i've had this garfield panel saved forever and i even marked in my calendar today as "the monday that wouldn't die" so uh. happy(?) monday the 22nd aka the monday that wouldn't die
OKAY LEGIT I REBLOGGED THIS YESTERDAY. ME AND MY PARTNER ARE IN SUCH A TIGHT SPOT FOR MONEY ATM AS WE ARE SAVING FOR A DEPOSIT ON A HOUSE. I GOT PAID DOUBLE WHAT I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO GET AND SO DID HE AND HONESTLY I CRIED SO MUCH TODAY IM SO HAPPY AND RELIEVED
Sharing yet again because last week I got another unexpected refundâŠand we had an adventure (my brother and me) paying off a tardy mortgage obligation.
Now Iâm desperate again. Iâm househunting and a huge chunk of my savings got âdepletedâ. I donât know how they got âdepletedâ; asking wonât get it back.
King is one of the most successful speculative fiction authors of all time, and among other honors won the National Book Award in 2003.
His memoir / writing manual, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, offers a wonderful look inside his writing process. Here are 20 rules for writing success gleaned from the book:
1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. âWhen you write a story, youâre telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.â
2. Donât use passive voice. âTimid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid people like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. The timid fellow writes, 'The meeting will be held at seven oâclock,' because that somehow says to them, âPut it this way and people will believe you really know.' Purge this quisling thought! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write, âThe meetingâs at seven.â There, donât you feel better?â [note: something like "We meet at seven" is even more active.]
3. Avoid adverbs. âThe adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence, 'He closed the door firmly.' Itâs by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if âfirmlyâ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before âHe closed the door firmlyâ? Shouldnât this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isnât âfirmlyâ an extra word? Isnât it redundant?â
4. Avoid adverbs, especially after âhe saidâ and âshe said.â âWhile to write adverbs is human, to write âhe saidâ or âshe saidâ is divine.â
5. But donât obsess over perfect grammar. âLanguage does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isnât grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story⊠to make them forget, whenever possible, that they are reading a story at all."
6. The magic is in you. âIâm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didnât need the feather; the magic was in him.â
7. Read, read, read. âYou have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you donât have time to read, you donât have the time (or the tools) to write.â
8. Donât worry about making other people happy. âReading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.â
9. Turn off the TV. âMost exercise facilities are now equipped with TVs, but TVâwhile working out or anywhere elseâreally is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhard on while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards, or the sports blowhards, itâs time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, Iâm afraid, that [the talking heads] must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.â
10. You have three months. âThe first draft of a bookâeven a long oneâshould take no more than three months, the length of a season.â
11. There are two secrets to success. âWhen Iâm asked for âthe secret of my successâ (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. Itâs a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.â
12. Write one word at a time. âA radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My replyââOne word at a timeââseemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasnât. In the end, itâs always that simple. Whether itâs a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like The Lord Of The Rings, the work is always accomplished one word at a time.â
13. Eliminate distraction. âThere should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.â
14. Stick to your own style. âOne cannot imitate a writerâs approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You canât aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing like John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.â
15. Dig. âWhen, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didnât believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories arenât souvenir T-shirts or Game Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writerâs job is to use the tools in their toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small, a seashell. Sometimes itâs enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all the gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.â
16. Take a break. âIf youâve never done it before, youâll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. Itâs yours, youâll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. Itâs always easier to kill someone elseâs darlings that it is to kill your own.â
17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. âMostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and thatâs what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribblerâs heart, kill your darlings.)â
18. The research shouldnât overshadow the story. âIf you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. Thatâs where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what youâre learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.â
19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. âYou donât need writing classes or degrees any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in Americaâs finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my lifeâs work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.â
20. Writing is about getting happy. âWriting isnât about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, itâs about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. Itâs about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.â
I still may have the Army magazine that has his article on the subject of teaching high school students. I'm glad to see this stuff even though I am not really a fan of him.
