Good morning good morning. Hello. Hi. Happy Friday. My head hurts. My neck hurts. Jane was kinda mean to me this morning.

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Got into Emma’s car this morning (mine is still in the shop, ugh) and there was a box of Adventurefuls hidden underneath the seat.

Oh update: I should grudgingly acknowledge that Elon seems to have realized that he’s never going to get to Mars if he cant get out of the earth’s atmosphere because of the Kessler Syndrome, and admit against my will that this new SpaceX initiative to radically improve space traffic management is pretty awesome. That guy sucks. Sucky people do good things sometimes. Bush the first launched PEPFAR.

Look at this fucking awesome popcorn popper have I told you recently how much I love our popcorn popper? It rules.

So I have moved my notes for GMHHAY over to ToDoist from Apple Notes, because the Android migration did not play well with Apple Notes, I thought I could keep using it on Android in a browser, and you can, technically, but it takes ten seconds to click on anything, it’s the least responsive website ever made, seriously, I made websites for dialup that were more responsive. It’s fine if I need to, like, dig up some obscure piece of information once a month but useless for the quick note-jotting necessary to keep the GMHHAY fodder file filled alliteration f yeah.

But I copy and pasted all my old notes into the file and they lost their nested formatting, so it’s a bit of a mess right now. So I am scatted. So bear with me.

Lines that Would Have Been Tweets in the Oughts

Listened to the new U2 album so you don’t have to. Last song is the best one, which pains me to say because it has Ed Sheeren on it.

See above comments about Bush I.

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!

We’re listening to the third Pullman album, imaginatively titled III. This album came out in January and I think it is, like, one of… three? four albums that Chris has released in various forms in the first 50 days of this year. The dude is too prolific. Apparently there is, like, an album of medeival music coming out with Tonya Donnelly or something? I don’t even know man this guy can make a whole album before I can write a song. He must be the nicest guy in the world he gets the best collaborators. And I think this is probably true because I met him once, like 20 years ago, fucked up on E and he has been nothing but kind to me ever since. Prince among me, Chris Brokaw.

Be cool to see Pullman live someday, don’t think I ever have.

Just wrote a little rant about AI on a Slack I’m in, because I am sick of this shit again. I would post the whole thing here but it’s not for public consumption. Though I guess I could edit it? But whatever. It had three main parts:

Fist: My Friend Ryan wrote something kind of beautiful about it that I felt so hard, so I am just going to paste it in here because my head hurts:

So, maybe, here’s my issue with AI:

When I was growing up, the line was always “Art doesn’t pay”. Didn’t matter what your talent was—painter, sculptor, musician—the refrain was the same: “That’s cool, that’s amazing, but good luck making money on it.”

Don’t go to art school.
Don’t get an art degree.
Don’t pursue the arts.

For those of us scared enough, we gave up those talents and dreams because we couldn’t gamble our futures, our family’s futures. Some of us got lucky, found ways to transform that creative spark into something the market would toss some coins to: design, architecture, craftsmanship.

And some, the driven and the unsatisfied, the ones whose talent burned so hot that it would wake them in the middle of the night? They accepted being broke in pursuit of Art. “Starving artist”. “Artsy fartsy”. Pejoratives to laugh at those who didn’t give it up, who committed to it. They must be crazy.

And so now, now comes AI. And the first thing it does is consumes the sum total of that creative output, the hearts of millions of artists; swallows it whole. There are artists who died for their art who are now part of the AI model.

No recognition, no compensation, no consent.
They built a golden robot to stumble through galleries devouring every canvas to shit out little memes. Art went from worthless, pointless, useless to the most valuable fucking commodity in the world, once technology decided they could package it as an innovation.

And the final insult was the machine could now replace the artist whose work it consumed. No need for poets, we have every single one on file.

And then it came for writers. Designers. Producers. Actors.

I stand against it. It is the antithesis of what art is, and the antipode of where I want to align myself. It is an offense to what it is to be human.

Every conversation about AI should start with this. I am sick to death of wonkish fucking conversations about how it is or is not useful for coding or fun or exciting or transformative or whatever without acknowledging the theft. There is a real fucking “get over it” vibe happening. I am absolutely not going to get over it.

It’s like meat. We all know eating beef is morally untenable. We just pretend it isn’t, because burgers are delicious. And then we mock those who can’t get over it.

Next: I am completely confused why all the engineers I read on the internet are like “this is changing my life, I am never going to write a line of code again” and all the engineers in my day-to-day life are like “eh, it’s mildly useful sometimes.” There seem to be two cynical explanations, pulling in opposite directions:

1. I pay most of the engineers in my life, and they don’t want that gravy train to stop.

2. The internet fucking lies to us all the time about everything.

Both of these seem plausible.

But it does occur to me that even if vibe coding is perfect, and all the engineers I employ were secretly using AI to do their jobs and then going on long walks with their dogs or something…. so what? Has my life changed? Nothing has changed on my end, they have spend money on tokens, somehow, somewhere, that is not my problem, and my life and projects go on exactly the same. I could turn into a neurotic bad boss and try and hunt it all down to eke out some savings but I am already wildly profitable and have a culture of trusting my employees and if some other boss wants to do that, cool, I will hire her employees.

And one of them could, oh, I don't know, poach me or my CRO and go be unable to raise money on SaaS these days and copy our product real quick without any of our biz dev deals and then compete with us on price and lose, I guess. AI would allow that, maybe. And I am not in a regulated industry, I am in an industry everyone says that AI is gonna conquer first. And I have a hot AI competitor! And it is getting all the buzz, it’s true.

But they are not getting the clients.

Wait I said there were three things. That was two. OH RIGHT. Number three, which leads to:

As far as I know I have not yet thus far used a single vibe-coded app, seen one in the wild I envy, or dreamed of making one. Maybe I am monstrously uncreative or unimaginative about all the amazing thing software can do that it has not yet done with a hundred million people constantly coding for thirty or forty years. Or maybe YOU CAN ONLY CODE SO MUCH SHIT.

Sorry. I decided to write this morning before going to Walmart so you get this shit instead of fascinating insights on Walmart radio and Chomps merchandising strategies.

Watched The Secret Agent over the last week or so. It looked so cool. The people in it were so bad-ass. There were a million cool parts. But it was a hodge-podge of a movie, all over the map, unsatisfying endings, weird tangents. Too long. First hour ruled, though. I’ll give it that.

Then we watched the men’s curling game where the Canadians cheated and the entire scandal has been edited out of the replay on Peacock, just completely removed. Very sad. I wanted to see some angry Canadians. Good band name, Angry Canadians.

Jane’s got a new thing where she acts manic at bedtime until Emma can’t handle it anymore and she calls me in to take over when her patience runs out. Which is ironic because our current bedtime order of operations is I do the first part and Emma does the second because Jane was being too manic and insane for me. No she is doing it to Emma. To get to me? Probably. She kind of admitted that. It is hard. You have to stay patient. And keep it “not boring.” But we are managing. This week Jane has been hanging six or so hangars from her underwear before she goes to bed.

She looks like a piece of pro-choice performance art.

Club mix for you today. LIke I Said, VERY into this new Charlie XCX. Excited for the new Avalon Emerson. Mentioned this Natural Wonder Beautify Concept record the other day, and it turned out to be pretty different from Ana Roxanne solo but i still really liked it. Also love this new HVOB and Fred Again, of whom I am not normally a fan. But that one’s a banger.

Okay I am off to Walmart, then pay pool bills then do my day job and then parent and someday I will sleep and it will be amazing. I will talk to you guys on Monday. Be swell.