Good morning. Hello. How are you? #844

Cure ticket sadness, AI sadness, can't we just ban it or at least opt-out? Powell's gonna raise on us just you watch.

Good morning, friends. Hello there. It is 7:20 AM, it is 29 degrees out, I am very cold. I’m wearing my Care Bear sweater and have my space heater on my feet. My fingers are cold. I am out of shape with this cold stuff. But I am happy to report my daughter seems to have my Alaskan blood, and she went out for our walk yesterday, in the 40’s with no coat and no shoes. Props.

I suppose none of us got Cure tickets huh. That is really sad. I am sad. I am in full support of the Cure’s efforts to curb scalpers… but also I desperately want to see the Cure and would pay a scalper a lot of money if I could see the Cure. I don’t have a good solution here. I just want to see the Cure. I want my daughter to see the Cure. I care a whole lot about seeing the Cure. I weirdly care more about seeing the Cure than most bands that I like, even bands that I like more than the Cure. If you gave me a choice right now between seeing the Cure or, say, Spiritualized, the Mary Chain, Love and Rockets, New Order, Depeche Mode, Mazzy Star, Mojave 3, Mogwai… well, man. Oof. Mojave 3 would give the Cure a run for their money but it would have to be the Cure. I don’t know why this is. But I need to see the Cure again. I want to hear “Plainsong” or something while holding my indifferent daughter and having a good cry. That seems like a thing I need in my life. I would trade my Cruel World tickets for an east coast Cure show. I would trade my Taylor Swift tickets for Cure Tickets boy I really do want to see the Cure.

I did quite enjoy Robert Smith’s caps-locked Tweetstorm about how he really is trying to make this ticket procuring experience fair, though.

And it looks like ALL the tickets are going out in the pre-sale, so that was it. Wait listed. SAD.

ROBERT SMITH @RobertSmith

WE HAD FINAL SAY IN ALL OUR TICKET PRICING FOR THIS UPCOMING TOUR, AND DIDN’T WANT THOSE PRICES INSTANTLY AND HORRIBLY DISTORTED BY RESALE - WE WERE TOLD "In North America the resale business is a multi-billion $ industry.

I made myself very sad about AI last night. Chast GPT 4 came out and boy people sure are excited that an AI can follow instructions and look things up and do repetitive tasks. I am growing to loathe AI more and more every day. I want to opt out of it. Here is what I want:

1. I want a standardized tag for the entire internet — preferably enforced by law — that lets me opt every piece of content out of machine learning, large language models and the like. Just like I can put a content=noindex tag on my webpage that will keep Google from indexing it. And just like the way that most developers of web publishing software like Automattic and Tumblr and Livejournal and Twitter or whatever also put an option to keep your content from being tagged by Google. I want one of those, preferably enforced by law, for large language models and machine learning. Stay the hell away from my stuff my stuff is for humans only no robots. Robots keep out.

2. I would, ideally, like a law against AI. But actually, even a plausibly proposed law against AI, in a major jurisdiction, would be pretty great. Because I am tired of everything being called AI. I’m tired of shit that has existed for a decade being lumped in with ChatGPT and Midjourney and being called AI. And if an AI law were on the cusp of being realistically passed, suddenly lots of industries and tech would jump up and say “but we’re not AI” and they would come up with all sorts of new terms to distinguish between these tedious, incorrectly applied blanket terms like “algorithms” and “AI,” which are also blurring as the VC money starts a-flowin’. And we could then have somewhat more serious conversations about the whole affair. I mean, ideally we would ban it all, or at least make it all licensable and opt-outable. Just one jurisdiction. Seriously. I would move there in a heartbeat.

Can’t we free ourselves of this? Are we so blindly walking toward our destruction. Ezra Klein had a funny anecdote in his recent screed about AI. I don’t buy a lot of his arguments but I absolutely love — and profoundly fear — his quoting of surveys that say 10% of the people WORKING on AI think it might actually lead to our destruction. But they keep doing it!