Iâm on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaurâs Guide to Life After AI. Catch me on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Keplerâs in Menlo Park and in TORONTO on Tues (Jun 23) at Osler Records. After that, itâs NYC, Philly and Chicago.
Perhaps you've encountered the stories about Dialog, an extremely weird secret society associated with Peter "Antichrist" Thiel, whose membership data and details have leaked this week:
By all appearances, this is a comically creepy, awful talking-shop for the Epstein Class. It's not all that surprising, in retrospect, to learn that all these terrible people were in a group chat, secretly assigning ratings to one another, and periodically gathering to have tedious panels about, I dunno, "race science" or whatever.
I'm on the oligarchy beat, so stories about Dialog have been popping up in my RSS feed for the past week or so, but it wasn't until last night that I made a connection.
A year or two ago, I got an invite to speak at an event. This is normal, I get a lot of these and I do a lot of public speaking. I'm good at it, and it's a good way for me to reach people and get them energized about the issues I care about. Sometimes, I do these talks for free. Sometimes I get paid.
When I first glanced at this speaking offer, I thought, "Huh, I guess this is one to send on to my speaking agent," because the names the offer dropped were a bunch of rich people, and so I assumed that they were having some kind of summit and looking for a keynoter. Then I read a little more carefully and realized they â these billionaires and their lickspittles! â wanted me to pay them, thousands of dollars, so that I could shlep my ass to some luxury resort in order to have the privilege of speaking to them.
I came up as a science fiction writer, and at some point, every sf writer learns "Yog's Law," coined by James D Macdonald when he was running the science fiction forum on GEnie, under the screen name "Yog Sysop":
In other words, whenever you, as a creative worker, are approached by someone who wants to "help" you with your work, and they want you to pay them, they are a scammer, preying upon your essential human need to communicate with others. Run away.
Which is what I did. I deleted the email.
Then, I got another one a couple months later. Ugh. I wrote a mail rule that auto-deleted anything from that sender and promptly forgot about the matter. Until last night.
I just had a look at my Trash folder and yup, these people are still emailing me in hopes that I will give them thousands of dollars to join their weird secret society.
I don't know if everyone who joined Dialog got an email like the one I was sent, but if you want to understand how at least some of those people ended up on those membership rolls, well, now you know: they were schmucks who'd never learned Yog's Law.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Dan Taylor (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_2014_by_Heisenberg_Media.jpg
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CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
Makes you wonder how much Julian No and Emilio Largo had to pay Blofeld to join Spectre in the 007 fiction. By the way, I almost got recruited into a shady organization myself just after I graduated from college. I knew Yog's Law somehow even if nobody taught me.
Send your name to fly on Roman and download a boarding pass like this one with your name on it!
Whatâs the farthest youâve ever traveled from home? Want to beat your record by about a million miles? Submit to have your name added to a memory card that will be attached to a plaque on our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope traveling a million miles away!
Prior to Romanâs launch, an SD card loaded with submitted names will be attached to this plaque where the square outline is.
After launch on August 30, Roman will journey way out to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), the same orbit as our James Webb Space Telescope. At L2, the gravity of the Sun and Earth, together with an objectâs motion around the Sun, let it stay lined up with Earth as they orbit. That will give Roman a relatively steady orbit without using much fuel. Like Webb, Roman will trace out a large orbit around the actual L2 point â much larger than the Moonâs orbit around Earth â and the two will easily be kept far apart.
Telescopes at L2 also have a constant, unobstructed view of a wide swath of the sky. Earth won't block much of Roman's view since it will be so distant! And at L2, heat from Earth, the Sun, and the Moon have less effect on infrared telescopes, which âseeâ heat.
The Roman Telescope model has its boarding pass! Do you have yours?
Send your name here. Submissions close July 16. Follow along with Romanâs road to launch at science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman!
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
In a weird but appropriate irony, my brother just gave me a whiskey bottle refilled with red/white/blue M&M candies to celebrate both my new house and the Sestercentennial!
