A Troll on Karl Johan Street

Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write.

[playwrongs]

That translation from @sungodsevenoclock got me thinking about jaunty short-line rhyming poems. I started remembering a handful from, in particular, Elinor Wylie and her somewhat later contemporary Phyllis McGinley. Both of them had a wonderful knack for these very playful, jazzy poems that were often just excuses to show off how brilliantly they could do multisyllabic rhymes. Here's a chunk of Wylie's "Peregrine":

"He made pantries Of Vaux and Arden And the village gentry's Kitchen-garden. Fruits within yards Were his staples; He drank whole vineyards From Rome to Naples, Then went to Brittany For the cider. He could sit any Horse, a rider Outstripping Cheiron's Canter and gallop. Pau's environs The pubs of Salop, Wells and Bath inns Shared his pleasure With taverns of Athens..."

And there's an even more technically brilliant variation of this, which is exemplified in McGinley's "Lesson for Beginners." I'm going to transcribe the whole poem, because (though it's a bit glib), I have rarely found its equal for marrying verve and musicality to keeping on topic and not wandering into rhyme for rhyme's sake.

LESSON FOR BEGINNERS by Phyllis McGinley

Martin of Tours, When he earned his shilling Trooping the flags Of the Roman Guard, Came on a poor, Aching and chilling Beggar in rags By the barracks yard. Blind to his lack, The Guard went riding. But Martin a moment Paused and drew The coat from his back, His sword from hiding, And sabered his raiment Into two.

Now some who muse On the allegory Affect to find It a pious joke; To beggar what use, For Martin what glory, In deed half-kind And part of a cloak? Still, it has charm And a point worth seizing. For all who move In the mortal sun Know halfway warm Is better than freezing, As half a love Is better than none.

[torschlusspanikattack]

there’s a lot of reasons to enjoy travelling but a rlly obvious one is you like someplace and you aren’t currently there

almost as obvious and prob even more common is you don’t like someplace and you are currently there

[sungodsevenoclock]

High Heels

Out on the water, there’s a cold, black layer. On the garden path, there are prints from shoes with heels. But there’s wind today, mountains fight the gusty air, and the wind throws heaps of clouds out into the sea. Why’d you come stand by the threshold at so late an hour? After all, it’s unfair, it’s against the rules we set. But the sea — how it combines such restraint with power, and how stern and timeless is the mountain’s silhouette. The wind wanders gloomily, clad in cloudy tatters. In the gullies, a subdued mountain rumble rolls. Trees with bare branches bend down with a clatter, And the air at sunset smells of damp and salt. You had come at night and stood a little while. A little while you stood there — it is clear from the prints. Threw your cigarette out and quickly ran back down to the windswept buildings, the deserted streets. How could it be, the kind spirit of bare branches didn’t tell you its wise “Stay, don’t go”? Only sounds from the ravine, gusts of damp and darkness, and the substation mumbling below. So what were you doing here in the night, standing? Waiting? Mouthing your goodbyes? Or did you try the latch? Like a skittish bird did every noise have you starting, Or did you want to begin our life from scratch? So, shall we part forever then, tell a lie to fortune? The fishermen’s speedboats leave for the Black Sea. On the sodden path going past the orchard, open-hearted, cruel prints from your high heels.

—1956

Vladimir Lugovskoy, tr. by me

[sungodsevenoclock]

Dondog (Antoine Volodine, tr. Viktor Lapitsky) Reading this book is a highly disorienting experience because you start by trying to find out what country it's actually taking place in, and then trying to figure out what has happenned in this alternate universe that has led to these names, these ethnicities, these events that seem askew from our world. And it's intriguing, but then you realise, there's no answer to this question. There is nothing there — completely on purpose. Volodine has created this amalgam of various Central European, Central Asian, Soviet and Shamanic cultures with randomly strewn atrocities and genocides and revolutions and camps. Without making any of it make sense. His point, I guess, is to showcase the 20th century as this phantasmagoria of cruelty and megalomania that can be thought of as background to everyone's life. And, as a Frenchman, maybe he is worried that specifics of place and time would be glommed on to treat whatever occurs as an exoticised "elsewhere". Hence, perhaps, his term for his project — "postexoticism" — as the idea that this "elsewhere" is really everywhere. But I don't know... I felt almost viscerally insulted by this view. History is not fucking interchangeable like this. It's not. It's not.

