Category: Bloggery

Westwhirled

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Just ask the guys at the shop how that whole robotic-workforce thing is working out for them. (BRAIN/2018)

A couple weeks back, while trying to discover what exactly the fuck was up with the “Report” button that mysteriously appeared next to “Reply” in comments, I found myself wandering through the bleak, shabby A.I. wilderness, like Ted and the gang in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”

I still had a mouth, and I was screaming, albeit virtually. But at whom?

First at bat was a bot, because of course it was. They reign supreme in Lower Supportistan and Customerservicesylvania. This level is tasked with solving the easy problems, which mostly I am not. Ask any publisher.

With the bot dispatched, next up was a WordPress “Happiness Engineer.” Could’ve been from MeatWorld®, maybe ESL with an A.I. assist, but felt slightly off, like the HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission, etc. Or maybe the reassuring, yet slightly menacing drone of The President from “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.” Occasionally one longs for a Marvin the Paranoid Android from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Still, one never knows. Automattic (with its sidekicks WordPress, Akismet, Jetpack, et al.) has big feet, one in MeatWorld® and the other on the Infobahn. So I dialed back the attitude, got a side of actual help with the platitudes, fired off an email to Akismet support, and went about my business.

Until I got a chipper reply from Akismet’s “Happy Bot” asking whether I was happy too. Ignoring that earned me a followup from — well, I have no idea what. Happy Bot ratted me out to someone, or something, which asked:

Since we haven’t heard back, we’re just checking in to see if the AI-generated response answered all your questions. Our goal is to ensure you get the help you need efficiently. If you require additional support from one of our experts, please reply to this email.

Well. Shit. Lead with your chin, why don’t you? So reply I did, recapitulating the original snark-laden complaint that led me down this digital rabbit hole.

And finally, I got an actual human response.

I think.

Which brings me to this piece in The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel. He writes:

Across so many levels of culture, there’s a feeling of control slipping ever so slightly away. You, me, all of us, whether or not we enjoy or use these tools, are living through a crisis of agency. The agita and paranoia, even the excitement—over AI’s encroachment on work, education, art, and culture—is the by-product of a cultural and technological moment in which humans are sliding into a more passive role in many activities. One way to look at the generative-AI boom is as a massive societal experiment foisted on us by Silicon Valley, the animating question of which is: What is a human for?

There’s much more to it, of course. And you should definitely read the Sam Kriss essay Warzel links to.

The Jetpack “Happiness Engineer” who was my last point of contact regarding this gripe professed humanity. My suspicions about the use of British spellings and semicolons were addressed (my correspondent mentioned having lived in the UK, writing detective novels on the side, and happily claimed semicolon usage as “proof of life”).

And my problem with the “Report” button? It too was addressed, and resolved:

Where things stand now: the developers who built this feature evaluated the results and determined it wasn’t delivering enough value to justify the concerns it raised, including exactly the kind of concerns you described. The Report button has been completely removed. It is no longer appearing on any site, including yours, regardless of your Akismet settings. You don’t need to do anything.

Y’hear that? I don’t need to do anything.

So … I’m happy? I guess. I think so. Yeah, sure, I’m happy.

But isn’t that exactly what they want? (Cue the spooky music. …)

Just wondering

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Good question.

I’ve spent the past couple of days rassling various techno-gators in my undrained swamp of a media landscape and that gaudy championship belt remains elusive.

Most of the hitches in the gitalong of the latest Radio Free Dogpatch revival we have already examined, save one: The 2014 MacBook Pro I use as a podcast editor is not only long in the tooth, it’s short in the stomach, which is to say that its 121 GB SSD is about 3 GB short of full.

So over the weekend I sez to myself I sez, “Maybe it’s time I finally installed that 1 TB SSD that’s been gathering dust around here for the better part of quite some time.”

Well, sir, before a fella does that he wants to back that internal sumbitch up to an external drive. Which my backup software decided it didn’t wanna do, it being the Lord’s day and all.

So I emailed tech support, which was Johnny on the spot, especially considering that even the Deity takes Sundays off. And we got that issue resolved and the backup created after a couple of false starts and a promise to download the latest software update “for security reasons,” which “for not-in-the-mood reasons” I postponed until some later date.

Because by then it was time for a bike ride, and then a shower, and finally dinner with a bit of TV, which the day before required a bit of Kentucky windage because some streaming services are getting pissy about shared user accounts, the oinking capitalist swine.

And this morning I decided the MacBook Pro upgrade could wait a while because I wanted to address some other issues, this time with a email/website-hosting outfit (not WordPress) whose company has changed hands and/or names about eleventy-se’m times in the last year or so, and holy hell did that ever turn into an A.I./ESL/Subcontinental clusterfuck of epic proportions.

About which the less said, the better, because I don’t want to stroke out before His Excremency, who from the look of him lately might just oblige us tomorrow by exploding in a pinkish-gray, shrieking shit-mist of curdled Mickey D’s grease, aspartame, and prescription drugs during the State of the Union, one of the many things about which he knows exactly jack shit. I won’t be watching, of course, but someone’s bound to post the video online.

