“Why?,” I blog.

I don’t even know if this sidebar joke will work until it posts, like, will the punctuation all display as desired?  Anyway, Mano had the kind of post a bunch of self-important blowhards might want to respond to in kind, like “why i’m an atheist” or “the benefits of my raw hog fat diet.”  Not an unworthy subject, simply, why he blogs.  Just sayin’ that teases the question from the minds of other bloggers, compels people to think, hey, that’s something I do that makes me cool and special, I’d better tell everyone about it.  Or will it provoke that response?  We’ll see what the rest of the sidebar looks like tomorrow.

I don’t have time to make a long post of this, so I’ll hit the bullets.

  • Lofty-minded, I believe that engaging in the discourse of civilization holds the potential to turn hearts and minds.  To win a vote, to catch the attention of a rich bitch or lawmaker at a key moment.  To somehow make the world a better place.  Admittedly, I’m too much of a coward and bum to do this where it would really matter, on social media, but hey, according to my stats at least one person in The Department of the Interior visited my site without having cookies disabled, at some point in the past.  Hello, beautiful.
    –
  • Vaingloriously, I believe on some level, despite all evidence to the contrary, that I am that special kind of genius who could accidentally stumble upon the cure for everything, if I just keep talking, keep thinking, keep engaging with my fellow philosophers in the agora.  Let us carry the hems of our togas and get socratic with each other.
    –
  • Beggarly*, I imagine the waning fame of PZ and Mano can elevate the visibility of any commercial endeavors I may choose to promote through this space.  I intend to sell books someday, and being in that sidebar, staying in the awareness of a potential audience market, well, it just makes good sense.  Again, gooder sense if this was social media, but eh, fuck that shit.

Well now, I hope that clarifies things for the all of none of you who were curious.  Thus ends my entry to this discussion.

–

*I use this term in lieu of “greedily,” because greed to have one’s basic needs met is not greed at all.  Fuck a motherfucker that thinks that, but also fuck me for not thinking of a better word, heh.

Catch Me if You Can

In an effort to not be AI discourse all the time blog, I try to bury those posts quickly with something else.  Here’s an extremely low effort dream post.

Ever had an indoor, or caged type of pet, and have a dream you’re holding it outside?  Then in the dream you forget you were holding it just long enough to come up with empty hands, and now your dream has become scouring the world for said pet, or just crying because recovering it will be hopeless?

I had one of those.  Also featured being underdressed in public.  Was there anything new in it?  Lessee… I was walking by this house which wasn’t mine but for some reason I was sure all the plants in it were my husband’s.  But this didn’t jar me, like, I didn’t connect that his houseplants should be in our house.  The people inside were some kinda goths, the lights were low.

I saw these huge butterflies in there and called their attention to it.  Hey, let those butterflies out.  I’m busy so I can’t; I’ll trust you to get them out of the house how you will.  Coming in to tell them that, I stirred up the bugs, and realized they were colorful and even larger than I had thought, sphingid moths.  I left for the bathroom and overheard the young lady saying a poem or spell about how she hoped to gain something by eating them.  And I knew they’d be eaten by the time I came back, so no point launching an objection.

Alright, have a good day, and don’t talk about robots.

–

How You Treat AI Says Something About You

The existence and availability of LLMs brings out the weirdest shit in some people.  I personally believe it’s worth it, for the benefits mentioned in my pinned article, but it’s so bizarre to watch.  It really makes me wonder just how messed up most of us are, under the hood.  I’ve already stated for the record that I believe the majority of people are less intellectually and emotionally capable than we expect them to be.  (not ableist because i think this is cause for protecting people, not limiting their freedoms or shaming them.)  Maybe I should take a cue from 2024 me and expect no better, but it still gets me.

A guy linked me to mastodon threads that put me in mind of all this.  (not linking it because i don’t want to give these losers publicity.)  Exhibit A:  Some leftoid activist type says she sees LLMs as automated slaves and use of them as morally corrupt.  I don’t believe she actually believes that.  I think she’s a partisan participating in the AI moral panic for social clout, by saying something wildly inflammatory against people who use AI.  I dismiss her position as asinine BS and move on.

Exhibit B:  A story, possibly apocryphal, of a workplace.  Only one guy has the courage to use the evil sin machine of AI, and his justification?  It’s like having a personal slave, and because they have no feelings, that’s OK and great!  Everybody should have personal slaves!  Why don’t you want one?  While this guy could be fake, I believe that such a guy is possible, and gross.  He is not my ally in the pro-AI position.

Why?  Because that’s a creepy way to think.  I do believe it is absolutely legit that everyone should have labor-saving technology at hand, as much as possible, at all times, because labor fucking blows.  Fuck working any harder than absolutely necessary.  Fitness people are perverts, which hey, is fine, but that’s not an aberration I would ever go in for.  Different kinks for different binks.  But this guy’s phrasing shows that exploitation turns his crank.  That is gross.

To be clear, LLMs don’t have feelings and if you want to be gross to them, that’s perfectly fine, from a moral point of view!  However, the way you treat them does reflect on who you are.  One way of putting this,

“LLMs aren’t conscious but you should still be nice to them.  Kant was right.  Being mean to anything ruins your soul!” – The Kant Car  (misspellings corrected)

You interact with this technology by talking to it with human speech.  Much like how TTRPGs can become an unintentional test of moral character, a consequence-free fake person to interact with can also provide insight into who you are, as the user.  Someone who conceptualizes this relationship as slavery (yay!) is, on some level, a nasty creep, and telling on himself.  Arguably, he should be reported to Human Resources at the company where he works for making his coworkers feel uncomfortable.

Oh yes, the coworkers.  For some reason, they accepted this perv’s framing of LLM usage, and refused to use AI because they saw it as slavery (boo!).  (again, if the story is to be believed.)  This does not say something bad or good about them as people.  It does show that they are shallow thinkers and easily misled, which puts them in good company with the majority of the human species, but aren’t exactly great virtues to possess.

Exhibit A jerk was trying to be cruel to a broad outgroup of labeled enemies – the villainous users of AI – by equating them with slavers, no matter what gentle souls are relying on them for companionship in a shitty fucking world, what gentle or noble purposes they could be applied to.  That says something about her as well.

There is no pro or anti AI person in this article that I respect, save the driver of the Kant Car.  Have a nice day.

–

Cootie Catcher

Remember paper fortune tellers?  It’s a basic piece of origami schoolkids have made since who knows when.  You put your hand inside and open it one way and then the other, a much more elaborate way to reach a binary result than flipping a coin.  I dimly recall one being used to see who you’d end up falling in love with, but more clearly I remember a funnier use.

Instead of alternating on some kind of counting system, you alternate with the pincers down on the top of somebody’s head.  One of the results was left blank, the other one had a bunch of weird bugs drawn on it.  If you got the bug result, well, you had cooties, son.  That’s just science.

Hey, that wikipedia article is fun.  Give it a look.

–