Battledroids, a game of armored combat, FASA, 1984 -- This is the 1st edition of the game that was rereleased the following year as BattleTech due to Lucasfilm claiming ownership of the word "droid." Alan Gutierrez' box art depicts a WHM6R Warhammer mech, and was used on the first 3 editions (1e Battledroids 1984, 2e BattleTech 1985, and first English printings of 3e 1992).
These early editions included mech designs like the Warhammer that were derived from anime art, licensed from plastic model importer Twentieth Century Imports. FASA later discontinued these after disputes over licensing and they became known as the "Unseen" mechs, sometimes mentioned in lore but no longer depicted in miniature or game art.
That time I superimposed FASA, R.Talsorian, Reaper and Dream Pod wargame world upon my own. This is an aerial photomap of the Gulf View/Embassy Hills neighborhood of New Port Richey, Florida.
What the same geographic area looks like today. (The old picture is probably from the middle of the Eighties.)
Doing some Postscriptage. By going back to GoogleEarth Pro and figuring out a good "eye height" to work from, I did some quick reconnaissance of my past stomping grounds and this is what I got:
First, this is the school campus that includes the successor to the school where I attended Kindergarten and most of First Grade. The original building was demolished and a new building replaced it.
This little place is where I lived for the three years that followed. It was relatively close to both my birthplace and my parent's hometowns. It was an okay place to be a little kid.
This is the subdivision neighborhood from the remainder of my grade school years; we took busses to the small towns east of here for school. Go west and you struck sprawl.
Where I spent my teenage and young adult years. Still very scrubby but an eye in the sprawl storm.
Somewhere here is Rather Manor, in the process of passing into history as we speak.
Wolfsden is in here somewhere. No need for me to point to it.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One of the best ways to evaluate your own understanding of a subject is to attempt to explain it to someone else. Through explaining things, we discover how much of the "totally obvious" world is actually full of ambiguity, mystery and contradiction.
There's a great bit in Rowan Atkinson's historical sitcom Blackadder that illustrates this principle. In "Ink and Incapability" Blackadder and friends have accidentally burned the only copy of Samuel Johnson's original dictionary of the English language. To cover up their mistake, they decide that they will recreate the dictionary themselves. However, they founder on the first word they try to define, "A":
Blackadder: Let's start at the beginning, shall we? First: 'A.' How would you define 'A'?
Prince George: OhhâŠ'A' (continues this in background). Oh, I love this! I love this! Quizzies! Erm, hang on, itâs coming. Ooh, crikey, erm, oh yes, Iâve got it!
B: What?
PG: Well, it doesnât really mean anything, does it?
B: Good. So we're well on the way, then. "'A'; impersonal pronoun; doesn't really mean anything."
I mean, what does "A" mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has more than a dozen definitions, and just the first one runs to more than 1,500 words:
Now, normal life involves a lot of explaining things to other people. You have to explain your problems to customer service reps, who have to explain why they can't solve those problems to you. You need to explain to your loved ones why you want to leave your toothbrush in the shower, and they have to explain why they hate having your toothbrush in the shower. These explanation-exchanges teach you as much as they teach the person you're locked in dialog with. The reasons for leaving your toothbrush in the shower may seem totally obvious to you, and your partner's inability to understand this reveals the assumptions you've never even considered.
For the past four decades, an increasing proportion of the population have spent an increasing proportion of their lives explaining things to machines that have no assumptions or shared context: computers. What we call "programming a computer" is really "breaking down a thing that seems obvious to you into increasingly simple instructions that will be followed to the letter."
Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child.
To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables").
I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever.
But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles."
Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists:
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
From "names of people" and "street addresses"; from "prices" to "time"; from "email addresses" to "phone numbers"; the "awesome falsehoods" lists are awesome because they reveal how much subtlety and complexity is lurking in these seemingly simple and intuitive concepts. This subtlety and complexity might never emerge through the process of trying to teach a person about them, but when you try to teach a computer about them, you have to confront them in all their awesome fuggliness.
