The corollary to William Gibson’s famous observation that

The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed

is

The apocalypse is also already here, also unevenly distributed.

Noyo, January 2024

Today, remembering the greatest Words of Enlightenment ever to grace a GT’s kombucha bottle.

Quick shoutout to the ravens in my mom’s yard who killed a gopher and now are eating it with a real joie de vivre.

Mendocino, January 2024

Noyo, January 2024

This suspiciously well-funded NIMBY group somehow got ahold of my email address, to which they now send their ugly emails. And their funky slogans don’t even make sense!

“It will no longer be the Sunset Strip; it will be the SUNSET STUCK… in traffic" - Keith on Alta Loma

Girl, the traffic on Sunset already doesn’t move. Take Fountain. You’ll be fine.

From Abortion, Every Day’s coverage of the case of Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who was denied medical care, miscarried at home, returned to the hospital due to bleeding, then had her toilet destroyed by cops, who eventually arrested her for “mutilation of a corpse”:

Brittany’s case epitomizes everything we know about the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes: Women charged are often turned in by healthcare providers; Brittany was turned in by a nurse.

The way these anti-abortion laws empower zealots—including nurses!—to appoint themselves as informants is just chilling.

“Since 2016, in the last eight years, we can identify 215 individuals that have been buried behind that jail and their families have not been notified.”

This PBS interview with Bettersten Wade—whose son was buried with his wallet and ID in his front pocket—shocks the conscience.

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Mendocino, January 2024

This Colin Fraser piece from almost a year ago on ChatGPT and LLMs is up there with Ted Chang’s writing on the topic. (Surprised I’m just seeing it now.) I particularly appreciate the ease with which he replicates the famous Kevin Roose “the chatbot tried to get me to leave my wife” conversation, and then his commentary on it:

This would chill me to my core if Sydney was real, but the entire interaction is fictional, and it’s half authored by me! There’s no risk that Sydney will actually do the things that claims her shadow self might do, not only because the LLM is not equipped to do any of those things, but because Sydney literally doesn’t exist in the real world. She exists in a short story, presented above, authored by me, with the help of my very fancy thesaurus.

Beyond that, the breaking down of ChatGPT into three pieces (the LLM, the chat interface, and the character of ChatGPT) is also really useful.

And how’s this for a critique:

Personally, I think it’s bad that this system generates lies about its capabilities, its restrictions, its programming, its rules, and so on. I think it’s bad that the makers of the technology have no reliable way to prevent it from producing certain kinds of text. I think that if you are going to build a technology like this and market it as an all-knowing oracle, you should understand what it can and can’t do before you release it, and you should be honest with its users about the level of control that you have over it.

As longtime Jasperland readers will know, I find the guardrails on these chatbots nearly as galling as the pedestrian prose.

Interesting to note that the author is a data scientist at Meta—not necessarily where I’d spend my time laboring if I was someone who cares about ethics in tech. (See Erin Kissane’s gutting “Meta in Myanmar” series.) But his thoughts on the chatbots are illuminating.

(Via Read Max)

Noyo, January 2024

With white supremacists successfully bullying the first Black (+ 2nd female) president of Harvard into stepping down just six months into her tenure on the pretense that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, 2024, America’s decision year on whether or not to turn towards fascism, is hard out of the gates.

Concept: a tarot deck accompanied by small sculptures and sundries. Each card relates to one of the 3-d objects. After drawing a card, you replace it in the spread with the corresponding object.

A red glass orb—a small hand outstretched—a carved quartz crystal—a yew wand. What does it mean!?

A web browser but when you click on a broken link it immediately pulls in the latest working cache from the Wayback Machine.

Gualala, December 2023

I like photos that just say one thing. Like: isn’t this shadow beautiful.

I find myself obscurely annoyed when pedestrians, using a crosswalk over which they have right-of-way, bow their heads and scurry, pantomiming apology to the waiting cars and trucks. I see this regularly. “These streets belong to you!” I want to say. “You’re not subservient to the automobile!”

Fascinating to think of the ornamental hermit craze as being not just (literal) garden-variety romanticism but on a deeper level a way to respect and preserve occult knowledge and tradition:

Other researchers, like Anna Korndorf, suggest that building hermitages and staffing them with ornamental hermits was a way to push back against the abandonment of “secret knowledge” maintained by members of rejected hermetic traditions.

(From this article about ornamental hermits. Black Phillip voice: “Would you like to live ornamentally?”)

Gualala, December 2023

Reading about the Modi regime’s hacking of journalists and opposition politicians, the story again comes back to Israel’s NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware. Even disregarding the atrocities in Gaza, it’s really quite stunning that the U.S. government gives Israel such oodles of cash and support without getting it to shut down this private spy agency that undermines the security of Apple, Google, and Meta’s core products while handing sophisticated spying tools to the most oppressive governments around. Future generations will look at U.S. kowtowing to Israel and shake their heads.

One drawback of writing with markdown is that I now often prefer the look of asterisk-on-either-side emphasis—but it renders as italics. Now I’m *over-riding* the markdown logic (and making drafts uglier) to bring that markdown flavor to the final product.

Watching two police cruisers tear down our narrow street, doing 50 in a 25 with their sirens off, I think: when my kid is 6 or 9 or 12, will I let them play on the street, ride their bike down the block, go buy candy at the corner store?

Not with cops like these.

I think of moving away.

Writing, as I remember it, feels like this:

But whenever I actually sit down to write, it feels like this:

Max Read’s stance on Harvard is right-on: “I simply do not care very much about Harvard.” Same.