Anyway, when I’m struggling to get all my kazoos, whoopie cushions, and aaaooogah horns to play from the same sheet of music, I think of Beth in “Diner,” as Shrevie is berating her for failing to shelve his records properly.

“It’s too complicated, Shrevie. You see, every time I pull out a record, there’s this whole procedure I have to go through. I just want to hear the music, that’s all.”

For reals. Makes me long for the days of typewritten underground newspapers and CB radio.

Awaiting enlightenment

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Strictly ornamental.

Author George Saunders is much in the news of late, chatting up the press in preparation for going on tour to promote his latest book, “Virgil,” due out later this month.

Speaking with The Guardian, Saunders said he was still trying to decide how to speak about politics when he hits the road. Preaching to the converted feels “a little too good, like it’s too much sugar,” he said, adding that while his nature is to seek peace, “that’s dangerous right now because I don’t want to be a peacemaker for this regime.”

I’m not a celebrated author, prepping for a book tour, or a Tibetan Buddhist. I blog irregularly and without distinction, the only tours I take are by Subaru, and the only thing I’m promoting is my own mental health. My devotion to Zen is sporadic at best.

But I sure dig where Saunders is coming from when he says The Work is the thing.

The one thing I’m doubling down on is: just keep making fictive worlds. Improve the quality of your thought, improve the quality of your compassion, by that sacramental exercise, then whatever you have to do you’ll be better equipped.

It reminds me of the Zen proverb, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Also, and too, of the Epistle of James, which goes, “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”

And I was pleasantly surprised to see Saunders prescribe a spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down: “Also start weightlifting, build a machine-gun turret. …”

Sounds like the right sort of work for an old blogger short on faith as the reign of His Excremency Donald the Dozy barrels along unhindered. We’re running out of water to carry in the Southwest, and we don’t burn wood. But you never know when a buffed-up bod’ and a machine-gun turret are liable to come in handy.

The Shadow knows

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Uh, whatever it is, I’ve got it penciled in … or not.

Whenever Herself zips off someplace for an extended stretch I suffer from delusions of creativity.

The idea is that somehow a window will open onto a shining world full of possibilities — blogging, podcasting, cartooning, etc.

Ho, ho. Miss Mia Sopaipilla gets more accomplished in one trip to the litter box than I do all day.

Here’s that annoying poet again, poking his big beezer through my window:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

In Herself’s absence Mia and I both find our daily routines disrupted, but Mia bounces back faster. Initially, upon discovering that her support staff has been halved, there is a related increase in vocalization, perimeter inspection, game-playing, and other attention-seeking practices related to separation anxiety.

“You may amuse us.”

But then she rockets right through all five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — and simply takes more and longer naps in various sunny spots, reasoning that time passes more quickly that way, and soon she’ll awaken to Herself offering a soupçon of half-and-half while preparing her breakfast coffee instead of that old baldheaded sonofabitch grumbling over a mug of tarry black heart-starter.

Me, I get to pick up a few more shifts in the barrel.

Herself gets up at 4 a.m. most days, so when she is not around to arise and deal with Mia, well, this means that I get up at 4 a.m. most days. This cuts deeply into my beauty sleep, which anyone who has seen me in the flesh knows I need desperately, the way Stephen Miller needs a walk-in freezer full of dead teenage runaways. (“Time for a cold one. …”).

Then there’s the cooking for one. Takes as much time as cooking for two, but now I have to handle the post-dinner cleanup.

Laundry. Won’t do itself. I’ve done the research. Same goes for taking out the trash and recycling, and loading/emptying the dishwasher.

And don’t get me started on the whole “making money” thing. Lucky for me it rolls in like the tide. I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.

Birds gotta be fed. We were out of seed, so it was off to our seed dealer, who is a talker. Hummers are back, so their feeders had to get filled and distributed around the yard, which was in need of mowing.

Somehow mowing is one of my regular chores. I’ve argued that it should fall to Herself, since it’s basically vacuuming outdoors, sort of like the parkour of hoovering. But she just chuckles and reminds me who makes all the fucking money around here.

Then my old VeloNews comrade Casey Gibson happened to be rolling through town to spectate at the Tour of the Gila, so it goes without saying that we had to get together for a couple of meals and complain about all the money we weren’t making.

And of course bicycles must be ridden and runs ran. Run? I’ll get back to you on that.

Thus a whole lot of my daylight (and best-laid plans) went up in smoke. And all I’ve got to show for it is clean laundry, washed dishes, a trimmed lawn, a couple extended chats over restaurant meals, empty trash bins, full birds, and a happy cat.

Because Herself just came home. Half and half is back on the menu. And I’m sleeping in tomorrow.

The cruellest month

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“And now, here’s T.S. Eliot with the weather!”

I’m gonna go out on a snowy limb here and say it was probably a good idea that the Soma Pescadero and I had our maiden voyage yesterday rather than today.

Yesterday it was knickers and arm warmers; today it’s green tea and bloggery.

Cruel it isn’t, though. Not at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, where we haven’t seen any sort of precip’ in the better part of quite some time.

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain

Whew! That Eliot feller would’ve made one helluva blogger, amirite? “The poet’s mind,” he once said, “is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

He also wrote: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

F’sure, bruh. Same thing m’self.