Categories
quotes ranting

I assume such job descriptions do exist

I feel [it] might be much too complicated, unless somebody *wants* to explore using AI because their job description says “Look for actual useful AI uses”. In today’s tech world, I assume such job descriptions do exist. Sigh…

Linus Torvalds, in an email, “Re: [GIT PULL] io_uring fix for 6.17-rc5” [lore.kernel.org], on the Linux Kernel mailing list

Linus being Linus.

I don’t have any survey or stats to back it up, but I feel that we are turning the corner on AI hype. As I browse through my news feeds every morning the number of negative AI articles seems to be on the rise. Not negative in the “Gen AI is theft” or “Gen AI is just a way to fire people”. That is there, but that’s been there since the beginning. The AI companies and businesses adopting it are determined to push right through those issues.

No, this negativity is the disillusionment of the people, and companies, who are pushing. There have been articles about companies who laid off large swaths of people, only to have to hire them back. And of companies who said they were using AI but, in fact, were using cheep overseas labor. Then there was that study from MIT, that 95% of all AI initiatives at companies fail.

I think this negativity goes back to an idea that Cory Doctorow expressed back in 2023:

The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can’t think of anything that belongs in it.

Cory Doctorow, in Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI [locusmag.com]

I posted about that back in January 2024, in The A.I. Bubble and Life-Changing Use Cases [confusion.cc], and I don’t think anything has changed. I think there is a lot of AI out there, a lot of it bloating software and services both useful and useless. Some small bit of it useful to some fraction of people. But I don’t think any of it comes close to achieving anything like a justification from the hype.

Microsoft is among the most avid pushers of AI. After the early and ludicrous investment in AI (I guess memories of “missing” the internet last a long time…), the have to push AI in every nook and cranny of their vast empire of software and services. Adobe is another company whose products I use and has baked in AI all over the place.

I just spent two paragraphs disparaging AI but I do find some of it useful. But I think Doctorow’s statement is accurate. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

In Adobe Express and Lightroom, the two products from Adobe that I use, there are a number of AI tools. Setting aside Firefly their image and video generating AI, there are tools to automatically mask an image in Lightroom – to select the subject, or the sky, the background, or a person/people and even specific parts of a person: facial skin, all skin, hair, eyes, etc. Once selected you can apply edits to this (or everything but what you selected). The AI masking is pretty good, it managed to select things I want most of the time. This is a great timesaver, or in my case, makes it so I can edit my photos in a way I would not previously. It takes too long to manually mask things, I only ever did very basic masking, but the AI tools spread things up a lot.

I find the useful set of tools in Microsoft’s software, their “Copilots” to be similar. The auto summary tool in Outlook that allows you to include a summary of a long thread of email in a meeting invite or when your forward the email to some poor unsuspecting colleague is great. But it’s giving most people to ability to do something that they never did, too often people forward long email threads to people with no summary or context, the dreaded “adding so-and-so” or “+someone” or, even worse, the cursed “++”. People are lazy, I’ve not even seen many using this auto summarization yet. But at my job we only just got access to it. I remain hopeful despite the complete lack of evidence.

One, more example: Apple Intelligence, oft maligned, has turned out to be useful on at least one occasion for me. My daughter sent me a recipe and asked me to get the ingredients she needed. The recipe was in ‘Mercian Freedom Units, and quaint as cups and tsps are they don’t sell shit in freedom units. So I copied the list into a note and asked Siri to convert it to metric. To my utter surprise it did it in one go and correctly.

But that’s it. This is the sum total of useful AI I have. Well, except for AI turning search engines into answer engines and killing the internet [confusion.cc]. All of this is automating low value, time consuming tasks. At best these tasks are menial and at worst they are left undone because the value is below the bullshit job threshold.

What about Vibe Coding?

I remain skeptical. If it’s just replacing the interns and college graduate coders with AI then it’s replacing menial work. And is just part of the corporate push to reduce jobs through automation. Nothing new about that. But I can’t see vibe coding as a good thing. The core idea of using a probabilistic generative AI to write code in a world where we have been pushing for more deterministic secure code seems to be going the wrong direction.

I read an article a week or so ago somewhere (maybe in The Economist, but I can’t find it again) about how the business who want to build or use AI needs to Victorian civil engineering for guidance. The story was that in the early days of modern engineering —building structures like bridges with steel— people didn’t have a full understanding of all the capabilities and properties of steel. And the quality of steel was highly variable so excessive caution and over-engineering was needed to ensure that bridges didn’t fall into rivers.