[sungodsevenoclock]

I am extremely impressed by the capabilities of AI, but attitudinally, I must admit my knee-jerk reaction to AI is the @wildgifthorses or @northshorewave style despair at AI being likely to usher an end to much of what makes life worthwhile. But then, my somewhat more considered opinion is that AI will be an immensely powerful tool of war and surveillance and domination.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

It's a common capitulative "hey please take me seriously and don't write me off" response to the extreme political polarisation of opinions on modern AI into a typically right aligned "powerful and broadly a force for good" and a typically left aligned "useless smoke and mirrors but broadly a force for bad" to say "both of these responses are wrong, they lack nuance and I believe something more complicated than either". Which is of course true and it's something I do myself say, but the capitulation (which I'm also guilty of) lies in hedging about the specifics and letting the other person assume that you agree with whatever is the most important to their politics.

But I think I need to be a little braver on challenging other leftists on part of this - or maybe, people explicitly on the left who have a little more domain knowledge of AI sort of need to force themselves to be. Perhaps part of the problem is how few there are who haven't been scared off, booed from the stage egged by their peers. It's certaintly why I quit serious academic study or career pursuit around AI, why I'm generally afraid to talk openly about the subject with people who know me personally except a very few very close friends. I know that I'll lose those friends before I can delve deep enough to be heard in any real explanative way, that getting there will involve challenging too many received wisdoms. Which is stupid, because I'm generally open to what should be the most important part of their politics on the matter, in that I am absolutely not convinced that AI as it's currently being deployed is going to be a prosocial force - although I believe it still might be, especially if so many leftists stopped spurning the technology.

But my problem is that they believe it's bad for - aside for perhaps a fairly skewed if righthearted version of automation threat - the wrong reasons, which are all predicated on this idea of the technology as an impotent, resource sink; the bejeweled sockpuppet inflated by the bloated dick of a corporation. Nonsensical mantras about data centers and energy use and water, which are absolutely nonsensical when you actually look at the numbers involved in the context of the energy, data and water use of any number of digital infrastructure technologies we take for granted. The cost of a cup of coffee, of locally grown vegan produce, of playing Mario Kart for half an hour, of posting on tumblr and reading your friends reply.

But perhaps the reason for this disconnect is the same sense that AI can only ever be a useless deception or party trick, so to get to my actual salient point. Your average leftist, marinated in a stew of posts about hallucination or counting letters in "strawberry", who recalls 2022 Dall-e outputs with too many hands, who still calls LLMs "spicy autocomplete", is catastrophically underaware of the consequence of the generalized abstract reasoning capability codified in the world models of these systems. The most critical mistake being made here is not in thinking that AI "is bad" (perhaps it is!) but by assuming that it's not powerful.

The right wing AI superintelligence truthers are far more close to being correct on this axis than the average leftist.

And because there's such a strong culture war imperative to stay in lane here, said leftists are almost to a man unwilling to learn more or be corrected. Which means that they're all entirely unequipped to address the actual problems with AI. Intrinsic to any analysis of AI risk should be the assumption that it at least has the potential to be powerful in the way that it's being imagined as being, and the best information we have on the topic is that it will be, perhaps sometimes already is.

Like, there is a whole field of study here. All the leading experts are convinced of it and those guys aren't partisan stooges or idiots. A ML researcher with a doctorate does genuinely have a more informed opinion than a tumblr fandom blogger, and all those fuckers seem sort of terrified at the moment. And we have metrics! Evaluations, benchmarks, cold hard numbers that show yes AI is good, this is how good it is, here's a percentage accuracy. Yes the failure mode of AI is hallucination, but at a certain point that can be minimised to an extent that the model can self-correct and we're getting close to the point of closing the gap. We likely already have in certain contexts!

On my phone so hard to fetch links and examples. I'll maybe edit those in later.

I feel like part of the issue is it's very easy to scratch the surface of an LLM and expose the artifice of the persona, of the output text-stream as pretended speech or thought. But this is missing the trees for the forest; yes what the AI shows its users is the model playing pretend for the sake of the text interface, but the actual AI is the internal world model that allows it to play pretend competently, and that is what is powerful. So many anti-AI people refuse to comprehend this fairly basic insight and it is maddening.

So yeah, essentially; if your critique of AI refuses to account for the possibility that the technology can be genuinely powerful, you don't know what you're talking about and you're unequipped to fight for your cause.

