Much of my work is drying up. AI is moving into my field faster than most others, and I have been both late to realize it and paralyzed with indecision. Given that many-if-not-most of my clients work in the intersection of tech and journalism, they’ve watched the rise of ChatGPT and that ilk over the last six months with great interest, which is perhaps why they’ve been so quick to adopt, despite some lasting reticence. For years, I’ve positioned myself at this intersection, creating a small-but-comfortable living for myself.
But now, that position is no longer tenable, or won’t be in the very near future, and I’m realizing that despite convincing myself I hadn’t, maybe I made my career into an identity?
Who am I if not an editor?
I’ve always felt secure in my work, which has allowed me to feel anything but attached to it. For years, I’ve worked digitally from my computer (or more recently, my iPad), which has afforded me tremendous freedom. Much of my contract work has been on-demand, and coupled with a lack of debt, I’ve been able to remain flexible in ways many people have not. So I moved to a small town in 2019 — a small town many, many miles from the nearest city — and now as I see my work starting to dry up, I wonder if that move was short-sighted.
Four years on, I’ve created a little life for myself, but as my work disappears, I’m starting to feel a little empty. Why am I here? If I can no longer do my job remotely — a job that’s afforded me modest financial stability, which includes the ability to leave this town when I want to see friends or family — why am I here? Is this house I bought four years ago — a house I love — becoming an albatross?
When people ask me why I’m here, I usually respond with something like “the mountains,” which, if I’m honest, is a half-truth. I didn’t move here for the mountains, I moved here in part because there was an unexplored mountain range not far from town. What a reason to move somewhere. I’ve since fallen in love with those mountains, and they’ve become a large part of my identity. I know much of this side of the range (“the southern flank,” as I call it) quite well, the twists and turns of this-or-that road, hidden springs, little caves and detours off the trails and old landslides and the best viewpoints.
But ‘the mountains’ no longer feels like a tenable identity. It seems that it was only in relation — or in contrast — to work, and now that one is disappearing, the other seems to be, too.
I’m left in a vacuum. Why am I here?
I’ve struggled to foster community in this place. While I have a few friends, I’m still wanting. As I approach forty in a rural area, there simply aren’t many people here like me. Most people in their late 30s are pairing up, having children, settling down. Most people, mindfully or not, follow a certain path I’ve come to call “heteronormativity.” Careers, children, marriage (and divorce)… it’s the typical story of American life. Growing up, that future wasn’t available to me, but now that I’m in my 30s and homosexuality has been adopted (or co-opted) into mainstream society — a marked change from my childhood — I’m feeling out-of-place. Looking around, I don’t feel at home in straight culture and I don’t feel at home in gay culture.
While I watch many of my gay peers adopt hallmarks of heteronormative culture, I have this nagging feeling that, no, I’m still not sure I want those things. Do I want to be married when I see so many dysfunctional, unhealthy marriages? Do I want a romantic relationship when most relationships I observe seem to be based in something a little fearful, a little controlling?
And then there is place. I don’t want to live in a city, and therefore I’m immersed in straight culture to a degree I find routinely suffocating. Misogyny, latent homophobia, mental illness, oppressive and painful masculinity, drug addiction… There’s a lot to love about rural culture, but there’s a lot that makes me recoil, too, and I have precious few friends that both want to live in a rural space and remain critical of it, careful to keep its miasmas at bay.
Beneath all this, there’s a clock ticking somewhere deep in my limbic system. While I pride myself on living on the fringes of culture, social pressures find their way in. Marriage, maybe a(n adopted) child… Maybe I do want these things. I definitely want to be closer to family as I (and they) age, and this will mean uprooting the life I’ve created for myself here.
More than any other impulse, this one has started to fill the vacuum. Family and community. I want more of both, and they aren’t going to be found in this place. That’s a painful and disappointing — and in hindsight, obvious — realization. What this means I don’t quite know yet.
Yesterday was the military funeral for my neighbor that died in February. His ashes were interred at a state veteran’s cemetery of a neighboring (red) state, as all the veteran cemeteries in ours are located on the far more liberal side of the state, which he hated.
I’ve been told this should bring some closure — I heard it repeated it all weekend — but I don’t feel any. I had ‘closure’ many months ago, and while it was nice to meet some of his family, this weekend only served to remind me how hollow so much of this feels.
The veteran’s cemetery abuts a subdivision several miles from the city center, the green manicured grass pushing into the sagebrush desert that surrounds it. I presume a veteran’s cemetery is designed to inspire, I don’t know, reverence? But who comes to a place like this and feels anything but horror at the ticky-tacky of it all? Is this what patriotism is now? A few acres beside Shady Acres?
Once, I had an idea of cemeteries as hallowed ground, as spaces that were meant to persist into the future, to demonstrate to future generations the respect and reverence we felt for those in the ground, veterans or not. Yet the more I see, the more I realize the cemeteries of our time are just suburbs of the dead, mere cul-de-sacs of headstones. I rarely see anyone visiting cemeteries, no families picnicking as was once customary and common. Built on the edge of town (on land given as a tax write-off) and accessible only by car, they’re bereft of anything remotely natural. The grass endlessly mowed and sprayed with chemicals, the ground as embalmed as the bodies beneath.
It’s bullshit.
Nearly every principle, every belief, every assumption that undergirds that cemetery is fake. Patriotism, afterlife, “respect for the dead”… it’s all bullshit. Our culture doesn’t respect the dead, we want them out of the way. We don’t create lasting monuments to their sacrifices, we put them at the edge of town so we won’t be bothered. These are not monuments to the dead, but shrines to convenience and willful ignorance.
