All year I’ve been reading about taste. Someone somewhere identified that one of the things AI can’t do is “taste.” Now it seems a certain part of the world can’t stop talking about taste, and much of it is trying to define taste, presumably to boil it down into a useful prompt.
This is a bit of a shift from the prevailing notion of “you’re allowed to like stuff,” which turned into “can’t we just let people enjoy things,” which quickly warped into “you have to like everything or you are a monster.” Especially if lots of other people seem to like it, which is one reason why the mainstream culture is so completely flat right now. Taste was demonised by poptimists who defined themselves as victims of those with taste.
And now everyone’s turned around and gone, oh shit, the robots can create everything I said I liked and I’m a slop-eater. There is no status or cultural cache in that. People are freaking the fuck out. They’re trying to find out what taste even is.
Tastemakers have discernment. They know they don’t have to and aren’t supposed to like everything, and they immediately distrust anything so flat and edgeless that it screams of being designed to be liked by the largest number of people. They have knowledge and powers of recognition, they have context and they own their idiosyncrasies. They don’t like what other people like, because they have taste and other people don’t. Other people sit on the kerb of a street in a town that isn’t pretty enough for Instagram influencers, their skin aged prematurely by their phone screens and the digital billboards all around them, googling for peptides to restore the collagen their own phones are evaporating out of their faces and being told by the Google AI summary that tobacco reduces skin cancer. Goldfish with tits of congealed microplastic fuck in the black water sludging its way down the gutter. A “celebrity,” which they understand to mean “someone who is on a screen somewhere for a period of time longer than fifteen seconds,” appears on the nearest digital billboard. Its teeth are white. Taylor Swift white, Rylan white, bone-white, skull-white, nothing-white. The alien teeth seem to swell on the screen, as an inhuman voice drones from the frame about low-cost funerals to the musical accompaniment of something Spotify has inserted into eight million playlists this year. They know the song intimately but they don’t know what it’s called or have any context about it beyond the fact that it must be popular because all the machines make them listen to it over and over again. The teeth seem to invert and bend, twisting inwards to become the event horizon of a black hole that emits only the elongated howling word ddddeattttthhh in an utterance that sounds eerily like Pedro Pascal’s because he had a spare three minutes to ensure he was literally fucking everywhere. They run from the town into the countryside, because “people” on X have told them to “touch grass.” But the grass bends away from their feet, because even vegetal microintelligences can tell when something approaches that is essentially Wrong and no longer of this world. They fall to their knees and whisper for mercy to a seedling in the undergrowth, as an AI gardening podcaster had once told them to talk to plants. But the seedling blackens and crumbles under their graveyard breath. They crawl through the undergrowth to the shore, and look at the water, but they do not know how to feel about the water because no mathematics has told them how to feel about it, for they are basically just a meat coffin containing a low-voltage ghost that knows nothing and feels nothing beyond a faint, fearful urge to spend money on tokens to feed huge calculators that might tell them what to like. In the weeks and months to come, even the carrion eaters reject the corpse by the shore, instinctively recognising that its grey fibres contain no nutrition. Because they have taste.
Anthropic submits draft to go public:
Today, Anthropic, PBC confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of our common stock. This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.
I’m not a stock market person, but I’d bet Anthropic is the winner in the LLM company race to be Coke over Pepsi.
I listen to a lot of YouTube at work. The moment I clicked through to the Caught In Joy YouTube channel, I knew I was going to love it. The description:
Over 80 albums designed to focus, flow and reset. Instrumental electronic music for you brain to wander.
And from the website:
Caught In Joy (Karol Pokojowczyk) is a multi-instrumentalist based in Florida, passionately dedicated to live composing, hardware synthesizers, and tape recording - a completely independent music project. I strive to create four albums and visual performances every month, entirely by myself.
I started my professional life as a software engineer and later became a serial entrepreneur, with a few successes along the way. After more than 30 years of working, I saved enough to fund my dream: building a home studio where I could finally focus fully on music.
This album is my current favorite: Mercury - full album (Tangerine Dream meets Pink Floyd and Boards of Canada)
This Reddit thread asks what a person can learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life, and the top-voted answer is using your hand span, thumb to pinky, as a built-in measuring tool. Mine is 7 inches, which I will never forget now.
The other favorites in the thread are worth sharing for your relationships and your nervous system: “Never explain yourself to people committed to misunderstanding you.” Before responding in an argument, scan your body and take a slow nasal breath to notice fight or flight before you speak. Then speak calmly. “‘No, I can’t’ is a full sentence. You don’t owe anyone a 10-minute TED Talk about why.”
The most important point about rising AI use in the arts is simply this: Millions of people desperately want affirmation. They don’t want to go to the trouble of writing or painting or drawing or making music — or maybe they are afraid that their own work won’t be good enough — but they want people to believe that they have made art. We should be thinking seriously about the intensity of the human need to be recognized, to be thought not basic but special.
This is true, but it has always been true and AI doesn’t have much to do with it.
For a few weeks there, I checked my phone like a worried parent. Andrej Stojakovic had entered the NBA Draft, gone to the combine in Chicago, and told everyone he was “both feet in.” That phrase does something to an Illinois fan. It sits right in the chest.
Then, on Wednesday, he pulled out. He’s coming back to Champaign.
The combine actually went well for him. He led every prospect in the max vertical at 41.5 inches, which is the kind of number that makes you sit up straight. But the draft boards had him as a late second-round guy, and that math never adds up to leaving early. especially in the NIL era. So he’s staying.
