Good morning good morning hello hi. How are you? Tuesday? December. Cold? Missing the sun? Is it snowing? We had a dusting of snow. Not enough to make it fun. Enough to make school opening delayed two hours. Throws my day off, it does.

Had a dream last night where I think I solved my ceiling problem in the attic studio. I have a good couple of layers on the ceiling already — open-cell spray foam, then closed-cell spray foam, then the OSB, then a foal layer, then the shingles, then the solar panels. But I would like to get a little more. Traditionally, you hang one (ideally two) layers of drywall from the ceiling using special hooks (or something called a “hat channel”) to keep the drywall from vibrating against the joists. But this is not really an option for me because the structural engineer has concerns about the massive weight of two layers of Type-X drywall and my absurd roof spans. So I have been trying to think of some layer that is, like, foamy? But also to which I can attach the ceiling boards. But ideally something that I could nail into, but the nails would stay in the foamy substrate and not go into the ceiling wood, but also would be secure? It is iffy.

Anyway, I think my dream brain solved it. So that is exciting.

Also had a dream where I remembered a very specific moment of an otherwise traumatic trip to Mardi Gras in the 90’s and it was, my god, so sublime. A moment I’ve not thought of in decades, and I could smell it and everything. Crazy. Messing me up, it is.

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We are listening to TTSFU this morning. We gotta get serious about clearing out this “To Investigate” playlist by the end of the year if I want to start the new year with my new non-Spotify Music plan. We have 42 hours to clear out. It is a lot. I wrote about this TTSFU album a couple weeks ago the last time I tried to make a dent, so I will spare you, but it is still awesome.

42 hours. Let’s do this.

While in the music section of this edition, I would like to give props to the Post-Rock band Ranges, who shipped my Bandcamp Friday purchase within an hour of ordering it. Must be fun to be a semi-popular band on Bandcamp Friday you can just sit there and watch the orders come in and ship em out. I bet whatever member of Ranges that’s in charge of their Bandcamp had a good day that day.

As I was falling asleep last night, I was thinking about this big keynote I need to make for my employees in January. And I was thinking about a specific slide and how I would lay it out. One of my employees once said, actually more than once, that I’m the only person he knows who thinkis in outlines, who thinks in Keynote, really. I don’t know if that is a compliment or not. But I was definitely doing it as I was falling asleep. And I thought what this slide needed was a bit of an illustration, sorta like an old Dagwood cartoon.

Now, ten years ago, this woulda been fine. I woulda started thinking about Google Image search, or maybe getting my wife to make the illustration or something. I have some tried-and-true methods for this sort of thing after decades of presentation-making.

But of course now you can’t help but think about generative AI. Even though I am adamantly opposed to generative AI. But it would just be so easy. Not to say my approach is difficult, but it is gonna take some time, maybe 5-10 minutes if I’m lucky with the searches, maybe a couple hours if I gotta do something custom. But with generative AI? Seconds.

And I don’t even like the thing, and I don’t wanna use it at all. But it really occurred to me how freakin tempting it is for people. How most people do not have my capacity and long training of creating or obtaining images they want. They do not have staff and illustrator wives and amazing internet chops. This must feel like fucking magic to them. It must be the most amazing feeling.

There is no way in that situation anyone is going to let their ethics stop them, even if they understood the massive theft machine underpinning it all, even if they cared about the massive theft machine underpinning it all.

How many people will forgo feeling like they have superpowers because of ethical concerns?

We are so fucked.

I made the mistake recently saying the following to one of these people recently, and I shouldn’t have done that. But I am so fucking tired about hearing about people’s AI prompts and workflows and tactics. I mean, I get it. People discover these amazing ways to use it and want to help other people achieve the same results. They are being helpful. They do not understand my absolute loathing of AI, because society (Bluesky aside, blessed be) does not currently comprehend people cannot stand this shit. When people tell me their AI prompt tactics, it’s like hearing people discuss strategies of bong building in the 80’s. I just do not care, man. It’s worse than not caring, because I am inundated with it. And I can’t talk about it because you come off as such a spoil-sport. People happily talking about their AI buddies and solutions and you just gotta smile and nod because no one wants to hear you talk about how evil it is. And then you seethe with the unfairness of it because why do you have to listen to these people constantly but they don’t have to listen to you go all Zitron on their asses.

It is a no-win situation and basically I am filled with dread whenever people talk about AI with me.

Which is, of course, not exactly the greatest situation to be in when you are the CEO of an adtech company and AI is sweeping through your industry as much as any other industry.

And I could get pedantic and talk about transformers and generative AI and GPTs and how this differs from the ML that my industry is endeavoring to use in a self-defeating effort to “streamline” the matching of supply to demand mm hmm yep sure totally gonna work yep yep but I digress. It is a different tech. But the nuances are lost because we’re calling it all AI because the financial world has… incentives. ML was hot with the nerds but never got the markets all hot and bothered, so now ML is AI.

And I gotta suffer for it.

One more aside about AI then I will stop: Translations. Is a human ever going to translate anything again? Are we fucked? Is it going to be the way AI finally sucks me in? Imagine the potential of all those books you want to read that were never translated into english being translated instantly. And so many are out of copyright.

Except translation is such an art. Would George Sand’s prose even shine through in a robotic translation of a whole novel? This seems like a thing we are not truly there with yet: artistic, sensitive translations of novels. Research papers? Probably? Mostly? But novels? No, right? We can’t do that yet, can we? Can we?

Oh god. That’s gonna be so fucked.

Absolute breakdown of Jane behavior last night. Full resistance to teeth brushing, back to the worst of it. Utter indifference anymore to streaks. Broken promises of not arguing. Lawyerly shade about what is arguing. All for no reason, wasting her whole play time arguing. All because it’s “boring.” It is so weird. It is obviously an issue of free will but we cannot make heads or tails of it. You think you’ve made some progress, then it all dissolves.

I wish there were, like, kid therapists that did house calls or something.

Except she is mostly an angel when other people are around.

Gah.

Today’s playlist is a cleanout - the hour or so of music that has been lingering at the top of my “To Investigate” playlist because I like it and want to listen to it again when I start at the top. But we gotta go. Gotta get this cleaned out, man. Let’s move.

Oh shit gotta go make and pack Jane’s lunch. Until tomorrow. Byeee.