Unfortunately the way modern companies work I cannot imagine any company approving the investments in over engineering AI the way a Victorian bridge was over engineered. It would not be financially responsible to do more than the bare minimum. And I fear that without costly over engineering high-stakes use cases are out of reach. So we are left with low-stakes use cases. Are their high-value versions of those?

So far the people with “look for actual AI use cases” in their job descriptions have come up with low-stakes, low-value use cases. On aggregate these might be enough to justify AI, by improving performance and laying off vast swaths of the workforce in companies they might be able to generate some return on investment.

But eliminating jobs through efficiently and productivity has a downside. The Economist had a guest article last week on this. In “Two scholars ask whether democracy can survive if AI does all the jobs” make a chilling point:

[L]abour automation isn’t just an economic problem; it’s also a political one. Right now, democratic governments depend on their citizens financially. But in a world of AI-powered UBI, the opposite would be true. Imagine a world in which citizens are burdensome dependants of a state that no longer needs them for anything.

Raymond Douglas and David Duvenaud in “Two scholars ask whether democracy can survive if AI does all the jobs” published in The Economist, September 27th, 2005.

It is a chilling thought. And it reminds me that the only positive view of the future I know of across Sci-Fi is Star Trek, where Earth is some sort of Marxist utopia where scarcity has been “solved” and humans have all devoted themselves to “the betterment of humanity”.

In conclusion. Companies are going to spend trillions to make AI automate low-value work, ending bullshit jobs and making us all dependent on our governments to take care of our needs.

Categories
ranting

No Plot

Life has no plot. No meaningful plot.

Daniyal Mueennuddin, preface to A Sportsman’s Notebook: Stories by Ivan Turgenev

You haven’t lost the plot. There is no plot. There was never a plot.

Categories
photography travel

Kyoto, Japan, December 2024

I am horrible about posting about my travels, it takes me way too long to do it. It’s become a bad habit. In 2023 I posted the final blog about my 2022 trip to France after returning from Italy. And last year I posted the first blog about Italy in June —not too bad…— but the final one in December, just before I left for Japan, literally on the last day. it’s a bad habit, but taking photos is far more fun than editing them. I mean, to take the photo you have to be there, editing them is nice but it’s not the same thing.

Anyway, I’m trying to do better. Not much better mind you, it’s September, but, baby steps.

This is the final post for my trip to Japan in 2024. I’ve already posted about the side/day trips to Himeji, Nara and Uji [confusion.cc] and the few days we stayed in Osaka [confusion.cc]. Now for the main course: Kyoto. It took a while to review, edit and post the photos, I took over 3000 in Kyoto! I think Kyoto is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Though I’m a simp for Japanese traditional design, and Kyoto was the capital for a thousand years. You know how many temples and shrines you can build in a thousand years? According to two different sites I found there are “over 1600 [Buddhist] Temples and 400 [Shinto] Shrines” in Kyoto. Neither cites a source, but it’s on the Internet so, you know, it must be true (and, to avoid also not citing a source, even if I think the data is suspect; here is site one [sjmcjapan.com], and site two [mykyotomachiya.com]).

I’ve seen many of the “must see” temples and shrines on my past visits to Kyoto, in 2004 [confusion.cc], 2005 [confusion.cc], and 2010 [confusion.cc]. But my daughters have not, my oldest was 2 in 2010 so doesn’t remember at all and my youngest was born 2 years after that trip. So, we did have to revisit all the must see sites. Which I don’t mind. But we did visit a few places I’ve never seen so it was great.

Kyomizu-dera

We didn’t have a set plan in Kyoto, which is unusual. It’s how I prefer to travel, but in many places it doesn’t work anymore since you can get tickets online. The ability to get tickets online and the fact that many places have limited tickets per day means you have to plan ahead. For Italy and Paris I had to plan out almost every day and book tickets weeks or months in advance. But things were much more relaxed in Kyoto, most temples and shrines don’t require any pre-booking or buying tickets in advance, you can just walk up and get tickets. I did check what days things were closed but we decided what to do the evening before, or even on the morning of.

The first place we decided to go was Kyomizu-dera [wikipedia.org]. The idea was to see the autumn colors while they lasted. The unusually warm summer and autumn meant that many trees were still covered in red, orange or yellow leaves around Kyoto. But less so with each passing day. Of all the places we wanted to go, Kyomizu-dera was the one that I though we should go to first. And we were not disappointed, the colors were amazing. Possibly, the best colors I’ve ever seen.