The 6’ 7” frame and the athleticism are already there. The rest of the game isn’t finished yet, and now he gets another year to build it. Shoot a million threes, get better, and go in the first round in 2027. That’s the bet, and it’s the right one.
The roster is locked and loaded.
If you’re an athlete, results are measured in wins and losses. But for the rest of us, there is no scoreboard — no way to clearly measure yourself against others.
Which is a good thing, I’d say. Your success shouldn’t be based on whether you’re doing better or worse compared to someone else. There’s a reason for the expression “run your own race.”
You have to figure out why you do this work. What matters to you? Why does this work have meaning to you? And are you doing work that meets those goals and those expectations?
It’s not about followers or likes or even revenue.
However you get meaning from this work, however you measure up against that — that’s your scoreboard.
My right knee hurts. Twice while walking with Maria I stepped wrong and nearly fell. The second time was pretty close to crashing.
Yesterday it was way better than it had been for days. I was on my knees helping plant flowers and plants and I generally felt okay. It was stiff this morning, but walking two miles as per usual just wasn’t in the cards after nearly hitting the deck. This is annoying.
“Americans may not only pay tribute to our honored dead but also unite in prayer for success in our search for a just and lasting peace.” — John F. Kennedy, “Prayer for Peace,” Memorial Day 1962
Matt Singer on The Mandalorian and Grogu –
The movie’s set pieces are a little grander than the ones The Mandalorian typically produced for Disney+; AT-ATs look even more imposing in the boxy IMAX frame. Otherwise, the feature recreates the episodic vibe of the show’s first season. The Mandalorian and Grogu is a straightforward adventure with almost no character development and little to discover below its handsome surface. Even the two-act structure (complete with a cliffhanger right around the one-hour mark), suggests it could have been rejiggered from a pair of scripts for the never-made fourth season of The Mandalorian.
Which is exactly why I’m not spending time and money to see this in the theater.
Do I think it will wildly entertaining? Yes. It’s just not enough for me to go see it outside of my home.
It baffles me why they didn’t just make 7-10 seasons of good shows with this character. It doesn’t need a movie.
James Poniewzik on Colbert ending The Late Show –
He didn’t land the pope, but he got a Beatle. He didn’t have a new project to announce, but he left us with a song (in fact two). He didn’t choose to end his show, but he ended it his own weird, wonderful way. Stephen Colbert hosted his final ‘Late Show’ on Thursday night, completing the story of the TV year’s most notorious and rancorous cancellation. But his final hour-plus — an emotional and delightfully bizarre wake for a comedy institution — turned it into a cancellebration.
That’s a good word. “Cancellebration.”
Colbert’s finale was just amazingly good. Unsurprisingly on-brand. And what a song to end on. Perfect.
At 2:30 in the morning, the night clerk at the hotel is a great help if you’ve locked yourself out of your room.
But if you want to complain about the hours of the gym, the hotel’s environmental footprint or even their late check-in policy, you’re almost certainly wasting their time. And yours.
Every organization with more than a few people in it has night clerks. Most of the people who work at the phone company, for example, and even the person clearing tables at the local pizza place.
It’s the night clerks that have the most customer interaction–in fact, they’re almost certainly the highest leveraged, most insightful marketing cohort in your organization.
They have information, and if we give them agency, they could transform the customer experience.
Alas, our systems rarely help. Many night clerks are underpaid and underappreciated, and systems around them push them not to care.
When your organization gets stuck, don’t blame them. Instead, find a way to help them become the contribution they’re capable of being.
Some useful questions you might not be asking:
How much does the information we’re not collecting cost us?
What is the customer service cost and brand dilution of depriving our people the freedom to take action?
If we built a culture of mutual respect with our night clerks–using training, compensation and engagement–what would our new customer experience and reputation be worth?
Americans are increasingly divided, not only politically, socially, and economically, but geographically. Our lack of real-world interaction makes us all the more susceptible to hateful, rage-baiting messages spread by those who benefit from keeping us divided and afraid of one another. Most Americans have never met anyone in real life that they hate as much as the caricatured versions of their political opponents. The imaginary friends of our childhoods get replaced by the imaginary enemies that exist somewhere, out there, beyond the borders—online and off—of our silos of homogeneity. Forget having united states, between political messaging, physical divides, and now contorted gerrymandering, we don’t even have united neighborhoods anymore.
“I just realized that maybe (just maybe) the reason for the fact that I’m unhappy, unmotivated and slightly head-achey might be that I didn’t have my morning coffee yet.” — Dominik Schwind
I’ve been watching YouTube stuff too much. Don’t get me wrong, I like what I’m watching but I’m missing on so many things on streaming. Aside from The Pitt with my wife, I’m not really watching anything regularly yet I’m paying for all the streaming services. I’m going to start watching shows/movies I want and stop with the YouTube.
Let’s see if I can’t come up with a playlist.
I just created a Skill in Claude. I found a really great breakdown and then used it as a basis for digital Claude Council to take a question and then debate the good, bad, indifferent about it and present a conclusion. It’s pretty great. I haven’t done anything with it yet, but I think it will become useful in the future.
“There’s a difference between standing up and telling people what you’re planning to do and standing up and going and accomplishing something.” — Paul Stanley
I’ve been watching YouTube stuff too much. Don’t get me wrong, I like what I’m watching but I’m missing on so many things on streaming. Aside from The Pitt with my wife, I’m not really watching anything regularly yet I’m paying for all the streaming services. I’m going to start watching shows/movies I want and stop with the YouTube.
Let’s see if I can’t come up with a playlist.