Good morning. Hello. How are you? #779
Kondoing some tools, paint disposal, rail workers strike, Post/Mastadon/Twitter shit, theoretical surreptitious inter-house butter smuggling, Open AI GPT chat and its depressing ramifications.
Good morning! Hello, there! How are you? Happy Friday! Sorry I’m late, sheesh, I’m an hour behind right now and I haven’t even written the thing yet. Been a busy morning. Had to go to the collection center to drop off the recycling, which was uneventful, unlike last week, where I had a ton of stuff to put in the free giveaway pile, and the attendent took the drill and jigsaw, and asked me if they work, and I said “yeah, I just switched to cordless a couple years back and don’t need two,” and he was so happy, and then as I drove off, I realized that those tools were the tools my dad gave me as a gift in my first “tool set” and suddenly I felt a profound sense of remorse that I just gave something away that my deceased father gave me, and it made me really sad, but then I remembered how happy that dude seemed to get some perfectly good, working, free tools, so I guess that made it worth it. And I Marie Kondo’d that shit and thanked them for their service and wished them well on their new journey, I only wish I did that while holding them in my hands I am such a hippie.
Also before that I had a long conversation with the guy about the logistics of disposing of paint, since we still have like fifteen cans of paint in the garage from when the house was first built, ten-plus years ago, and a bunch of them are interior wall colors that we don’t even have anymore since we repainted the whole inside when we bought it. You can dispose of paint by waiting for it to fully dry, which is my kind of slow-but-steady approach. You can wait for a “paint disposal event,” but there won’t be another one of those until March, so. (Of course, will these ten cans of open, drying paint in our garage be dried by March? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Or… you can fill your paint with sawdust or kitty litter, solidify it that way, and throw it in the special dumpster at the collection center. Fascinating.
Anyway, Walmart was great. I bought a clock mechanism, cuz you can do that there, and I am repairing a 30+ year-old handmade clock that my old roomie Jussi made for me in the 90’s that recently fell off the wall and damaged the decor (thank you Emma for fixing that with your hot glue gun), but the clock mechanism has been broken for, oh, a decade, so it’s been on the wall but only decorative since then but it occurred to me what the hell, man, clock mechanisms are cheap, just fix it. So I am going to. Also, big news, they had the hardwood floor cleaner Emma likes in stock, and they never do, so that was so, so exciting.
Okay, okay, lightning round here. So many topics in my list, it keeps growing and the world keeps spinning and my god, it’s all so much.
One: If you want a holiday card, please fill out this form. Last chance, I’m gonna stop nagging you about this today.
Two: Railroad strike. I understand Biden’s predicament. And I know a rail strike would be bad for lots of people. So I know that despite my profound desire for this thing to come to a head with a strike, which I am sure labor would win, albeit not without quite a long strike, I get why he thinks that is a bad idea. But I think he probably made the wrong call here, from a moral point of view. But he probably made the right call from a political point of view because Americans are thoughtless and absurd. I read a fantastic explainer in New York mag as to why the rail lines won’t give their employees sick days. The rules are really fucking insane. You can call in sick, but you have to do it a few days’ ahead of time. They’ll pay you more, but no sick days. These rules, combined with how impossible it is in America for the avergage person to get a doctor’s appointment these days means that people have literally died from these rules. And the railroads are stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma of en vogue management techniques that have swept the industry thanks to shareholder activism and hedge fund assholes. They cannot fix themselves, because if any one railroad does, the management will immediately lose their job, and the other railroads will pounce. The long and the short of it is that it is exactly the sort of situation where government is supposed to come in and say “hey. these are the base rules you have to play by. Live with it.” It’s exactly the sort of “guide rail to capitalism” issue that governments are suposed to fix. If the government said “hey these rail workers get sick days deal with it,” the entire system would adapt, no problem. It would still be profitable, and everyone would be fucking fine. But they won’t do it on their own. And now Biden has let them down. There are “good” reasons for this, but it feels wrong to me.
Three: Trump and the Special Master. Appeals court struck down Cannon’s stupid ruling and that is fucking great, the special master is dumb and now things should speed up. Of course, Milquetoast Merrick appointed a special prosecutor which was dumb but hopefully he is quick about things. This thing has been so frustrating watching Trump’s standard delay tactics work again and again, so it’s nice to see them fail once.
Four: Butter. My friend Aubrey pointed me to one of those butter-saving dishes we talked about a few years ago, wherein you put your soft butter in them, with some water and it keeps em soft. I explained to her that the butter won’t get soft beforehand, and then she said something like “can’t you find someplace in the house to get it warm, then use the dish and bring it back to the kitchen,” to which the answer is no, our house is not warm enough, but she then mentioned my mother-in-law Janet’s house on the property, and sure enough, Janet, being a Floridian, keeps her house much warmer. So now I am thinking how funny it would be if I came over with a stick of butter and said “Janet can you leave this on your counter for me over night” without any explanation. I think that might freak her out but maybe it is worth it. OR I could sneak a stick of butter into Jane’s bag when she packs for her sleepover and offer no explanation whatsoever. Tempting.
