Are the fires of hell a-glowing?

…

There’s no earthly way of knowing

Which direction we are going

There’s no knowing where we’re rowing

Or which way the river’s flowing

Is it raining?

 Is it snowing?

Is a hurricane a-blowing?

Not a speck of light is showing

So the danger must be growing

Are the fires of hell a-glowing?

Is the grisly reaper mowing?

Yes, the danger must be growing

‘Cause the rowers keep on rowing

And they’re certainly not showing

Any signs that they are slowing!

Gene Wilder / Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

VIA 20th Century Man (nsfw)

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

“You should do that for money.” LeSigh… Everything is a commodity. Good long read here. Sorry for the wall of text, but it’s complicated to break it down to a blur. Just go read it, lol!

“There must exist professions that are free from capture, but I’m hard pressed to find them. Even non-remote jobs, where work cannot pursue the worker home, are dogged by digital tracking: a farmer says Instagram Story views directly correlate to farm subscriptions, a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers. Even religious guidance can be quantified by view counts for online church services, Yelp for spirituality. One priest told the Guardian, “you have this thing about how many followers have you . . . it hits at your gut, at your heart.”

But we know all this. What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.

I tell you all this not because I think we should all be very concerned about artists, but because what happens to artists is happening to all of us. As data collection technology hollows out our inner worlds, all of us experience the working artist’s plight: our lot is to numericize and monetize the most private and personal parts of our experience. “

Nike Pledged to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint. It Just Slashed the Staff Charged With Making That Happen.

Ouch. Gnarly reporting by ProPublica here.

“So it came as a surprise one Sunday night in December when the dozen or so people on the team got summoned to a mandatory meeting the next morning. In a Zoom call before sunrise, they learned why. The team was being eliminated. The vice president who ran the team was gone. The call lasted less than 10 minutes.

It was the first in a series of deep cuts that one former Nike employee called “the sustainability bloodbath.”

With sales flatlining, Nike executives in December announced a plan to cut costs by $2 billion over three years. Those cuts have dealt a big blow to Nike’s sustainability workforce.

Nike has laid off about 20% of employees who worked primarily on its sustainability initiatives, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found. Roughly another 10% left voluntarily or were transferred to other jobs. The cuts to its sustainability staff of about 150 people were far deeper than Nike’s 2% reduction companywide and 7% reduction at its Oregon headquarters.”

Cool animation though.

Was the 401(k) a Mistake?

“The first generation to be fully reliant on 401(k) plans is now starting to retire. As that happens, it is becoming clear just how broken the system is.”

The amount of jobs I have had that even offered a 401k is like 20%.

Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

Ah, crap….. and this is why we can’t have nice things.

Investor statement.

Hacker News discussion on it.

Private Equity has not completely killed bandcamp yet, so maybe it will be OK. But they are gonna wanna make back that, checks notes, 6 billion? WTF?! From the Hacker News discussions:

“I hear that PE destroys products and culture to make money at all costs, but i don’t get how that can net them back the >$6 billion they paid for a company with <$300 million yearly revenue and negative profit.”

The Life and Death of Hollywood

A rather sad tale on how the one of my favorite boogy men, Private Equity, has ruined the film industry just like it’s ruined the gaming industry, real estate and pretty much everything else it touches. To quote “Better Offline”, “The rotten demands of eternal growth.”

“In fact, they weren’t. The streaming model was based on bringing in subscribers—grabbing as much of the market as possible—rather than on earning revenue from individual shows. And big swings brought in new viewers. “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” Smith said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.”

“It was communicated to me,” Smith said, “that my only choice to keep the show alive was to begin all over again and write a whole new season without a green-light guarantee. So I was expected to take on that risk, when the entities that stood to profit the most from the success of my creative labor, the platform and studio, would not risk a dime.” “It was also on me,” she went on, “to kind of fluff everybody involved in the entire making of the show, from the stars to the line producer to the costume designer, etcetera, to make them believe that we’d be coming back again and prevent them, sometimes unsuccessfully, from taking other jobs.”

The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers.

None of this is likely to happen.”

And I dug up an old illustration I did when I lived in L.A. to go with this post.

Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad

This is a disturbing, shocking ad, not just because of what it shows but because of its seeming obliviousness to the subtext that it turns into text, as well as the message it sends to every artist alive: the tech industry will crush you, destroy you; suddenly, violently, all at once.

…

The ad arrives amid a continued furor over the ethical, moral and copyright implications of "Generative AI," which is a cool-sounding name for plagiarism software. This so-called "intelligence" is not intelligent but crudely imitative. Contrary to what its industry boosters (and their simps) keep trying to tell us, its relationship to the history of human creativity is not at all like the relationship between a flesh-and-blood art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings or a budding trumpeter playing along with Miles Davis. It's more like the relationship between the tripods in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the people that they suck up into their bellies, shred into gory paste, and spray onto their crops, as a kind of mulch. 