That's because humans have context, agency and flexibility. Sure, the person who designs a form with a blank for "name" might never have met a Malagasy person whose first name is Randriamananjararadofabesata, but in the pre-digital world, when Madagascar Slim met a public official who had to transcribe his name onto a paper form, that official could simply draw an arrow in the margin next to the "name" blank, turn the form over, and write out all 28 characters on the reverse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Slim
Computers can't do this. If the programmer doesn't know about Malagasy first names, the computer doesn't know about them either, and the only person who can "teach" the computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it.
This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on spectrums rather than in binaries. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank:
Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a personal challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. This isn't always easy, but officials on the front lines necessarily deal with reality, and they can't get their jobs done unless they're capable of interpreting the necessarily incomplete procedures they operate under to fit things as they really are.
But a computer doesn't have any agency or context or flexibility. If the computer says your name isn't valid, you can't argue the computer into accepting it. The only way to get a digital world to acknowledge your existence is to campaign for systemic change. A trans person might (with great difficulty, to be sure) convince the regional registrar to white-out an old X on one "gender" box and mark a new X in the other box. But the only way to make that change in a software system that has been programmed to treat the "gender" field as immutable is to change society itself.
In this way, computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves. They require that we interrogate and faithfully recreate our personal tacit knowledge, and they require that our societies interrogate their tacit presumptions as well. When you are forced to turn your tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, you're also forced to confront how many broken assumptions lurk inside your reasoning. At best, it's a clarifying process.
Computers don't just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are. There are lots of things that we have supposed that a computer would never do, because we believed that these things required something that only humans could do.
Take chess: there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so brute-forcing chess by running all possible games is a technological impossibility. The best human chess players do something we don't quite understand, mixing their recollections of previous games with rules-of-thumb about the best strategies, with "creativity" (whatever that is) that lets them spontaneously develop new strategies. We can easily get a computer to memorize all the known-good chess sequences and all the rules of thumb, but we don't know what "creativity" is, so we can't encode it as a series of instructions.
But thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning and its successor, "deep learning," we have created chess-playing software that can beat every human, partly by assaying gambits that we would term "creative" if they originated with a human player.
What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from "creativity" can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears "creative" doesn't mean that machines are human.
For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call "creative" in a human doesn't mean that we defined "creativity" too broadly, it means that we defined "human" too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person.
I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for reasons that Ted Chiang sets out with luminous brilliance in a recent Atlantic article entitled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious":
(If you're hitting the paywall on that one and you're on Firefox, you can try my favorite trick: switch to "Reader Mode" and hit "reload" â your mileage may vary.)
For all the reasons Chiang articulates, I think that drawing the "personhood" line to include machines is a technical mistake, but it's worse than that. Admitting machines to the "personhood" club is a tactical mistake, on par with the mistake we made when we admitted corporations to the personhood club. We should absolutely consider expanding personhood to incorporate living things, including animals and ecosystems, but at the same time, we must purge these dead, artificial constructs from the club:
There is a way in which the recognition of new capabilities in machines parallels the recognition of new capabilities in animals other than ourselves. When those animals manage to do things that we once thought were the exclusive province of humans, we (should) take that as an opportunity to refine our conception of humanity. We're not "the animals that use tools" or "the animals that make plans" or "the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors," because there are other animals that do those things. We are an "animal that uses tools"; not the animal that does so.
Likewise, if we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity â not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not "a thing that requires a human mind," they're "things that can be done by human minds and by machines."
Edsger Dijkstra once famously asked "can a submarine swim?"
Submarines and fish and humans and dolphins all propel themselves through water by different means. But when an animal swims, it does something that is different from what a submarine does. The submarine has no intention, while (complex multicellular) animals swim to pursue goals. Building machines that propel themselves through water is very useful, but it's not the same thing as creating life. In some ways, it's better than creating life: for one thing, we owe other living things moral consideration that is not due to machines. Harnessing a machine to accomplish our own goals is more morally clear than controlling living things to achieve those goals. By the same token, creating machines that can do some of the tasks that we ask of other humans can be the superior moral course. I'd rather have a machine remove mines from a minefield than getting humans to do it.
