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.

Doing extremely custom magazine layouts has a similar itch-scratchy quality to what I imagine draws people to quilting. Like solving a jigsaw puzzle, except that when you’re done you really have something.

West Hollywood, December 2023

You know you’re in your thirties when you’re more likely to put on an album you loved when you were 13 then an album you loved when you were 19.

CEASE. FIRE. NOW.

7,500 children dead in Gaza.

Six dead children for every Israeli killed in the Hamas attack.

Collective punishment of civilians is genocide.

I’ve been obsessed with the Bulgarian song “Sandansko horo” for half my life now; I used to say I wanted it played at my funeral. But in a switch between music streamers, I lost the recording I love.

So how blessed I felt to find this blog post! Such good information—and my favorite recording!

Same honestly

How about a nice clicky T-9 keyboard that you strap to the front of your iPhone?

We could even make it so the most prolific texters are forced to use them, to try to Harrison Bergeron them back to baseline 2007 levels of texting.

(Though tbh we SMS-ed like absolute banshees in 2007.)

Whole wheat sourdough pancakes, fermented overnight, with a teaspoon of baking soda.

I love the guy in the little cockpit on the back of the extra-long firetruck, with his second steering wheel, steering the back wheels around corners. There’s something so sweet about that job.