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One of my new hobbies is to have conversations with large language models both to analyze how they work and to just kick ideas around. Unlike the majority of people, I do not go to ChatGPT to do this. In fact, I don’t even go online. I have no illusions that a natural language engine is “smart” but I do know that this reflects the collective, synthesized, perspectives of a phenomenally huge mass of human writing and thought. It is worth investigating. Skeptically.

So, I take open-source foundation models and run them on my own local hardware. I set system prompts and “heat” value in order to try to minimize sycophancy and hallucination, and I contemplate the resulting information. I see it less as an oracle or intelligence or even a conversation and more as a way to read the collective tea leaves of the weights in the data. It’s a very interesting way to interact with the collectively mapped knowledge of humanity to date.

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My first response to this announcement was “Yes. We need at least one place on the internet for art and music that is not going to be overrun by computer generated slop.” and then I read a few rebuttal pieces by people who have embraced AI as a tool in their work and I had a change of heart.

Now I think we need MULTIPLE places on the internet that take an active stance against AI-generated slop masquerading as art. Because, here’s the thing: a person using synthetic media generation tools, even if they are using those tools in good faith to augment or bring to life their own creative vision from inside their own heads, can simply produce thousands of times more output than mere humans working through their artistic struggles the old fashioned, slow, tedious, and thoughtful way. It is simply far easier to have a half-polished brain fart and turn it into something that looks shiny and polished via prompting than it is to do the actual work.

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I recently returned from my first cross country trip via Amtrak. I have always enjoyed the physical sensation of being on a train, the sounds, the movement, it triggers a lot of the same feelings in me as being on a boat. I am a little bit on the ASD spectrum and have certain sensory preferences for motion. When I was a toddler, I used to ride on a rocking horse until I fell asleep, fell off, got back up, and started riding again. I also love swings and hammocks.

If that was all that the train had going for it, I would have been tempted to ride it forever but there was more. The food was quite good, the price was reasonable, the staff were friendly, the accommodations were comfortable compared to a bus or an airplane, the scenery was interesting, there were veggie food options, and the time on the train flew by. I absolutely will be taking more trains in the future. It’s the most civilized and low stress vacation travel I have ever experienced.

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I am sitting here and listening to The Cure’s classic album Faith from the year 1981. I love this record. This particular copy of the album is a vinyl release from a record store day a few years back. So satisfying to spin it yet again after all these years. I have no idea how long ago I first heard Faith but it never gets old.

Today I finally managed to do something that I have been wanting to do for quite a while: I rebuilt my blog with something other than Wordpress. I have wanted to ditch Wordpress for many years and I’ve taken many runs at the problem of converting the blog to something else but I have never gotten to my goal until now. As of this post, this blog is no longer a Wordpress blog and is now a static web site generated by the hugo static site generator, written in Markdown, and managed via a private git repository using Gitea. The next step will be to move the site from Bluehost, where it has lived for many years, and deploy it on my self-hosted Linux server.

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Back in May I was doing some morning writing and an idea for a novel started growing. Afraid of smothering it with too much early excitement, I let it simmer for a while and then I found that it started to come to me, the characters, the plot, the outline of the whole thing, and I have been writing bits here and there. Unlike most of my previous attempts at writing any sort of book, this one seems to be interested in being written. I am not just deciding that I want to write a novel and then trying to coerce my brain into writing it. No, it’s just a story I want to tell and I am starting to get into telling it. It’s a new experience and I am enjoying the process. Feels a bit like how albums happen because, you know, in my process, new albums grow and occur when I decide to make the space for them and listen for songs to show up in my head.

Anyhow, not going to post any plot spoilers here but I will talk a little bit about the technical side of this.

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