…

Steve Albini, Storied Producer and Icon of the Rock Underground, Dies at 61

Steve Albini, an icon of indie rock as both a producer and performer, died on Tuesday, May 7, of a heart attack, staff at his recording studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed to Pitchfork. As well as fronting underground rock lynchpins including Shellac and Big Black, Albini was a legend of the recording studio, though he preferred the term “engineer” to “producer.” He recorded Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, and countless more classic albums, and remained an outspoken critic of exploitative music industry practices until his final years. Shellac were preparing to tour their first album in a decade, To All Trains, which is scheduled for release next week. Steve Albini was 61 years old.

"the future of the internet: a garbage dump"

This week in AI, brought to you by, “Is it too early to have a drink?” Great article by Erik Hoel called, “Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI”. Read the whole piece, it’s a real good account of what is happening to the internet right now in real time. I was looking for info on a new printer and the amount of AI trash is insane. Here are way to many pull quotes.

“The amount of AI-generated content is beginning to overwhelm the internet. Or maybe a better term is pollute. Pollute its searches, its pages, its feeds, everywhere you look. I’ve been predicting that generative AI would have pernicious effects on our culture since 2019, but now everyone can feel it.

...

What, exactly, are these “workbooks” for my book? AI pollution. Synthetic trash heaps floating in the online ocean. The authors aren’t real people, some asshole just fed the manuscript into an AI and didn’t check when it spit out nonsensical summaries. But it doesn’t matter, does it? A poor sod will click on the $9.99 purchase one day, and that’s all that’s needed for this scam to be profitable since the process is now entirely automatable and costs only a few cents.

...

Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump.

...

This isn’t what everyone feared, which is AI replacing humans by being better—it’s replacing them because AI is so much cheaper. Sports Illustrated was not producing human-quality level content with these methods, but it was still profitable.

...

All around the nation there are toddlers plunked down in front of iPads being subjected to synthetic runoff, deprived of human contact even in the media they consume. There’s no other word but dystopian. Might not actual human-generated cultural content normally contain cognitive micro-nutrients (like cohesive plots and sentences, detailed complexity, reasons for transitions, an overall gestalt, etc) that the human mind actually needs? We’re conducting this experiment live. For the first time in history developing brains are being fed choppy low-grade and cheaply-produced synthetic data created en masse by generative AI, instead of being fed with real human culture. No one knows the effects, and no one appears to care. “

This week in AI.

All AI news is bad news. That pretty much sums it up. I won’t even get into the video aspect yet, that will need it’s own post.

Instacart is using AI art. It's incredibly unappetizing.

“The text for the ingredients and instructions for the above recipes, meanwhile, is also generated by AI, as disclosed by Instacart itself: "This recipe is powered by the magic of AI, so that means it may not be perfect. Check temperatures, taste, and season as you go. Or totally switch things up — you're the head chef now. Consult product packaging to confirm any dietary or nutritional information which is provided here for convenience only. Make sure to follow recommended food safety guidelines."“

'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal

“The open-access paper explores the relationship between stem cells in mammalian testes and a signaling pathway responsible for mediating inflammation and cancer in cells. The paper’s written content does not appear to be bogus, but its most eye-popping aspects are not in the research itself. Rather, they are the inaccurate and grotesque depictions of rat testes, signaling pathways, and stem cells.

The AI-generated rat diagram depicts a rat (helpfully and correctly labeled) whose upper body is labeled as “senctolic stem cells.” What appears to be a very large rat penis is labeled “Dissilced,” with insets at right to highlight the “iollotte sserotgomar cell,” “dck,” and “Retat.” Hmm.”

Microsoft and OpenAI warn state-backed threat actors are using generative AI en masse to wage cyber attacks

Russian, North Korean, Iranian, and Chinese-backed threat actors are attempting to use generative AI to inform, enhance, and refine their attacks, according to a new threat report from Microsoft and OpenAI.

The group’s use of LLMs reflects the broader behaviors being used by cyber criminals according to analysts at Microsoft, and overlaps with threat actors tracked in other research such as Tortoiseshell, Imperial Kitten, and Yellow Liderc.

As well as using LLMs to enhance their phishing emails and scripting techniques, Crimson Sandstorm was observed using LLMs to assist in producing code to disable antivirus systems and delete files in a directory after exiting an application, all with the aim of evading anomaly detection.

Why Are Alaska’s Rivers Turning Orange?

The thaw of permafrost soil under a wetland allows bacteria to start reducing that oxidized iron, Cooper thinks. And reduced iron, unlike oxidized iron, is soluble in water. If it's carried by groundwater out into an oxygenated stream, it can once again be oxidized. When that happens, it will fall out of the water as “rust” and turn the stream orange. While digging trenches on marshy ground near Timber Creek this past August, Cooper and Dial found water as deep as 1.5 meters under the once frozen soil, as well as dirt the gray color of reduced iron. New groundwater flows have developed in the thawing earth, Cooper said, and they have “really awakened a lot of these geochemical processes that have been basically stalled out for 5,000 years because the ground's been frozen.”

We stumbled on another burn among the raking willow shrubs as we descended toward the creek, and the trickle from the lumpy black crust there was strongly acidic, too. Below the black spots, an orange slime covered the rocks of the Anaktok, rubbing off on the hands of Alexander Lee, an Alaska Pacific University philosophy professor who was helping to sample fish and invertebrates. A small stream coming down from the hills had a highly acidic pH of 3.5. “Wow, this is crazy,” Dial said.