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Just back from a gig of these lads. Ears ringing, pissed, but it was absolutely class.

 

Given them a go a couple of times over the years, know Skinty Fia fairly well. I don't mind the vocals so much as the repetition, that's what makes them most often fall on the wrong side of the authentic/try-hard to my ears. Grand though like.

I've said it before, but I can't help myself finding it all fairly poignant that Dune--set in a future where the production of machines designed to think like humans has been forbidden--should be having its brightest moment in the sun right now, just as the experience shallowing potential of AI is beginning to dawn on us.

Also maybe of interest to some of ye here, an Israeli neuroscientist colleague (and fellow peacenik) led a huge study investigating how trauma experienced under psychedelics/MDMA is processed, based on interviews and analyses of survivors of the attack on the Supernova festival. These were conducted in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7th and I remember well his harrowing day-by-day reports of how emotionally exhausting the process was for everyone involved. Anyway, results were published a few days ago.

The study here:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.28.587237v1

An NYT overview here:
https://archive.is/IE8fA

Deep, deep dive into the Knesset and IDF's actions over the last six months from an Israeli professor of history at the Hebrew University:
https://www.academia.edu/112967602/Bearing_Witness_to_the_Israel_Gaza_War_updated_to_15_April_2024_
https://twitter.com/LeeMordechai/status/1780034934444331325

Hopefully, no shade of a joke, he doesn't get himself hospitalized, disappeared, or assassinated for speaking out.

One mate recommended simply skipping S4 but to make sure to watch S5. Apparently it's great.

We started in for a run through all of Fargo last night. Seen seasons 1 and 2 already, so know they're absolutely worthy of a re-watch, but none of the rest. Have been warned 3 is iffy, 4 is crap, and then 5 is v. good again. Either way and come what may, going to go through the whole thing.

Some trying to get McGuirk kicked out of Gript. I think..?
https://twitter.com/wethepeopleeire/status/1779943298464903430

That both sucks and doesn't suck.

 

Walked into that one!

I was hoping to have a similar simple pleasure yesterday having taken the hoover apart and cleaned it out, but no such feckin' luck 

Opeth - Deliverance

I'm not predicting any radical immediate changes, but thinking more long term, and more on the creative than the receptive side, although both are important.

On longer scales, things do profoundly change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. And really nothing of what I'm saying hasn't already featured as warnings in science-fiction since the 1930s: the more creative and intellectual "burden" we delegate to machines (of one form or another), the more we risk (everything is probability, nothing black and white) deterioration of some of our own cognitive capacities. Some of this may have very real impact on things like mental health, as more people become pure content consumers without even the facade of interpreting at a distance some kind of meaning put out there by a fellow human (i.e. the artist). The impending possibility of on-demand 100% bespoke entertainment, responding purely to what an individual wants at any given moment, is a real risk for shared experience. That could be the "shit" of the future, but it's a very different kind of atomized individualistic shit to the popular shit of the past which, at the very least, functioned as a kind of social glue of common experience. Even soap operas filled such a social function.

Again, I'm not predicting that X, Y, Z are necessarily going to happen, but I do think it would be wise (wiser than can be expected of our society) to consider things like impact on experience of life, which is just another way of saying impact on mental health. I don't see current AI direction getting more people to create, to learn to create in any kind of experientially meaningful/mentally healthy way. Conversations still exist, but clearly social media has done something to society which leaks beyond its own digital boundaries. Generative AI imo has similar if not even more powerful society-altering potential.

Sure, immediately concerned parties are currently focused on their income being taken away, and that's understandable. But the deeper threat, which Napster and photocopying/taping/etc., never posed, is imo the actual creative activity itself being taken away or at least massively reduced across society as a whole. What we're looking at is more like the shift brought about by the advent of recorded music itself; prior to that, if you wanted music somewhere, you needed performers and so live music was much more prevalent in society. Napster had no impact on this dimension of things; it took away some recording income but also opened up audiences for smaller performers and had no negative impact (that I know of) on sizes of live audiences paying out to see live performances.

There is no useful comparison to be drawn between Napster and where AI generated art is going. No more than there is any useful comparison to be drawn between photocopying technology and where AI generated art is going.