Jenn Dolari @dolari@driveinsaturday.org

#StarTrek

As a teenager in Neustrelitz (East Germany), I painted small stones purple and left them all over town. Did it for years. It drove the police and Stasi nuts. It meant nothing. It just felt good to do something they couldn't control or understand.

Great Scot!

Google Maps: Now with more Squamish than any other map!

#squamishbc

Ted Chiang as eloquent as ever:

"The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

[...]

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

[...]

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."

Read the whole essay. It's brilliant. #ai

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art

Happy Labor day! 🎉

So my online banking no longer works on Firefox so I used (ugh) Edge and got instantly hit in the face with a backlog of “WE HAVE PUT AI INTO EVERYTHING; INTO YOUR TABS, INTO YOUR SEARCHES, UNDER YOUR SEAT AND IN YOUR TEETH, SEE WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH IT PLEASE THIS IS MINDBENDING TECH DON’T YOU WANT TO BE A PART OF THE FUTURE OF OUR SHAREHOLDERS” bullshit while I’m just trying to pay bills.

I find that weirdly the Scottish and Japanese mindsets are actually quite similar in a number of interesting ways (extensive Scottish-Japanese cultural exchange goes back to the 1700s)

Look at any number of historical Japanese figures, and the sheer number educated in Scottish universities is fascinating. The modern understanding we have of Geotechnical engineering was founded by a Scottish educated Japanese guy from the 1800s.

Also, modern Japanese whisky comes from a Scottish woman who married and moved into Japan and started her own distillery.

Just a huge amount of cultural overlap.