Good morning good morning. Chaos! Somehow, my phone’s alarm went off at the appropriate time, 7:40 AM, I hit snooze, and then the phone promptly died for zero battery. Luckily I woke up 30 minutes later so I did not make my daughter late for the vitally important final day of POP STAR CAMP, but I did have a phone with zero battery right before I had to drop her off and run a ton of errands. My phone is also my key and my credit card, my shopping list, so, you know. I was like Scotty in The Voyage Home and had to do it the old school way.

It did not help that my truck has USB issues that I cannot identify. But this at least provided me an excuse to purchase a USB voltage meter from Klein tools. That’ll be fun. Deep dive to come.

Went to McDonald’s and if I lived in a city I coulda sworn I saw next to Judd Hirsch. Used the Wifi and got my shopping list only my old iPhone with no cell service on it so I could shop. Went to the recycling center and dropped off a giant box of packing peanuts at the free swap shop. Do people want a giant box of packing peanuts? Someone must, right? That place is a hive of eBayers.

Walmart, lovely, prime parking spot, excellent Walmart trip. Reduced sensory hours. Found the hominy, which I had lost about six months ago. Why do I love hominy so much. Why did my very white Alaskan parents teach me to love a Mexican staple? Very mysterious. Which one of them was it, who knows. I have no one to ask.

The Trump administration is trying to pin our Cyclosporiasis outbreak on Taco Bell and I call bullshit. I have eaten at Taco Bell three times in the three weeks this has been going on. They are also trying to say it is confined to Michigan, etc but a quick look at any map or mom’s page on Facebook assures you this is not the case. Taco Bell should sue. It’s not even like they make lettuce! Come the fuck on. Also! They defunded their tracing regime! How do they even know? We can’t trust them! Do not pin this on Taco Bell!

Trump also did a dumb speech last night trying to further his re-election goals. Everyone reports this as a midterms hail-mary but I am convinced it’s not. He is going for a third term, I have zero doubt. It will fail. But he is convinced that he’ll go to jail if he leaves office. I do not profess to have a theory of mind for Trump in general, but all of his actions for eight years have indicated this. The irony, of course, is that Dems are timid AF and would never endeavor to prosecute him. Luckily no one seems to have really bought the speech. It’s scrambled the Republicans in congress who are trying to placate him by re-arranging some SAVE act provisions into the NDAA and another party-line budget bill, but they were already trying to do that. The minute the speech aired without a coordinated, party-wide PR campaign, you could tell it was a bust. He’s on his own here. For now. Will they let him run for a third term? Probably. Maybe. Probably.

SpaceX stock was below the IPO price this week, which is hilarious and great. And then they fucked up a rocket launch and it went a little lower. This is hilarious to me because fucking up rocket launches is part and parcel of being a rocket company and should not be cause for alarm, but it was anyway. Musk got fucked unfairly by that and I am fine with that.

I do not fully grasp (sorry, I’m just going through every topic in my head today because the weekend is here and I don’t want to write about this shit next week) why Zelensky fired his clearly very popular young defense minister. The dude is widely credited with modernizing their army and doing all their bad-ass drone strikes. I cannot tell if this is true or fair or not. There was an argument between the Defense Minister and the General and it seems pretty clear one of them pressed the issue to Zelensky and he felt like he had to choose. But I suspect he shoulda just team-o-rivals-ed it and let them fight Godzilla Mothra style. That’s right. Lincoln and Godzilla in a single sentence. I confess I do not know much about the intriciaces of this until I watch six youtube videos from assorted Ukrainian video bloggers. Don’t let me down Colin Robinson Caolan Robertson. Now we got a what we do in the Shadows reference in the same paragraph. I’m a pop culture machine, a regular Matt Dinniman here oh shit there’s another one.

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Listening to a noise band called Big Brave this morning. Gothy drone guitar noise, like Sunn O))) or OM with a lady gothilly (should be a word) singing over it. It is awesome. I love it. I want to listen to it so, so loud. Album is called In Grief or in Hope. Dont know anything about them or what it is doing in my queue but I love it. Discogs tells me this is their ninth album holy moly I have some work in front of me.

Two more quick music-related items (keeping it light on the rock today): 1) someone put one of the three Discogs items on Discogs, so I am down to two. I should really do them. I was going to yesterday but i forgot. I did add a photo to that first one though.

Also 2) I have now purchased two records since I told you what? Two days ago? That I was trying not to purchase records. FML.

Important yogurt update: I have procured two new yogurts from the hippie co-op: Nancy’s, the Merry Prankster-invented yogurt that started it all, and a hippie brand from Austin that makes Bulgarian yogurt which I am hoping is somewhat Greeklike, not to stir up any geopolitical rivalries. The Texan Bulgarian one is called White Mountain. It comes in a glass jar. Both are zero sugar full fat, which is what people tell me I need. I am hearing that the fat is what has the Omega-3s in it and that is what I am doing this for. I could be wrong on that, more research is necessary.

People have given me all sorts of healthy flavoring ideas – blueberries made into a jammy puré that has been cooked thus avoiding the pooping disease. Honey. Nuts. They all sound good but I think for me I am going to, for now at least, treat this like medicine. Mainly because I am on a very high dose of wegovy and I do want extra food and also because I don’t really care about sweetness.