But everyone else in Kyoto also had the same idea. The crowds were almost as amazing as the colors. It was Harajuku crowded. But totally worth it.

And, because I had fun doing it last time, let’s compare some of this trips photos with previous trips. Here is the main hall or Hondo, at Kyomizu-dera 20 years apart, in March 2004 and December 2024.

2004

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2024

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Kinkaku-ji

I think that Kinkaku-ji, the “Golden Pavilion”, must be the most famous site in Kyoto. Though, maybe, the torii’s of Fushimi Inari-taisha could be more famous. Either way Kinkaku-ji is stunning and a must see.

Kinkaku-ji is extra special, beyond its beauty, to me because it is where, in 2005, I got engaged. That made for some fun with my daughters on this trip. I showed them the exact spot. The extra shot from 2005 below is when I got engaged.

2004

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2005

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2024

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Ginkaku-ji

We chose a gray, rainy day to go to Ginkaku-ji [wikipedia.org], the “Silver Pavilion”. Fitting as the first time I visited Ginkaku-ji back in 2004 it was also raining. And in 2005. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been to this place when it was not raining.

Overcast sky’s and light rain are fitting for Ginkaku-ji. The mossy gardens and hills around the pavilion work quite well in the rain. Or maybe that’s just because I’ve never been there when I was sunny. Anyway, here are a couple of photos of a rock with a handle that some monk left on a stone bridge, for more than 20 years now…

2004

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2024

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Nijo-jo

Nijō-jo-jo-jo-jo-jo. Nijō Castle [wikipedeia.org], is where the palace of the Shogun was. Is. Nijō-jo actually has to palaces; the Ninomaru Goten, and the Honmaru Goten.

Ninomaru Goten was the actual palace of the Shogun, which has the “nightingale floors”, which sing —or squeak really— and stunningly beautiful paintings and woodwork. All of which you cannot take photos of. I’ve visited Ninomaru Goten multiple times.

Honmaru Goten was an imperial villa which was (at least in part) moved to the grounds of Nijō-jo after the Meji restoration from the grounds of the Kyoto Gyoen, the Kyoto Imperial Palace. This is the first time I’ve been in Honmaru Goten, apparently it was recently renovated/restored and reopened to the public. It’s beautiful, amazing fabrics, printed/stamped paper, paintings. As you would expect for a imperial residence/retreat.

Of course there are also gardens. All proper samurai need extensive gardens to wonder around while they compose verse.

Since you can’t take photos of the gorgeous interiors of the palaces, here’s a stone lantern in the garden, from 2004 and 2024:

2004

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2024

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Fushimi Inari-taisha

Fushimi Inari-taisha [wikipedia.org] is another must visit place. Especially in the Instagram era, I guess. I first learned about the iconic Senbon torii, or “thousand torii” from the movie Memoirs of a Geisha. So, I didn’t visit it in 2004, but I did visit it in 2005 after seeing Memoirs.

It is a mecca for the Instagram, or Tik Tok, or whatever other social media there is. The crowd of people at the most iconic corridor of torii, the Senbon torii is insane. Really only one person can take “the perfect shot” at a time and they need to all take a hundred so it takes forever to get a chance. I don’t actually have good shots of my daughters because I was just done with the crowd. When I went to look at the photos I found that the focus was off and so the photos are not good. If you squint the are OK on a small screen but they are not good. C’est la vie. It leaves something for them to want to go back for.

Here is a shot from 2005 and 2024. I don’t even have a shot of the Senbon torii section from 2005. It was snowing and not very crowded when we visited in 2005, we didn’t stay long, should have take some more time and gotten a good shot.

2005

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2024

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Now I wanted to point out some places that I visited for the first time on this trip:

Saihō-ji

First up: Saihō-ji [wikipeida.org] or the “moss temple”. There are a couple of temples or shrines in Kyoto that are not so easy to get into. Saihō-ji is one of them. It requires reservations for a specific day and time and you cannot make reservations for more then two people. Traditionally you send a request by mail the a return postcard. But these days you can also use their website (every temple and shrine has a website and many of them have amazingly beautiful designs). There is also a minimum age of 13 to go.

We made reservations and went in groups on different days. And Saihō-ji did not disappoint. After copying a sutra we were able to walk around the gardens. Apparently there are 120 or more types of moss that make up the carpet of moss covering the entire garden. I didn’t count. Once again the late onset of autumn made for a even more beautiful visit. The moss was covered in many placed with deep red Japanese maple leaves. There was a single man waging a war on them racking up large piles and carrying them away in bags. But they were falling like snow.

