Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1573
A weekend of sorting through parental memories. The Google anti-trust decision. NIN back catalog. An ode to Vuescan and Hamrick software.
Good morning good morning. Greethings from Chatham County, NC, where my finger and hand are slowly healing. The trigger surgery, with a cut in my palm, is doing great. The finger, where the foreign object was removed, less so. The finger tip is still numb — a situation that was advancing before the surgery. I suppose all that rummaging around in there exacerbated what the glass was already doing. I am assured it will heal nicely and I will have feeling again eventually, but it is distinctly unnerving to have a finger feeling numb and constantly asleep, with pins and needles. Also the cut looks gruesome. In order to stitch. up a cut on a finger, you really gotta double up the skin, to make sure it doesn’t jostle loose with all that motion. So it is raised, and looks very Frankenstein. Also there is a small part of it that didn’t stitch together and a small amount of, I dunno, flesh? guts? something is oozing out. It has hardened up but boy, it looks gross.
The pain, however, isn’t too bad, from either cut. And the immense searing pain that I got prior to the surgery whenever i tapped my index finger has now abated, so that is nice.
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We are listening to Nine Inch Nails today. I did a big order from Trent’s site. I guess Trent and Atticus’ site, huh, still not used to this whole “two permanent members of Nine Inch Nails” situation. Anyway I bought all the vinyl he was selling that I did not have — Add Violence, With Teeth, Bad Witch, Deviations 1 and the new Tron soundtrack. Hahaha remember when I wasn’t going to buy any vinyl this year. Anyway, I am listening to Add Violence right now. It is better than I remembered. Also Trent (and Atticus) accidentally sent me two copies of Bad Witch and Add Violence. Someone already claimed the Bad Witch vinyl but if you are in the market for a 180gram copy of Bad Witch let me know and I will send it to you.
This weekend I did not trust my wounds enough to work on the studio, so I stayed at the main house and started to tackle a chore that has been sitting there festering for months. Exactly as long as my finger wound festered, actually, since both stemmed from the same situation — the mailing to my house of all of the things that I took from my parent’s house when I unpacked it. I got the glass in my finger from opening a framed print from my parents, and there have been about six packing boxes sitting in my office for months now. They contain all of the paper and photos and books that I took from my parents house. It’s been too daunting to consider tackling it, both from an effort and emotional point of view. But faced with the prospect of, oh god oh god, doing no chores this weekend, oh no, god no, I cannot be unproductive, oh god, I decided it was the right time to tackle the chore.
I have not completely finished, but I got everything sorted. I have about 500 photos I need to go through and see if I need to scan. I have scanned about a hundred of them. I got nice scrapbooking boxes and stored away all the old paper ephemera — school stuff like diplomas and report cards, birth certificates, passports, death certificates and the like. A bunch of letters. A bunch of newspaper clippings of important events like the moon landing and stuff and more personal stuff like photos of my dad in the paper or Val in the Boston Globe. I found a picture of my geat grandmother with president Truman. She won some North Dakota Mother of the Year award or something like that. Big story in my family.
The whole thing was as emotional as I feared. And in the middle of it, my sister and aunt called because they were at my mom’s church and apparently there is a thing there now — this was not a thing when I was a kid — where the kids at the church pay honor to recently departed members and make banners for them based on their life and the hang in the church on All Saints Day. So they asked us about my mom’s life, while I was sitting there rummaging through photos of my mom in her childhood and whatnot. It was a lot. I miss my mom. She was a good mom. The transition to thinking about my mom in her heyday vs the years of decline at the end is almost complete. I rarely think of those last years anymore, just remember how great of a mom she was.
Apparently they did this for my dad but I was not aware. Actually not even sure if Val was aware.
Anyway I busted out my Canon Lidoscan scanner and the amazing Vuescan software that runs for any scanner ever. Hadn’t touched either one of them in months but they fired right up, a rare moment of tech that “just works.” Ed Hamrick, the creator and maintainer of Vuescan, deserves the Nobel Prize or something. This little piece of software has served me well for decades and I think in total I have given the dude like maybe $50 over nearly 30 years. Just phenomenal.
Every week at the playground on Sundays, I read a little bit more of the Google antitrust decision in the search case. I have been trying to figure out the logic of the judge’s decision. After, like, six, seven weeks I think I have the gist of it, I am about 2/3 of the way through the decision.
First, he is correct in stating that things have changed substantially since the case, and for the first time, due to generative AI, Google is facing its first real competition in decades, and this radically changes the landscape of things. Fair point.
(This used to make me depressed, since GPTs hallucinate, and kids are running around using them as search engines and believing them, but, then, Google is absolute garbage these days and serves up falsaties routinely now, so I guess… whatever.)
His logic for not forcing them to spin off Chrome is sound. It is not necessarily a morally correct interpretation, but it is an undeniably correct reading of the law and the facts on the ground. I would have loved to see Google be forced to sell off Chrome, but that was mostly from a shadenfreudenistic point of view, not any actual belief that it was a fair remedy.
What he focuses on, then, is the concept of data sharing: offsetting Google’s unfairly derived economies of scale by forcing them to share significant chunks of their search data with competitors. T
he whole reason I chose to read the decision is because the devil is gonna be in the details with this approach. It could work or not work depending on what data, how much data, how often.
Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, my personal opinion is that this approach is not going to work. The judge severely reduces the amount of data sharing requested by the plaintiffs. He does this for assorted reasons, tackling each data request one-by-one. Some of the reasons seem pretty sound, but some seem dubious AF:
He is very very obsessed with it not being too easy for competitors to come to fruition? Like.. why? The whole point of this is we want competitors! But he is very concerned that competitors a) must spend tons of money to establish themselves, just absolute gobs of money, and b) they have to work really hard to be competitors. Of course this makes sense from the Google point of view, and he does cite some case work, but on its head, the notion is farcical: the public has been hurt by lack of competition, the whole point of all of this is to bring about competitors. Who the fuck cares if they spend lots of money.
He arbitrarily limits the frequency of the data sharing. This is a huge handicap. He’s like “case history says we can’t tell Google to give the data to competitors forever” and, okay, fine, so then he says “so we’re only going to make them give it once.” What? Why? He never explains. Huge bummer. He also goes on and on about how Google dominates because they are so good at recency and long-tail, which obviously matter a lot more in this situation.
It’s not a bad opinion at all. It is well-reasoned. But Google was correct to see it as a win and I do not anticipate it changing the market. Though of course it will be impossible to tell. Right now, sans remedies, a future is visible where ChatGPT supplants Google. Now, in this world, post-remedies, if that happens, it will be impossible to say whether the remedies helped or not.
So, unless Duck Duck Go or Bing wins the day and explicitly says they pulled it off because of this court case, I think it most likely that we’ll juat never know.
Pretty decent weekend from a Jane POV. We had one giant fit that lasted about two hours that sucked, on Saturday, but mostly things were pleasant. We did a playground playdate with the girl we met a year ago at the Bojangles, that was fun. We see her pretty much every weekend on Saturdays at breakfast but had never seen her outside of Bojangles. Good to see them get along on the playground. On Sunday a couple of her school friends came over for a playdate. She drew a really cute picture this weekend.
You know what? I’ll throw that into today’s edition.
We are continuing our 1991 survey here, with Volume 2. This is the weakest volume because so much of what I listened to in 1991 from the Americas is not on Spotify. But I did my best. RIP Mia Zapata.
Have a lovely day. Let’s tackle this Monday thing with aplomb we can do it.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.