So, the question is: What is a “serving” of yogurt for me. I.e., how many probiotics do I need in a day? This seems like a grammatically weird question, “how many,” except all these yogurts seem to tell you how many. That is weird, right? Like the White Mountain one says “up to 90 billion CFUs per serving.” I do not know what a CFU is. But presumably it is a measure of probiotics since it says elsewhere on their site “Billions of Probiotics.”

SO. I assume a few things that may or may not be correct:

1. You probably need more probiotics at first when you are trying to get your gut into a priobiotically lovely state

2. It might vary by weight

If that is the case, it feels like the “number of probiotics: would be calculatable and different for different people. Let us google Kagi “probiotic calculator.”

Fuck yes.

5-20 billion a day it says. Helpful. Well, then, a small serving should be fine for me.

It is occurring to me I am thinking that probiotics will help with my Omega-3 but this is not the case, huh. Yogurt does both? Eh. Google says no.

Well what the fuck why am I doing this anyway.

Man I have lost the plot being healthy is a pain in the ass I am going to hit the bar get crunked and end up in a stranger’s bed fuck this adult healthy living shit I am out of here sorry family.

Fuuuck. I just lost half this entry. The good part. The part that shows I still have thoughts. Fuck fuck fuck. That has never happened before on Buttondown. Dammit. Okay well I will try again. Dammit dammit. Buttondown says it’s an outage due to an upstream provider. Crap. We will try again. Let’s see if we can pull this off. Fuck this is all going to take another hour. Good thing it’s a day off for my company because I am the best boss in the world even though no one’s ever bought me a “word’s best boss” mug WTF.

I was listening to Zero La Creche this morning. Great band. They are, however, severely hampered by the low quality of all the recordings that exist of this band. Which is a shame because I'm sure they coulda been a lot bigger if they had better recordings. Like Husker Du. Great band, lotta people love them but they woulda been HUGE had they had better recordings. My good friend Jeff did a great job on the last re-master, sorry, name drop. But I am proud of Jeff. But the bass is not there, only so much you can do.

It occurred to me that AI could fix this problem. You could pretty easily use the currently available AI tools and make a recording that sounded like a well-recorded version of Husker Du or Zero La Creche. There are two levels of moral shenanigans here: the artistic merit, etc of these new recordings, which is interesting but we are going to put that one aside and focus on the other one: the morality of the AI tools themselves.

And it fucking sucks because modern AI is inherently an IP theft machine at its core (I’m using the term as shorthand for LLMs, GPTs, etc., don't pedantically @ me). It fucking sucks because it did not have to be this way. Sam Altman did not have to steal the world's intellectual property, put it into a for-profit tool (under the guise of a non-profit) and then force every other company in Silicon Valley to steal the world's IP as well. It is built on theft. It is still being built on theft.

A compulsory licensing scheme where all artists get paid is so simple. All it takes is willpower.

Or just fucking make all the tools a public good, do not extract profit for them, and make the argument to the world's artists that their work has made humanity better, thank you, and no one is stealing your work, you are giving it to the world. Also a completely acceptable approach! But no. We chose the third path of steal it all and let someone else make the money.

You know all this. Some of you don't like to think about it but we all know it.

So then yesterday Linus Linux told the Linux community to get over it and let AI be used in building Linux.

He did this by focusing on one facet: utility. AI is "useful," so we should use it. It is a very interesting discussion, how quicly vibe coding is evolving and improving. All very fascinating. BUT IT IS NOT THE POINT.

By reducing an ethical argument to one facet, utility, you are essentially lying.

DDT is useful. Napalm is useful. PFAS are useful.

I am particularly depressed about it because George Lucas just said the same thing. It's just a tool, he said, a technology like any other, get over it. NO! It is not! No one stole the world's IP to make Blender or Cinema 4D or Renderman. Lies! Sucks because I deeply respect George — the directing quality of the prequels aside. And he's an artist and I doubt he'd want his IP to be stolen. And it is! Right now! He just doesn't know it.

My depression is lifting but these thoughts last night took me to an even more dark place and I’m going to share it with you now and I am sorry. And I am even more sorry this second time as I have to write this AGAIN instead of working on the studio. But here we go:

You are an inventor. You just invented a thing that could maybe change the world. Save billions. You are sitting on this invention right now, but you have a decision to make: whether or not to release it to the world.

And I am sorry but here are the stone-cold facts. Your invention will go one of three paths:

1) it will be as great as you think, no drawbacks, and you will save millions of people. Think the Polio vaccine. Pasteurization. Solar energy.

2) it will do a lot of great stuff but also some terrible stuff. Plastics. Asperthame.

3) it will be an unmitigated disaster and you will be responsible for a holocaust. Thalidomide. PFAs. DDT. Asbesthos. Lead in gasoline. This list is fucking endless. THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. I do not believe the scientists who made these things realized this could happen.

So. What do you do? Release it? Not release it?

You are fucked either way.

Until humans completely change themselves and how they test products — with new testing regimes that span generations and are universally adhered to around the world — we are always going to have another PFA or lead gas catastrophe.

And we are never going to make those testing regimens. Because we are human.

Have a great day!

Jane was awesome today, didn't mind I forgot her water bottle. She is so excited about pop star camp. I am too. She was great last night too. Super cuddly, didn't argue about going upstairs when it was time to. The parenting gods blessed me last night.

I'll take it.

God. Can’t believe I wrote that twice. Was it better the second time? Who knows. I lost the first draft when trying to add photos so we’re gonna stop no. No playlist. Even though I have a ton ready finally.

Until Monday, friends.