Five: I am on Post.News now, if you are into that sort of thing. Here is my profile. So far, all I do is post little snippets of this GMHHAY every once in a while. The very same day I signed up for Post.news, however, I learned that they had taken funding from the lex Lutherian VC Firm Andreesen Horowitz, though, so that is kind of a bummer, especially combined with their lack of federation/interoperability and integration with some sort of open-data functionality such as Activity Pub. The two issues, combined, make me think I am probably not going to create much there, but maybe it’ll be worth cross-posting to or consuming from.
I have my Mastadon, too, here’s the link, if you’re into that sort of thing. I HAVE, sporadically, been posting things there, mostly pessimistic things and/or chatting with Edith Frost, the indie musician who was recently kicked off of Twitter for doing a great run of scatalogical Elon Musk parody tweets.
(Well just skip over the implicit elephant in the room to all this, Twitter, and the absurd, completely batshit back-and-forth between Elon and Ye last night, save to say that that, that that Ye posted, had Elon not deleted it, yeah, I think that might have been just enough of an increase in Jizz and Nazis for Apple to do something. but Elon deleted it, so he lives another day. Does seem to indicate he has a decent idea where Apple’s line is, though, so yes, as I said, well probably have to await a profound inadvetant security lapse for Apple to act.)
(I guess I’m not skipping it, so six-and-a-half: also look at this amazing letter from a lawyer representing fired Twitter employees. So good. These lawyers understand meme legal battles, which seem to be the only kind Elon takes seriously.)
Six: I am slogging my way through Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. It is not my jam, though there are moments of profundity that make it clear to me that Mark Fisher is a big thinker of whom I would like to read more, especially his music stuff. But in any case, there’s an interesting chapter about bureaucracy and capitalism, and the call center as a manifestation of this interplay. And it occurred to me that I have not had to call a call center in yonks, as the Brits say. Is this a thing? Are we all spending less time on phones now with call robots? I’ve always been super dilligent to avoid these halls as much as I can, but of course, we all try to do so. But it seems to be working more these days. One time I can think of that I used to always have to deal with call centers was when canceling Delta flights, and or dealing with re-schedules, but all of that is handled fairly efficiently on their website these days. Semi-relatedly, as I mentioned before, I recently had to contact customer service regarding a defective LP from an order, and all I did was email their email address, in plain English, and the same day a real human being said “oh sorry we’ll fix that today, and they did. And then! This just happened again! Yesterday I realized that I never got my copy of Holy Fawn’s Dimensional Bleed that I ordered ages ago and has been out for months. So I just looked for an email address on the invoice, emailed the address a plain-language email, and a human being was like “sorry we’ll get this taken care of today.”
I’ve been sort-of debating the central thesis of Fisher’s book, and he uses this call center situation as an example, and I could, you know, concoct some sort of counter-argument in my head if my recent experiences are part of a larger trend, but who knows. So I’d like to know from you guys: do you find yourself dealing with call centers more, less or about the same as compared to, say, ten years ago?
Seven, final: Our CTO, Dmitry, had the new OpenAI GPT chat do a summation of the Apple ATT policies that are fucking up our industry. Here was his one-line prompt: “write a 2500 word sensationalist article on how Apple has negatively affected programmatic advertising on mobile in recent years due to their app store policies.”
Here is the output:
First, this is amazing.
Secondly, its “recommendation” is super dumb, because it is utterly unrealistic and not helpful. In this particular instance, I love it, I would love to see that solution, but it’ll never happen. I don’t blame the AI for this, of course, the whole thing is just trickery, so how could it know that.
But the ramifications of these two things, combined, are somewhat terrifying. Not super into the idea of our AI overlords just throwing out really bad suggestions all the time, especially cogent and well-writen, smart sounding ones.
Don’t like that at all, nope, nosiree.
But, man, CEOs are gonna love this for their LinkedIn posts.
Haven’t played with it yet, myself. I’m hoping to this weekend. I used to make chatbots oh, a decade or so ago, so I’m sure this will be mind-blowing and amazing, but it is also kinda sad. Well-written, in a normcore, boring style, without a single new intelligent thing to say.
Moody and quiet mix today, though I am feeling pretty energetic. But dem’s the breaks, this is the one that had an hour’s worth of material on it so here we are. Mostly new, except the great Pat Benatar, listened to her entire body of work after her Rockhall induction. A quility Mary Chain tune that I have always really loved and doesn’t get enbough credit, and a quiet folky goth tune from the criminally underrated The Arms of Someone New. God I love them. Oh and Magnog cuz they showed up on a friend’s festival meme thing and I forgot how much I used to love them. Wish I saw them live. God I love too much reverb on drums. More reverb on drums everywhere.
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