I don't know. I've given up talking to people about AI at this point except for on this blog. I figure whereever the wave takes us my talking about it isn't going to divert things so I might as well focus on other parts of my life. I basically gave up on having a well paying career in a topic that interested me so I could scrape by doing menial systems maintenance and not have to think about it seriously any more. I mean, I don't think I ever had the chops for it anyway, not when I realised that this would be the tone of the conversation. But still every so often I peek back at how the people around me are talking about it and it's just. So bleak.

[thunderstruck9]

Karl Sterrer (Austrian, 1885-1972), Gebirgsbauer [Mountain Farm], 1920. Oil on canvas, 115 x 105 cm.

[tsarina-anadyomene]

I do think my least appreciated discourse posts are often my best ones and about the things that I care most about

[sungodsevenoclock]

Okay, I was thinking, maybe there's some inner decision-maker for each of us that decides post/don't post based on passing some minimum threshold of goodness. And maybe "of personal interest to me" and "is likely to get lots of likes" are both components of that overall evaluation. Then, something like what OP says will always be true of everyone. Unless, of course, like some horrible Mr. Beast, one twists one's psyche to maximize personal interest in whatever drives engagement.

[sungodsevenoclock]

Speaking of which, I'm curious,

Your favourite city is one where

You currently live

You have lived in in the past

Not the city itself, but you live / have lived in the area

Have not lived, only visited

Voting ended onJun 7

[sungodsevenoclock]

Strange to what extent it's evenly balanced at this point...

[seafalls-deactivated20190913]

everything about this sketch is hysterical to me. the archaeologist outfit. the pens. the weird zen like way everything is delivered. the fact that it’s very clearly scripted. the increasingly demented looking furniture. the turning to a different camera but only once. the christina applegate mention/weird political detour. the glass container of crushed cumin seed he just has in his pocket slowly falling to the floor. the implication he’s routinely going on archaeological digs. the fact that no one is laughing for the first solid minute and a half because it’s not really funny. i love it so much.

[sungodsevenoclock]

My great grandfather's family were Jews who lived in Bukhara, actually. The thing is, they were not Bukharan Jews, who wouldn't associate with Westerners even if they were fellow Jews. And since the Russians and Uzbeks wouldn't associate with them either, as far as I understand, the family experience was being hated by absolutely everyone.

[worldscoolest]

Magnetic Storm, 1966 •

Oleh Sokolov •

[sungodsevenoclock]

Uzbekistan, plus.

Uzbekistan has got to be one of the most fascinating places to visit as a tourist and one of the ones I am most dreaming about getting to go. In terms of historical interest, architecture, food and nature, all of it. Of course the ancient capitals of Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand deservedly get top billing, but also the Early Modern era in Kokand and the Soviet era in Tashkent. Then there's the food. The best plov I've ever eaten was made by an Uzbek acquaintance of my parents'. The second best plov I've ever eaten was made by a different Uzbek acquaintance of my parents. My parents only have two Uzbek acquaintances, a fact that I greatly lament. And then there's the Tian Shan. I hope I get to go.

[sungodsevenoclock]

On many political issues, you can find a carve-out position that is all of mostly defensible, better than the status quo, and polls well. And so you get this centre-left American pundit dream of the extremely effective "centre-left politician espousing popular views".

But if you look at centrist politicians that actually exist, they are very much not like that. And as tempting as it is to assign that to circumstance, there's more to it.

Namely that the popular view is a composite view, not the view of a particular person, so it may not be a view a person can actually hold, or even if it is, it is popular because it is espoused by people who are largely not super invested in the topic and don't spend too much time and attention on it (since that is most people on most topics).

But even if people have some view because they aren't ideological, and they don't care that strongly one way or the other, politicians, almost by definition, are and do, so it makes little sense for a politician to hold such a view. Of course, the politician's public statements might be another matter., but still.

[sungodsevenoclock]

Sounds a little iffy, would you explain your reasoning?

Anti-trans participation people point out that and there's a history of doping with testosterone in women's sports, including doing so without informed consent on the part of the athletes. So a regulation on the level of testosterone is reasonable, and that you have to have some way of bracketing who is allowed to participate in women's sports other than self-identification.

Pro-trans participation people point out that a wide ban on trans women participating in women's sports would mean instituting an invasive testing regime, and cut off trans women from the camaraderie aspect of just doing women's activities.

I think setting the cutoff at "where there's an invasive drug testing regime anyway" can satisfy both of these sets of concerns, though of course not fully.

[sungodsevenoclock]

I think the compromise that would work for trans participation in women's sports is that for anything you do drug testing in, trans participation is not allowed, and for anything else, it is.

[sungodsevenoclock]

The treaty of Breastly Tovsk