Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Tag: AI

  • #25: Superhero movies were a blip

    Dune’s been on my mind. Not simply for the technical mastery on display, or for its commitment to theatrical spectacle, or even for its place in the larger cultural landscape of 2024.

    I’m just kind of impressed that its a bonafide modern franchise not tied to some sort of superhero source material. It’s not even all that original. Obviously, it’s adapted from a very popular sci-fi series, and it’s been tried before. But the (in some ways far too incessant) comparisons to Star Wars go beyond its thematic and stylistic similarities. It’s a generational blockbuster film franchise that’s self-contained, in its own world, sweeping through audiences. It’s big and epic and interesting and exciting in a way that we haven’t seen in a while.

    It does feel like this year we are starting to see some return to movies as they existed before the days of Marvel. There are summer blockbusters, and mega franchises. There are shots in the dark like Everything, Everywhere all at once. Kevin Costner is even making Westerns again.

    When I first met my now wife, we used to go to an indie theater every week and see whatever was out. There was always some indie rom-com (this was the era of 500 days of summer) or drama that was fun and stylistically original and had a nice self-contained story to it. Then movies got split into either mega blockbusters or super low budget, barely watched indies. All those middle of the road films disappeared.

    So it’s fun to see a movie like this about a woman who tries to reconnect with her boyfriend, who passed away, through connections through music. It’s exactly the kind of thing we would’ve went to the movie to see. Maybe those kinds of movies are coming back.

    And it’s possible that after all of this, superhero movies and never-ending, interconnected IP will be more of a blip of film history rather than a seismic and enduring paradigm shift.

    Maybe multiverses will be all too much.

    Maybe we’ll be able to just make movies again.

    Bookmarks & Notes

    When ChatGPT and it’s many, many competitors began flooding the market, I started to use it a bit in my writing. Mostly I would set it up with something I had written and ask for a revision, then pull some things here and there I liked. But over time, it’s for sure slipping out of use for me. I like this guide from the iA team, Writing with AI . It’s more pragmatic than a lot of other things that I’ve seen. It’s advice essentially boils down to turning to something like ChatGPT at times when you are stuck. Like a rubber duck, but for ideas. But this caution is so important for me:

    AI can and will ruin your voice and credibility if you lazily let it write in your place. As writers we can not allow AI to replace our own thinking. We should use it to simulate the thinking of a missing dialogue partner. To write better, we need to think more, not less.

    I was also feeling that AI was beginning to rob me of my voice. And without that, what else do I even have?

    We Need to Talk About the Front Web. As a generalist, that works with a lot of full stack developers, I have mixed feelings about the division between the front-end and it’s tradeoffs with back-end expertise. But I do understand the way that the intention and semantics of HTML is under attack, and in slow decay. And so I really do appreciate Angela Ricci’s point of view here. The whole thing is absolutely worth a read, I enjoyed every bit of it.

    That’s the web today: abstractions, intertwined dependencies, heavy tools, thirty-party libraries, client-side JavaScript frameworks… SPAs! — we simply broke the web with these.

    And man does the web feel broken sometimes.

    I don’t know if I see No Labels as a “dangerous” experiment, but after reading the profile on them in The Atlantic I’m left wondering, what is even the point of this (other than to placate the egos of it’s founders)?

    Kierkegaard on the root of despair

    The relation to himself is something a human being cannot be rid of, just as little as he can be rid of himself, which for that matter is one and the same thing, since the self is indeed the relation to oneself… With despair a fire takes hold in something that cannot burn, or cannot be burned up — the self… To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.

    Notes

    Prepping for Easter

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  • #24: Sunday Sauce

    I married into a very big Italian family, with roots in Sicily. So one of the things I learned pretty early on was how to make Sunday gravy (or Sunday sauce depending on your region of origin). I make it here and there, and it’s good for a couple of days worth of leftovers.

    I looked around at a few recipes, and this one felt the closest to the method that I know. Except I don’t use wine, and most of the time I’ll just use sugar instead of carrots, if anything.

    The most important parts of Sunday Gravy, as I understand it, is the long simmer, and the quality of the tomatoes.

    The beauty of it is that you can get going sometime in the morning and leave it to simmer all day, coming back to stir it from time to time. That’s how the tomatoes break apart, and the sauce thickens, and eventually the flavors of the meat combine with it. It’s meant to be cooked slow. That’s why it’s for Sundays.

    And for tomatoes, as the recipe I linked to mentions, you probably want to use the San Marzano variation of whatever can of tomatoes are at your local supermarket. You can really use whatever you want, and you can either buy whole peeled tomatoes and crush them yourself or just buy them crushed. But the quality of the sauce is more or less dependent on what you chose, so it’s probably worth a couple of extra bucks.

    Anyway, this being less of a formal recipe, here are the steps I generally follow.