Yesterday was the military funeral for my neighbor that died in February. His ashes were interred at a state veteran's cemetery of a neighboring (red) state, as all the veteran cemeteries in ours are on the far more liberal side of the state, which he hated.
I've heard people say this should bring some closure — people said it all weekend — but I don't feel it. I had 'closure' many months ago, and while it was nice to meet some of his family, this weekend only served to remind me how hollow so much of this feels.
The veteran's cemetery abuts a subdivision in the suburbs. It's meant to inspire, I don't know, reverence? But who comes to a place like this and feels anything but horror at the ticky-tacky of it all? Is this what patriotism is now? Is all we give our veterans is a few acres beside Shady Acres?
Once, I had an idea of cemeteries as hallowed ground, as spaces that were meant to persist into the future, to demonstrate to future generations the respect and reverence we felt for those buried there, veterans or not. Yet the more I see, the more I realize the cemeteries themselves are just suburbs of the dead, just cul-de-sacs of headstones. I rarely see people visiting cemeteries, no families picnicking (as was once customary and common). Built on the edges of towns or cities on land ceded as a tax write-off and accessible only by car, they're bereft of any natural landscaping, with lawns sprayed and mowed and where anything un-manicured is presumably deemed disrespectful to dead.
It's bullshit.
Nearly every principle, every belief, every assumption that undergirds that space is fake. Patriotism, afterlife, "respect for the dead"... it's all bullshit. Our culture doesn't respect the dead, we want them out of the way. We don't create lasting monuments to their lives, we put them at the edge of town so we won't be bothered. These are not monuments to the dead, but shrines to convenience and ignorance.
I’ve been a fairly active Redditor for more than 11 years. Until now, it’s been the website with the best mix of community, popularity, developer ecosystem, and web-search-ability. The non-monetary value Reddit as a knowledge store is literally priceless; it’s a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
By now, you probably know my thoughts on social media. (Fuck social media.) But Reddit was always the exception. When I hear “social media,” I think “toxic stew of projection and posturing designed to make you feel bad about yourself in the service of serving you advertisements,” and by that definition, Reddit isn’t social media.
Reddit was the promise of the internet in one place. A group of people, each passionate about something, talking and supporting and, yes, sometimes fighting with each other. It’s been a good place. The best of human nature.
Everything changes and nothing is free. Not in this culture, anyway. I know this. But it’s still painful when the pursuit of profit comes for a community you love so dearly. We’ll see how these API changes play out, but I’m not hopeful.
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
A lot has changed since I first read this almost 15 years ago, but it has only become more prescient.
Ukrainian officials said the Russians wanted to create an emergency at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which uses river water for cooling, to stall an expected Ukrainian offensive.
“If you could bring back the heyday of Brandon Tartikoff–Warren Littlefield NBC with shows like The West Wing, ER, Friends, and Seinfeld — maybe with some nudity and F-bombs — every streamer would be very happy right now.”
Adding plug-ins closes an air gap that has so far prevented large language models from taking actions on a person’s behalf. “We know that the models can be jailbroken, and now we’re hooking them up to the internet so that they can potentially take actions,” Hendrycks says. “That isn’t to say that by its own volition ChatGPT is going to build bombs or something, but it makes it a lot easier to do these sorts of things.”
If any other species caused as much damage as humans do, we would think it wrong to breed new members of that species. The breeding of humans should be held to the same standard.
The broadcast, which also claimed there was an ongoing Ukrainian incursion into Russia, was aired in Belgorod, Voronezh, and Rostov, cities in close proximity to Ukraine’s border.
I was HIGHLY doubtful that Apple could pull off a workable digital avatar based off of just a scan of your face using the Vision Pro headset itself. Doubt crushed. I’d say that if you’re measuring the digital version of you that it creates to be your avatar in facetime calls and other areas it has a solid set of toes on the other side of the uncanny valley. It’s not totally perfect, but they got skin tension and muscle work right, the expressions they have you make are used to interpolate out a full range of facial contortions using machine learning models and the brief interactions I had with a live person on a call (and it was live, I checked by asking ‘off script’ stuff) did not feel creepy or odd, it worked.
The video passthrough was similarly impressive. It appeared with zero latency and was sharp, crisp and clear. I happily talked to others, walked around the room, and even took notes on my phone while wearing the headset — something I would never be able to do with something like the Meta Quest Pro.
What we have with these LLMs isn’t low-level intelligence but rather high-level applied statistics that creates the powerful illusion of low-level intelligence.
I predict that in short order, our collective consciousnesses might become indistinguishable from “high-level applied statistics.”
Stories in nature are once-upon-a-time stories, with slow, winding plots and surprise twists that evolve in the telling and are never finished. Once upon a time, Mount St. Helens came as close as a mountain can get to earthly perfection. And then the worst happened. But the land never stopped telling its stories. Fortunately, there were people on the ground who knew how to listen, who could make sense of what they heard, who pondered its implications and understood that they were entrusted with knowledge of the most miraculous kind. They’ve been writing the sequel to the eruption for nearly four decades now and counting — trying to answer that crucial question, What happens after the worst happens?
In another example of a company tactic, an outside lawyer hired by Syngenta to work with its scientists was asked to review and suggest edits on internal meeting minutes regarding paraquat safety. The lawyer pushed scientists to alter “problematic language” and scientific conclusions deemed “unhelpful” to the corporate defense of paraquat.
Syngenta’s decision to involve lawyers in the editing of its scientific reports and other communications in ways that downplayed concerning findings potentially related to public health is unacceptable, said Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas who has served on several National Academies of Science committees. “Clearly the lawyers are involved in order to limit liability,” she said.
The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.