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Tōfuku-ji

Tōfuku-ji [wikipedia.org] is a temple that was not even on my radar. We saw it on a flier or poster or somewhere and on the last full day we decided to go check it out. It’s stunning, I wish we had done it earlier, most of the trees were already mostly bare, the lower branches still red or orange but the color was ending. The view from the Tsūten-kyō a bridge over a small gorge filled with tree, must be stunning. Even in the state we saw it, it was beautiful.

Additionally, there are four “zen” gardens around the abbots quarters that would make the visit worth it even without autumn (or spring) trees. There is a traditional dry rock garden filled with raked spirals and lines, some natural rocks and moss covered mounds. That’s the biggest garden. Then there is one that has bushes trimmed to be flat topped squares checkered with more raked gravel. A garden that is half moss and half raked gravel around several short stone pillars. Finally there is a moss garden with small squares of stone that form a checkerboard pattern with the moss and ‘fade’ as you move from one end of the garden to the other: a fully complete check pattern on one side changing into a pattern with a few missing stones, changing into only a few stones among the moss and finally only moss, no stones.

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This post is really long and there are so many more things I could have written about. Let’s just say, Kyoto is one of my favorite cities in the world, a place filled with indescribable beauty, side by side with the hubbub of a modern city.

I’m just going to list a few other places we went. Some I’ve been to before, some where new:

  • Arashiyama Bamboo Grove [wikipedia.org], also in Memoirs of a Geisha but I knew about this one before the movie. It’s a lovely, if short, walk. Been there before.
  • Yasaka-jinja [wikipedia.org], or Gion-jinja, the shrine Gion district.
  • The Philosopher’s Walk [wikipedia.org] or Tetsugaku-no-michi, a path along a canal hugging the hills between Ginkaku-ji and Nanzen-ji. Been there before. Amazing colors when we where there this time.
  • Nishiki Market [wikipedia.org], a covered arcade with many shops selling raw and prepared foods. A great place to grab lunch or an early dinner. Been there before. Unfortunately this time I could not find the pickled watermelon! It looks like a giant white raisin.
  • Tō-ji [wikipedia.org] a large Buddhist temple, we went to because it was having a flee market, which they do every month on the 21. Tones of vendors, it was fun. First time visiting.
  • Chion-in [wikipedia.org], a large Buddhist temple just next to Yasaka-jinja in Gion. Not really a tourist site, we just wandered in after visiting Yasaka-jinja. A few interesting things but not much unless you are their for religious reasons. First time visiting.
  • Byōdō-ji [wikipedia.org], a small Buddhist temple near our hotel that is dedicated to a Buddha associated with medicine, but it seems the temple is popular with people who have pets too. First time visiting.

There were other shrines, temples and what-not. We also visited a lot of places to shop. Spent most evenings accompanying my daughters shopping in arcades and malls around Shijō-dōri. It will be a few years, but I’m sure I will go back to Kyoto again. So many more places to see.

You can see the full Kyoto, Japan, December 2024 [flickr.com] photoset on Flickr. Or brows through the gallery below.

Kyoto, Japan, December 2024
Categories
quotes

Our Passions

“I think that our passions should ask more of us than just our money, and they should give us more than just pleasure.”

Phil Edwards in Disney Adults were all part of the plan [youtube.com]

Yea, that’s from a video about Disney Adults. I guess pearls of wisdom can come from anywhere; a pearl is an oyster’s reaction to an irritant. And we use it as jewelry.

Categories
albums

RTJ4

Artist
Run the Jewels
Album
RTJ4
Realse Date
June 3, 2020

After I finished writing this, when I went to create a featured image, I found that I already had one for RTJ4. Which means I already did a review. Apparently I did it over a year ago, but I failed to set the category to “Albums” when I posted it, so, I missed it when trying to decide what album to review. Since I spent significant time on this, and it’s interesting to see the evolution of my thought on the album, I’m keeping both, it’s my blog. You can read the other one here: RTJ4 [confusion.cc] and compare if you are so inclined.

I first became aware of Run the Jewels [wikipeida.org], or RTJ, as the MCs on the DJ Shadow song “Nobody Speak”. “Nobody Speak” is an amazing track and it has one of the best music videos ever! Go watch it now [youtube.com] if you’ve never seen it. After hearing “Nobody Speak” I went and found the RTJ back catalog. “Nobody Speak” was released a few months before RTJ’s third album in 2016.

