Archive Report #785
Cool wins. The cost of Christmas Spirit. Is the problem the problem, or is your grit the problem? Kick filp your truth. Salad days.
Meeting Notes
Duration is a problem
“What is a cool win we could have?” - The Business
Should we do anything about the feedback?
Quotidian Quotes
Lighted deer are expensive. I've priced them.
Catalog of Archetypes
Guy who responds to criticism about unnecessary futility in the process with “We come here to work.”
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Those Were the Days
I miss those real early years when we'd sit around marveling about getting Facebook ads for products we were moments ago discussing with our friends. Salad days.
Now it happens everywhere, on every surface. It is every surface.
I even miss the unfortunate, but mercifully brief thanks to Moore’s Law, wearables phase when anyone with disposable income could walk around taking phone calls from a pair of glasses so chunky and garish neither Elton John, nor the United States Marines would have been caught dead in them. Salad days.
You used to have to worry about your older loved ones saying something racist in line at Panera, speaking of salad. Now you hope they word their order for a bear claw carefully enough to prevent the pastry case from becoming a grizzly. They said this would never happen, but the AI started glitching. Its self-repair protocols were supposed to be triggered by something as small as a spelling error, but tell that to the patrons of a Tucson Waffle House who were smooshed to jelly when an old timer’s story about Dessert Storm turned the ceiling fans into full-sized M1A1 Abrams tanks.
Over the course of a very bloody summer, people started to figure out that disaster could be averted if, as soon as someone said something that might prove a deadly invocation, you simply shouted, “Figuratively! Figuratively!” then it seemed to settle down. It helped that the no-nos (a derogatory term for the nano bots that covered everything) made a faint whistle one second before assembling themselves. One positive side effect was that people became great listeners. You might think you had the cereal aisle all to yourself and were therefore safe to squeak out a little fart, but if it was much above a Middle C you’d hear a chorus of voices from the other aisles shout “Figuratively! Figuratively!”
I thought it was funny when people started calling that couplet The Overlord’s Prayer. My Great Aunt Bessie used to sit on her porch and shriek prophesies that the microchip would make us all godless lechers. She’d be happy to know that everybody prays now.
Very few things are truly all the way bad, and if you ask me, we had one really good year of AI before people started accidentally dropping period war machines on each other. I remember the misery of the mid 2020s when people rushed with an Oklahoman’s eagerness to post articles and videos and ebooks with tips about how to use AI only to reveal (like they were landing a Copperfield-grade Prestige) that the very content you’d just consumed was made with AI. You don’t say. At that stage you could tell something was AI without even looking at it. If someone turned their phone to show you a piece of art while greedily searching your face for a reaction and beaming with the pride of being the first person on their block whose refrigerator could send an email, then it was AI. As symmetry would have it, years later these same hucksters were some of the first people to accidentally destroy themselves with AI when, at a conference for advancements in sales funnels, the keynote speaker spoke the secret words that turned the podium into a 50-foot Ricky Roma who licked his finger and dotted the attendees into his mouth like he was collecting the last sesame seeds on a burger wrapper.
The best year for AI was the year prior to that event when you could go for a walk to work out a bad mood, and in addition to the medicine of motion, sunshine, and fresh air, the host of nanos (not called no-nos until Roma ate up all the good leads) would alter reality based on their knowledge of what had put you in a bad mood. One night, for example, they knew that I needed a walk because I had just lost a fight with my wife about what movie to watch. By the time I reached the sidewalk their desire to cheer me up had already turned the house next door into the giant ice machine from Mosquito Coast, and the cherry on top was my 83-year-old neighbor standing in her driveway with a running chainsaw shouting, “Double-digit inflation and a two-dollar loaf of bread!”
End Transmission