    1. In a large sauce or stock post, dice up a yellow or white onion and saute it in a healthy tablespoon or two of olive oil. Add a bit of salt while you do.
    2. When the onions are nice and tender, add in some tomato paste. Not quite the full thing of a whole small can. Maybe like 3/4 of it. Add a heap of garlic.
    3. After about a minute or so of moving that all around dump in two 28 oz cans of your tomatoes. Fill up one can with just water and dump that in too. Stir, cover and raise your heat.
    4. Once the sauce is boiling gently, take the heat back down and uncover. Add some more salt and pepper, a lot of fresh basil (pretty key that it’s fresh, imo) and a tablespoon or more of seasoning. You can add some grated carrots, or a healthy pinch of sugar, or a half a packet of Sweet N Low. All of those are just meant to balance out the acidity with some sweetness. You may not even need it.
    5. You can leave this going for a long time, several hours or more if you want. Stir every 20 minutes at least to keep the bottom from burning.
    6. Make your meatballs. I won’t go into all the details, but use a bit of fresh basil with those too. And you can soak some old bread in milk instead of breadcrumbs too.
    7. Once the meatballs are fried, add them to the sauce for at least an hour, until they are cooked through
    8. Continue seasoning as needed
    9. Serve it right away, or the next day, or both

    I enjoy making it, and it makes a fine meal. But I really like a food with such a clear tradition. It’s meant to be left on the stovetop as your kids and your grandkids scamper around the house. It’s meant to be tasted with a wooden spoon every so often. It’s meant for a lazy day inside when dinner can be served at anytime. It’s Sunday gravy (sauce).

    Bookmarks & Notes

    Cory Doctrow is really on to something with this whole enshittificaiton thing. At the beginning of this year, he posted a talk he gave about it to his blog. I like the way that Doctrow sums it up:

    It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

    And we’re seeing that happen to the platforms that we love, only slowly. And it’s going to drive people away from the web, which is a tragedy.

    Laws aren’t going to catch up to this kind of thing. And in the meantime, we’re just going to let artists have their entire careers sucked up by machines.

    Got to see Dune 2 on the big screen. Perhaps Villeneuve’s best work. Perhaps one of my favorite films of all time. Just an incredible, lived-in world that’s beautifully realized and consistent. It’s got all the right story beats, even when it missteps here and there, and it doesn’t beat you over the head with exposition in a way that feels very natural. But this is going to be remembered for its technical brilliance. For all the talk of a bland cinematographic palette, there is something incredibly precise about every aspect of the film’s audiovisual landscape. There is not a single moment that distract the eyes or the ears. Everything is exactly in its place.

    James Hollis on the transition into midlife

    Symptoms of midlife distress are in fact to be welcomed, for they represent not only an instinctually grounded self underneath the acquired personality but a powerful imperative for renewal… In effect, the person one has been is to be replaced by the person to be. The first must die… Such death and rebirth is not an end in itself; it is a passage. It is necessary to go through the Middle Passage to more clearly achieve one’s potential and to earn the vitality and wisdom of mature aging. Thus, the Middle Passage represents a summons from within to move from the provisional life to true adulthood, from the false self to authenticity.

    Notes

    Check Asana
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    Add to the Count of Monte Cristo
    Review projects in Obsidian
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    Set a weekly focus
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  • #21: The art of letting go

    This week’s post is brought to you by the letter L. It’s all about letting go.

    My wife and I did a weekend project (including not one, but two trips to IKEA) to straighten up and declutter our playroom. Years of accumulated toys, junk, and forgotten happy meal trinkets had piled up and it was time for a much-needed purge.

    Right away, I needed to let go. First I needed to let go of things on behalf of my two sons. As I sifted through the piles of clutter, I had to make a decision about what goes in the donate pile, with very little input from my two sons. Letting go, on behalf of another, is a pretty unfamiliar feeling.

    But there was a different kind of letting go, of my own need for control and order. My wife’s method of quick and decisive action sometimes clashes with my own much slower and methodical nature. Both have their advantages for different kinds of projects but it’s clear that a quick burst directed at decluttering was going to be far more effective. So we did it her way and it was pretty successful.

    So in a lot of ways I spent much of the weekend letting things wash over for me. But it can be terrifying to cede control to others and let nature take its course. Of course the only alternative is to gather everything around you until it suffocates you into submission.

    In my life, I have found that I am a collector of digital debris. My computer is a mix of assorted notes, workflows, lists and various stashes of makeshift junk drawers in this application or that. I don’t know why I do it or who it’s for. But if I think too hard about it I’m forced to confront my own mortality and think about where it will all go when I’m gong. So mostly I just kind of avoid thinking about it at all.

    But learning to let go is a good thing. And that’s why I like this blog. It provides a bit of finality to an idea or a loop in my head. Writing helps me think it out. And these words hold more meaning than the hundreds of forgotten notes I have stored away. Writing helps me make sense of the debris. It helps me to let go.

    I saw this tweet from Dan Brooks recently

    Which was a banger. And so that got me to read the linked article, a profile of billionaire Bill Ackman and his descent into social media fueled mania and paranoia over the last six months to a year.

    Look, Ackman isn’t especially stupid. Some of his ideas, particularly about the insular and single-mindedness of elite liberal arts institutions, are not without merit. But he’s also not especially smart. And he more or less got to where he is coasting on waves of luck and opportunity funded by generational wealth.

    When he was confronted by a new generation of people who had different ideas than the ones he built his fortune and empire—people who simply did not give a shit who he was, mind you—he snapped.

    The writings of John Michael Greer are, well, complicated. He is obviously prolific and has very strong, important ideas. But he can also be such a frustrating read for me because he is so beholden to his own fatalistic view of the future (which he has proved to be right about, on occasion).

    But I was really impressed by a recent article called The Three Stigmata of J.R.R. Tolkien. It describes how modern political events are viewed through the lens of intentionally binary and contrived fiction, and therefore leads to fallacies in our understandings about the world.

    The Great Fiction of AI. I first saw this Verge article mentioned by Dave in a dozen thoughts about AI.

    There’s a lot to say about this article, which was fantastic. It highlights the issues created by the tech industry’s over-dependence on scale and algorithms. But now it’s the tech industry, again, that are selling the “solution” to that problem (the one they created) by pushing AI downstream to every other industry.

    So they follow readers to the microgenres into which Amazon’s algorithms classify their tastes, niches like “mermaid young adult fantasy” or “time-travel romance,” and keep them engaged by writing in series, each installment teasing the next, which already has a title and set release date, all while producing a steady stream of newsletters, tweets, and videos

    Platforms like AMazon and social media have been prioritizing frequency over quality for years. It compelled writers to create at a more rapid clip. Now, AI enters the picture, promising to expedite the writing process but paradoxically feeding off the creativity of the writers themselves. Now we have a swirling mass of uninspired content generated by AI which is, in essence, consuming itself.

    That is, they’re using it not because they have something to say but because they need to say something in order to “maintain relevance” — a phrase that I heard from AI-using novelists as well — on platforms already so flooded with writing that algorithms are required to sort it. It raises the prospect of a dizzying spiral of content generated by AI to win the favor of AI, all of it derived from existing content rather than rooted in fact or experience, which wouldn’t be so different from the internet we have now.

    I wonder what snake oil the tech industry will have for us in another decade as a solution to a web polluted by algorithmically generated Markov chains disguised as AI content.

    Notes

    • Bluffs update
    • Pick out glasses ahead of time
    • Respond to the FW: WalkMe/Intercom Integration email
    • Follow up on SilverRock requesting a change to the auto-increment
    • Renew Salesforce API key
    • Approve Thomas’ time off
    • I like the format of this for links on the history of the web blog: https://tomcritchlow.com/2024/02/16/narrative-strategy/
    • March 6 – 1PM ET VIP
    • Should I use Kagi? https://kagi.com/pricing
    • With Kagi I could use the universal summarizer with my Raindrop reading mode thing https://kagi.com/summarizer/api.html
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • Travelers in landscapes from our past

    A post thanksgiving flurry into the holidays always has me thinking about the future. And I spent a lot of this year reading what I want to read. Maybe next year I can focus on writing what I want to write.

    Reading

    If I could find a through-line for a few articles I’ve read recently, it would be this: the web, and the culture of its development, is unraveling at the seams even as it finds new forms. It’s a runaway train.

    First, a sendoff from the creator of Omegle, which at the very least offers an interesting perspective. From reading it, I have no doubt that Leif had the best of intentions with the site, but he so clearly wants to cast himself the hero he seems to have missed the point. The web started small and you could build small things for small groups of people. But then it got bigger. Much bigger. And the job of keeping everyone safe got bigger too. And just about everybody failed at it, from the tech giants at the top down to the Omegle’s of the world.

    Then, a couple of entries from Garbage Day trying to make sense of what is starting to feel like a pivotal moment. In TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden, a fascinating piece of digital archeology, Ryan traces the backlash of the latest panicked news story and finds that (surprise, surprise) it was the backlash that seeded a bad take’s virality, not some cultural movement.

    And then, commenting on AI and copyright, Ryan points out that we have, in fact, done this all before. And everyone needs to stop being ridiculous.

    My hunch is that we’re just speedrunning the Napster era and will end up with an AI-protected class of creators and institutions and a wilderness of AI-powered piracy beyond that. In fact, seeing as how I can’t currently generate a picture of Mickey Mouse dabbing in Midjourney, we’re probably already there

    Are we doomed to repeat these same cycles over and over again, faster and faster each time? Personally, I’m losing faith in our own ability to capture the world’s information stream and turn it into connection and empathy rather than chaos and ill-will.

    Reading a talk from last year, weathering software winter, offers at least one way out. Slow down and rebuild. The founders of Hundred Rabbits take everyone through their journey building emulators and games on old hardware and old software built to actually last. It is not “infinitely scalable” and it doesn’t exist in the cloud. It is simple and resilient and enduring—values we have lost track of.

    Watching

    I recently watched All Quiet on the Western Front, based on a novel I quite enjoyed. And so it’s hard not to think about the same stories contrasted in two mediums.

    And this is what I would say on that point. The book is concernned with the humanity, or lack thereof, of war. How old men send the young to die in waves to accomplish very little. And there is a lot about these young men—little more than boys really—growing up and searching for identity amidst great tragedy and horror.

    The film touches on this, but it is far more preoccupied with the aesthetics and mechanics of war. It structures the narrative in chronological order, to its credit I think. But it also focuses quite a bit on the machinery, on the mechanics of trench warfare, on the contrast in rhythm between the peace negotiations and the frontlines. All of these create a picture of a useless war and senseless violence. But I do think it loses some of the humanness of the book.

    At one point in the film, the wise, older comrade Kat pauses to cotemplate what will happen when these war-torn soldiers return home.  

    We’ll walk around like travelers in a landscape from the past… I ask myself if I wouldn’t rather just sit around a campfire with you… and eat fried potatoes, with the skin on.

    It’s a memorable highlight that captures some brief moments of calm in between torrid chaos. But many other times the film trades long, contemplative passages from the book for general platitudes (i.e. “I’m a pair of boots with a rifle”).

    Thich Nhat Hanh on the essence of self:

    It’s funny how much our surroundings influence our emotions. Our joys and sorrows, likes and dislikes are colored by our environment so much that often we just let our surroundings dictate our course. We go along with “public” feelings until we no longer even know our own true aspirations. We become a stranger to ourselves, molded entirely by society… Sometimes I feel caught between two opposing selves — the “false self” imposed by society and what I would call my “true self.” How often we confuse the two and assume society’s mold to be our true self. Battles between our two selves rarely result in a peaceful reconciliation. Our mind becomes a battlefield on which the Five Aggregates — the form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness of our being — are strewn about like debris in a hurricane. Trees topple, branches snap, houses crash.

    This isn’t about chaging anythig that we are doing, but it’s about settiing a vision and a mindset that I think will motivate people more and attract the right kind of people ot the company.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote
    • Focus this week
    • Sportsengine: Launch WP 6.4
    • Site Architect Demo

  • Consuming films like Coca-Cola

    Reading

    The conclusion of two books: Sculpting in Time and Just Keep Investing.

    On Sculpting in Time I will say that it is an incredibly unique perspective and view of cinema—recognized by Tarkovsky as a wholly artistic pursuit and a unique medium focused on the compression and rhythm of time. And these are accurate, and well thought out, though perhaps a bit dated these days, as the cinema has receded into the narrative over form in greater and greater strides over the last few decades. This has caused more than one person to lament lately about the state of content, but thankfully Tarkovsky precedes that view and entirely rejects it.

    He concludes the book with a look at the responsibility of the artist. The responsibility is, of course, to represent one’s own personal vision faithfully. But, there is also a responsibility to create true art, even when it is challenging, rather than popcorn movies for pure consumption:

    People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola. The contact between film director and audience is unique to cinema in that it conveys experience imprinted on film in uncompromisingly affective, and therefore compelling, forms. Th e viewer feels a need for such vicarious experience in order to make up in part for what he himself has lost or missed; he pursues it in a kind of ‘search for lost time’. And how human this newly gained experience will be depends only on the author. A grave responsibility!

    I found it interesting, when talking about Stalker, how bothered he was when people asked him what the mysterious “Zone” at the center of the film was:

    People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films

    I wonder what he would think about Star Wars and Marvel movies, where every offhand storyline requires a huge backstory and every plot thread needs resolving.

    Just Keep Investing more or less reiterates the title over the course of many chapters. It’s good advice though.

    Watching

    I saw an interview with Karim Lakhani about the future of AI. I think in many ways it represents well the popular view, and presents a nuanced vision for what’s to come. One thing that gave me pause was when Lakhani pointed to AI as a place to substitute whenever one is doing tasks that require thinking. This is a useful starting point, but I think that it hides the technology and makes AI feel too much like magic.

    Final Note

    I was reminded of this excellent quote by Oliver Burkerman (in Four Thousand Weeks) from this week’s Marginalian:

    Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.

    Notes

    Meal Plan: Meatloaf + Breaded Chicken using new breading

    Focus