So I was familiar with RTJ, and had songs from their first three albums in heavy rotation, when RTJ4 dropped in mid 2020. RTJ4 was released, a couple of days early, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests triggered by the death of George Floyd [wikipedia.org], at the hands of the police because police brutality, especially against the black community in America is a major, in fact the major, theme of the album.

There is a lot of commentary on police brutality on the album. I’m going to refrain from turning this post into a discussion of the politics of Black Lives Matter, or Blue Lives Matter or De-fund the Police or whatever social media convenient slogan you may or may not personally agree with. But… I do want to talk about a few of the lyrics that hit hard, especially hard given the real world situation that the albums was released into.

First off, in the song “goonies vs E.T.” Mike delivers these lines:

Now I understand that woke folk be playin'
Ain't no revolution is televised and digitized
You've been hypnotized and Twitter-ized by silly guys
Cues to the evenin' news, make sure you ill-advised

Which references Gil Scott-Heron’s, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” [wikipeida.org]. By adding “digitized” and referencing Twitter I think this is encouraging people to channel their anger into action, not just posting on social media.

Mike comes back to this sentiment in the very next song, the most powerful song on the album, “walking in the snow”, when he raps:

And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV
The most you give's a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
But truly the travesty, you've been robbed of your empathy
Replaced it with apathy [...]

The most shocking thing about this particular verse by Mike is the lines that immediately proceed the bit on Twitter rants:

And every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free
And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me
Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, "I can't breathe"

This album was dropped in the middle of the George Floyd Protests, protests sparked by the death of a man caused by a cop kneeling on his throat while he repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”. So how can Mike reference that so quickly?

He’s not.

It’s not George Floyd he’s quoting.

It’s Eric Garner [wikipeida.org] who was choked out by NYC police in 2014. While complaining I can’t breathe.

You can see why “Walking in the Snow” became such a big song during the protests. (as an aside: there are no Wikipedia articles on any of the individual songs on this album, for most albums I look at there are at least a couple of the more popular songs that have individual articles.)

Now, I want to go back to the line The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy. And ignoring the irony, I want to use social media to back up Mike’s point that social media is the opiate of the masses and a false outlet for empathy and poor stand in for true action for change.

Hank Green once posted on Threads [threads.com]; “It would take a lot to convince me that the problem with America is that we’re not angry enough.” And another guy, Jason Pargin responded with a video on Facebook/Instagram [fb.watch] where he said something relevant here:

[…] With every strong emotion you can feel, there’s two versions of it and most people don’t recognize this.

There’s a fun version of the emotion and there’s a real version […]

[…] When he says the problem is not a lack of anger it sounds ridiculous because for some of you your social media feeds are nothing but outrage all the time.

But for 99.99% of us, it is not the kind of outrage that would motivate us to go attend a boring city council meeting every single week. That other kind of anger is the fun anger. It is its own reward. It is fun to sit around and imagine one day there being a revolution or imagining terrible things happening to the powerful people you hate. The system does not fear that kind of anger at all.

The system is terrified of the kind of anger that will motivate you to tolerate boredom and tedium. The kind of anger that motivates you to spend the rest of your life studying and becoming an expert and making yourself valuable in society so that you have power to effect change. The kind of anger that motivates you to sacrifice fun for discipline.

This is why Mike is talking about. That posting your outrage or support for action on social media will not help. That going out and working to affect change requires you to put down the phone and do something. To protest. To vote. To get involved.

The George Floyd Protests were action by a lot of people around the world. Unfortunately that action didn’t result in the right changes and it faded too quickly. Maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it was the feel good dopamine hit of watching people protest on social media. Maybe it was just defeatism in the face of a massive system and the backlash. Yes the fascist were defeated at the ballot box. But not for long. Four years on they stormed back, with a republican winning the presidential popular vote for the first time since I was in elementary school. And apathy is a big reason why, more eligible people didn’t vote than voted for any actual candidate, including Trump or Harris. So the pendulum seems to have swung firmly back in the other direction, towards apathy if we want to be generous, towards fascism and the politics of hate if we want to be realistic.

Anyway. I said I would not get too much into politics. So let me end this post now as every song I look at is filled with more politics. RTJ4 is a great album, like most great rap it’s highly contextual to its time and place. But it’s still relevant and hard hitting. One day, maybe the context will be lost on most listeners but it’s still fresh enough and, unfortunately, still relevant enough that it should leave an impression on you. If you haven’t heard it, take a listen.

On iTunes:

Or on Spotify: