Hello good morning. My first morning in a yonk’s age where I actually have time to write this, been like two weeks. Very nice. I like time. Time is swell. How are you? Holding up okay? Or is the utter stupidity of this world getting you down? Was definitely getting me down yesterday. Just so much stupid all around. Trump bragging about how much he researched his pardon of the drug-smuggling president of Honduras and then days later insisting he didn’t do any research on it? Like how would THAT not be a scandal? Oh whoops I accidentally pardoned a dude who smuggled literal tons of cocaine into America without researching it don’t blame me I was too busy conducting my new war on drugs.

I had to help a friend download a youtube video yesterday, it was a video of a man going crazy. Forty-five minutes of super calm, collected, but absolutely bonkers ranting, guy wearing a balaclava, sitting in a modern suburban American living room. Another person broken by the modern world. Kinda fucked me up.

Thinking a lot about that period of history — also known as most of the 20th century — where we spewed lead into the air in massive quantities and everyone on the entire planet got sick and maybe we made a lot of serial killers for no good reason. And how we still needlessly spew millions of tons of pollution into the air from our cars for no reason whatsoever and oh hey whoops turns out this might be the answer to increased childhood asthma rates, and they still kill 90,000 people a year in America just from the pollution, but we just keep doing it and dudes watch Youtube videos and just think these stupid fucking engines are so fucking cool vroom vroom makes big sound and man, I do it too and I really would absolutely love that new 12-cylinder Ferrari except it is spewing poison.

Oh yeah and microplastics woooo. And forever chemicals!

It is fucking so bonkers that everywhere you look in America, out pretty much any window, you can see some device for spewing poison into the air, ground and water and the woo-woos have convinced themselves that it’s our medicine killing us, not the poison that we dump constantly.

I can’t decide if I would rather be young or old in this era. When Trump was elected the first time, I felt so bad for old people who died when he was president, who spent their lives watching the world “get better” (sort of, a bit) only to die on a low point. But part of me now feels like that could be okay. That I should just give up, that this whole is going to pot, and thank god I don’t have to suffer in it too long. And it would absolutely suck to be young because they never get to experience a world where we had the power to, like, fix the Ozone layer, make international agreements limiting things like cloning and nuclear weapons testing, and had actual MDMA in our ecstasy. We were a society and they will never get to live it and they just get to live in dumb-ass fascism and watch their lesser-minded, internet-addled peers cosplay SS officers.

But also I think it would be awesome to be young because this shit will not last and soon the Democratic party will finally be wrestled free from the geriatric and ossified, they will finally be forced to reckon with the fact that the entire American population, left and right, wants to see big change and they can fucking go for it and Trump will die and his minions will spend so much time backstabbing and fighting each other that there will be opportunities to get shit done, real shit, shit that would make (pre-Epstein) Chomsky smile, shit that makes a difference.

In the immortal words of Cinder fka Gordon Sharp:

RISE, ULRIKE MEINHOF, RISE RISE, ARTHUR RIMBAUD, RISE RISE, PASOLINI, RISE RISE, WOLFE TONE, RISE RISE, SITTING BULL, RISE RISE, SANDINO, RISE RISE, HUGH MacDIARMID, RISE RISE, CHE GUEVARA, RISE RISE, HO CHI MINH, RISE RISE, ANDREY TARKOVSKY, RISE RISE, JOHN MacLEAN, RISE RISE, EMILE DE ANTONIO, RISE RISE, DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA, RISE RISE, WILLIAM WALLACE, RISE RISE, RISE, RISE

Semi-relatedly and more defeatedly and escapismly (not a word), if you have a feel-good new 30-minute comedy to recommend, Breaking Bad is bumming the fuck out and I need some laughs. Just finished Man on the Inside and Only Murders in the Building and both of those hit the spot.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

What are we listening to today? We are continuing on our clean-out-the-To-Investigate-playlist-so-I-can-get-off-Spotify project. Down to 37 hours, cleared out five hours yesterday. Found a new Brandi Carlile (can’t stand the spelling, ruins the illusion she is related to Belinda) album that I hadn’t listened to even once yet. I enjoyed its angry protest song. Now (royal) we are listening to a band called They Are Gutting a Body of Water. Excellent name. Fits in well with my current environmental angst (Naomi Klein needs a new book stat) and also I am a sucker for long band names. A full three more syllables than my former band Rockets Burst from the Streetlamps. Two more syllables than my former noise band with Ben Palmer, We Are All Drainage for Angels oh shit Ben and I should do a reunion that would be hilarious. Maybe we could get Chris Ewen to join again.

Anyway this band is okay. They are no The World is a Beautiful Place and I’m Not Afraid to Die. They are an excellent long-named band. But it’s not bad. I like it. This album, LOTTO, sorta defies characterization, and I respect that.

Thank you for all your kind words about AI yesterday it is nice to know I am not alone. I feel bad though, because even in the GMHHAY Slack there are some people who love AI — and that is their right you do you I am not trying to convince people here — and I just do not like confrontational writing anymore. Truman Capote or the Algonquin Roundtable I am not. Never really got how writers could write autobiographies and piss off their moms or wives or something. I am terrible about that. Utter failing in my art, my need to not hurt people’s feelings, right? Because, you know, art has to hurt. Or so the goths tell me.

(Speaking of goths isn’t it weird how good of singers David J and Daniel Ash are? It must have been weird, that first Love and Rockets rehearsal where they were like “oh yeah we can sing fine we don’t need Peter.” “A Private Future” came on today and I still believe that The Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven might be one of the best albums of the 80’s. So many of the songs have movements, they are absolute symphonies. Amazing.)

Do you remember that whole GMHHAY I wrote about how I would love my own personal LLM of my own shit? If I could do it morally? Well, I talked a lot to my CTO about it when he was in town. It is getting closer. But there is still a problem.

The way I understand it is that when you start the process of making a personal LLM — well, let’s back up. They are called RAGs — remotely-augmented generation. As in your shit is the remote stuff, augmenting a previous model. Which means when you start the thing up the first time, and it says “hey there I’m your new personal model load me up with shit” and is speaking English to you, that is, let’s say, Model 1, a model made externally by one of the big evil AI companies or open-sourced by the French or something (god bless the French). But that first model, the one that walks you through making your model — it was built on stolen art. So not okay.

The way I understand it (and if I am wrong blame me not my CTO) Over time, your model slowly replaces that model. As in there is a maximum number of tokens and as it learns your corpus. So eventually, assuming you personally had enough tokens, your new RAG model would not be stolen, since all the stolen model stuff was deleted as it conumed and adapted into your model. But it stole shit to get there, so that’s a no-go for me.

BUT you can run one on your local machines pretty well these days. And there are some good open-source models. Still stolen, but at least non-profitly stolen? Hrm, gonna have to unpack the morality of that one.

Very tempting but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Jasmine Crockett announced a run for the US Senate Seat in Texas and… I mean… I guess this is good? But also I don’t think she can win and we have two other people running for the seat that both poll slightly better. One even occasionally wins in the polls. So this all makes me nervous. Because we all love Jasmine, us Dems, we love her sass talk and quality putdowns and, mostly, her willingness to fight. But it’s those same qualities that will make it a pain in the general. But also you gotta do what you gotta do. Milquetoast seems like poison these days. But then again, I am not so far removed from Fleabag to not appreciate a hot young priest who is for socialized medicine and against the Ten Commandments in schools hubba hubba.

Also.. Sexy black guy who was a civil rights lawyer and an NFL player? I mean, c’mon.

Too many good candidates too many cooks.

Emma and Jane have concocted the ability to earn streak freezes for teeth, a layer-upon-layer in this never-ending tooth saga. If Jane does everything — teeth (with toothpaste), rinse, floss, medicine — quickly and without arguing, she earns a streak freeze. Worked great on day one. Will it continue? Who knows. And of course, what if she accrues so many streak freezes she spends a subsequent week terrorizing us. Seems inevitable. Legitimized terror in the house just like on the high seas the these days.

Okay that was an offensive metaphor sorry.

Justa mix for you today. Threw on here the Love and Rockets song that fucked me up this morning. Jane and I had a nice long talk about Love and Rockets and Bauhaus, you know, don’t let it be said that I am not having the difficult discussions with my daughter. Also threw on “A New Decade” by Verve because I have been thinking about that show at the Paradise when they came in advance of This is Music coming out, so we had not heard the album yet, but I’d seen them twice on the magestic A Storm in Heaven and then they started with “A New Decade” and he gets to the big cathartic chorus and wails “how long will I run for/who am I running from” and I was standing there against that pillar that used to be right in front of the stage at the Paradise before they moved it and I just started bawling like a baby, man. Who am I running from.

Everything else on this mix is new and I do not have the same emotional attachment to any of these other songs and probably never will because my time on this earth is finite and it is hard to fall in love with new music in the same way but: the tracks by Brandi, Hatchie, Molly Nilsson and Saintsenenca might get there some day. Oh and there is a new Daniel Ash tune on here too, no Love and Rockets but not bad! I need to buy that vinyl one of these days.

Okay have a lovely Wednesday, this moment in time where we are currently all suffering and loving together as one. Make sure you turn in your TPS reports.