But beyond this moral relief, creating machines is a fantastic way to learn more about ourselves â making explicit our tacit knowledge, our implicit social assumptions, and the limitations of our conception of what sets us apart from the rest of the universe.
One way in which AI is exceptional is in how it undermines this principle. Conventional software techniques struggled to produce a program that could identify objects in photographs. It turns out that defining all the visual correlates of "cat" is even harder than defining the letter "A." Deep learning techniques solved this previous insoluble problem by relieving us of the job of making explicit all the implicit factors that we deploy when distinguishing an image of a "cat" from an image of a "dog" or a "tiger" (or a "tractor").
Instead of forcing humans to engage in introspection until we'd made a list of every factor we use to identify cat pictures, we simply identified pictures of cats and fed them to a program that tried to find the commonalities among them. The more pictures we fed to that program, the better it got at identifying cats. Today, we have programs that can reliably distinguish an image of a cat from an image of a tiger cub!
This represents a major breakthrough in the power of computers to perform useful work for us, but it's also a huge regression in computers' role in forcing us to make our tacit thought processes explicit through systematic introspection. That's probably fine: we didn't create computers to make us introspect, we created them to do useful work for us. All things considered, it might be better to have genies who grant our wishes according to the spirit of our words, not their letter.
AI may not force us to render our implicit thoughts as explicit instructions, but it absolutely forces us to reconsider and narrow the realm of the numinous. Our own creativity is still delightful and important, but the fact that this squishy, amazing process can (sometimes) be replicated by procedural machines changes the definition of living things. We're "a thing that can produce creative outcomes" but not "the things that can produce creative outcomes." The machines aren't being creative (any more than a submarine is swimming) but they're outputting things that we used to only achieve by means of creativity.
An AI that does something that used to require creativity is fulfilling my favorite of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has not done before":
https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
Just as bosses fantasize about AI bringing about a worksite without workers, and Zuckerberg is trying to build social media without socializing, and politicians want a bureaucracy without bureaucrats, we can sometimes use AI to produce creative outcomes without creativity:
But art isn't the only realm that we apply creativity to. There are plenty of outcomes that we've always believed we couldn't bring about without applying creativity. AI â like all software â is making us realize that an ingredient we once deemed uniquely essential turns out to have substitutes. AI can sometimes accomplish things without us explaining how we do them. That relieves us of a useful but difficult chore â but in so doing, it forces us (yet again!) to revisit what sorts of things are needed to do the things that matter to us, and therefore, what makes us special.
Reminds me of two things:
1) an episode of the 1980s revival of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, when the team helped a chess master defect to the West, and the master-of-disguise man must step in and impersonate him during a competition. Even though the agent only knew the basics of the game, he decided that rather than play to win, he could just play to perpetuate the game long enough for his team to enable the switch and escape.
2) Scott McCloud's book REINVENTING COMICS, which at a point gets into the thought that human nature often intertwines artistic and non-artistic motives, and rarely is a motive purely one or the other.
âCountry singer Lee Greenwood, 83, will open the proceedings with his 1984 signature track âGod Bless the U.S.A.â â the same song he has performed at Trump events since 2016. Three of Greenwoodâs top five songs on Spotify are variations of the same tune. Trump also tapped tenor Christopher Macchio, whom he compared to the late Luciano Pavarotti, to perform classical selections. Macchio currently draws 571 monthly listeners on Spotify and 2,000 YouTube subscribers. Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice, and Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory have not yet withdrawn from Freedom 250.â
â Trump scrapes barrel with D-list rally singers as âFreedom 250â finally implodes
Lee Greenwood was my brush with fame. I saw his show once in the late Eighties; met him twice while living in Tennessee. This happenstance does not surprise me at all.
(It's been over 40 years since he first hit the pop charts with "I.O.U." So he got a gig. That's show biz.)
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