We just keep marching toward it and everyone rationalizes it by saying the Chinese will do it if we don’t, the bad people in tech will do it if we don’t. On we march, blindly and pointlessly.

But it does not have to be this way! We have successfully banned things planet-wide before! This one would be even easier! We successfully banned human cloning. We successfully banned CFCs. We could do it! Shit if you took a planet-wide vote right now I have ZERO doubt that the majority of the people on the planet would vote “stop all this research.” I’ve been down this road before, of course, spent a ton of my money to confirm my hunch about theories about humans and AI and everything I learned confirmed this hunch. We don’t want it. Stop it! Stop stop stop!

All that being said I do not believe we are on the precipice of anything humanity-changing. At best we’re at the precipice of something like the industrial or internet revolution, and even those I find to be unlikely. I could obviously be wrong, and obviously this could be wishful thinking, but I don’t see anything particularly humanity-changing in the current spate of AIs. I see toys and assistants and speed and the removal of time and tedium from redundant tasks and a slight increase in the intelligence level of the redundant tasks that are being performed. I do not think we’re at the factory-level with AI. I think we’re at the self-driving cars level. Or, fingers crossed, please god, maybe at the video calls level, where we wanted it forever and once we got it we were like “eh, whatever.”

But again. Why take the chance! Stop it now! Stop it now! Choose the Star Trek future over the Blade Runner future! We have a choice!

So the inflation report came out yesterday and inflation is still rising, which I guess is a surprise and not a surprise at the same time for me. Prices seem to have stabilized in my day-to-day life like groceries, but I don’t hire a lot of service people and I don’t buy gas and I don’t do home construction or travel so, you know, missing out on a lot of categories of price indexing. This of course begs the question of whether Powell will raise interest rates again and I think the answer now is probably yes. At best he’ll hold steady, but I am leaning toward a .5% increase. Because of course.

Also, for your reading interest: The Fed’s Inflation Goal is Completely Arbitrary. (Thank you Ben Young for that one).

Question for you: Has anyone watched the Chinese TV version of The Three Body Problem, known as Three Body? I am kinda curious. I know the Game of Thrones guys (don’t make me go Google the spellings of their last names) are working on an America one but, like, a) will it ever come out, and b) wouldn’t it theoretically be more interesting to see a faithful Chinese adaptation of a Chinese novel? I am kind of thinking that might be the case.

Potato McWhiskey was on the official Civ livestream last night. That was kinda fun. It was so weird to see him in person. From his voice I always imagined him to look like Dudley from The Dudley Corporation, cuz Irish, and he does a little bit, cuz Irish, but not really. Taller and thinner than I imagined. Looked good! Cleans up well.

Finally, this new Kia EV9 looks really awesome (thank you, Ryan McManus for notifying me of this) All electric, six seats, three rows, second row rotates to face the back row to make a nice little socializing are. Clean lines, not too slavish to the brutish trends of SUVs today. Probably has a solid charging system if the Kia/Hyandai lineup is any indication. Probably gonna be a lot cheaper than the only other EV SUV option out there, the Rivian R1S.

Had the night off from Jane. I spent it catching up on my Youtubes and then napping. So tired. Not handling this Daylight Savings Time transition well this year, even though I’m getting enough sleep. Would appreciate it if I could adjust please k thnx bye.

World mix for you today. Good stuff. Lotta modern and weird, some traditional and normal. I guess I should clarify that these mixes are not “world music,” they are “global” as in they are multi-lingual and mult-cultural, but some of the music is straight-up “western” music but sung in languages other than English. Correct terminology is hard here. World Music got a bad rap. I don’t know enough to say if it was deserved or not. Also I like cross-cultural pollination in my music and my food. I’m not going for “authentic.” Whatever. This is too much caveating. It’s a lot of good music. Enjoy.

Until tomorrow, dear friend. Take care.