markjgsmith

2024/07/15 #

• Shoplifting bloke appears to have disapeared the past 2 days, but he’s been replaced by another bloke who basically does the same charade. This bloke has a mobile phone and a backpack, looks much more normal. He stands there for ages looking at his mobile phone, looking confused. Then over to the shop, looking confused. He’s holding a plastic bag with something in it. Then eventually disapears.

  There’s also been this other older bloke on a motorbike that’s stopped two days in a row, yesterday evening with some food gift. He's very grumpy.

  The police did several walk-bys early this morning. That’s unusual. I mention all these things because I know from experience that they will all coalesce into some sort of thing where I get blamed for everything. They always do.

  Even as I write this note, two motorbike gang stalkers drove past and shouted No! at me. And so it goes, everything will be my fault now for the rest of the day. #

• I’ve listenned to several politics podcasts discussing the Trump assassination attempt and though there was much mention of the fist in the air, no one has mentioned the bizare nazi salute thing as he was evacuated from the stage. Was the video I watched a fake?

  Apparently he was shouting 'fight' rather than the f-word, which is what I thought at first. A bit weird but I can see how in the heat of the moment that could happen. But a nazi solute? WTF is that about?

  If it turns out I did watch the official real video, it’s really strange that everyone is just pretending the nazi solute didn’t happen.

  As part of today’s escallations from locals, there has been another photographer (there was one yesterday too), some sexual harrassment and a walk-by past me as I sat in the park earlier loudly saying 'fight fight'. Oh and another police walk-by in the shop / cafe I’m in now. What are the chances? #

• cat << EOF > Parodying yourself

  I've heard two examples of this recently. I’m starting to wonder if it’s a thing people do.

  First there was Louis Theroux, on a recent episode where he sits down for a catchup with fellow podcaster and childhood friend Adam Buxton. From what I remember from the show, Adam was doing an impression of Louis, and Louis then tries to mimic the impression, very effectively I might add, so he’s basically parodying himself. It’s very funny.

  At the time I remember thinking I wouldn’t even know how to parody myself. I can hardly even recognise myself in the mirror most days.

  Anyway I didn’t think much of it until I started listening to Ed Zitron. His recent episode with some of the Vergecast folks is pretty good for example. He’s got a very east end of London kind of accent. What occurred to me was that at times he really lays the accent on thick, it’s like a total piss take. The interesting thing is that you momentarily wonder if his accent is real or not. It feels uncomfortable. Then he returns to the normal version, and you are comfortable again. Few. It occurred to me this might be a very effective way to get people to unknowingly trust you. If you do it enough that is. Btw whether it’s a put on thing or not, Ed’s reporting and analysis is top notch.

  The reason this popped into my consciousness today, is because I’d made a note to write about it a while back, but also because yesterday someone tried to assasinate Trump and he did a fight fist followed by what looked like a nazi salute as he was evacuated off stage, and everyone is ignoring it, and I thought wouldn’t it be the ultimate extreme self parody if it turned out he was taking the piss? Is he an actor or a comedian, or both? Or indeed neither?

  Another extreme self parody that springs to mind is Stevo from Jackass who had an enormous tatoo of himself done on his back.

  Anyway just thinking about self parody today, wondering if it’s a thing people do on purpose, or whether perhaps it’s some weird Carl Yung shit people do unknowingly. Or perhaps both.

  EOF

• I hope I've reached peak blog post weirdness.

  They seem to be getting a bit weirder everyday.

  Must keep reminding myself we are living in the best days.

  Pretty sure there’s a Beatles song about all this :) #

• There was an interesting interaction between lawyers on a recent Vergecast episode all about music copyright in the age of AI [20:10]:

  Nilay Patel: Professor, let’s say you didn’t have Jonny B Good in the training data, but then you had the entire architecture of Rock ‘n Roll, that is built on Jonny B Good. Could you back your way into Jonny B Good?

  David Pierce: Monkeys and type writers and Shakespeare right? Is that the theory here?

  Nilay Patel: Do you need the seed crystal when you have the whole diamond mine of Rock ‘n Roll?

  Professor Charlie of NYU: That’s a really good question because if you look at this entire era of music where RnB, Rock ‘n Roll, Rockabilly, are all kind of one entity, the music is drawing on 12 bar blues, a very standard song structure, they are often in the same keys that play well on guitar, they are using the same guitar licks, they are mostly using pentatonic scales, they are using the same language, and you might think yeah you could sort of back into that. But the precise rhythms, the exact words? Let’s be clear, the copy is worse, it does not sound nearly as good as the real Jonny B Good.

  He goes on to say anyone defending the AI would lose. But it brings up an important question. Could you train an AI, remember it’s an infinite training regression, that would guarantie a specific output? What if you actually could?

  This is likely bigger than just copyright. It’s much more akin to fate. #

• Isn’t it a bit strange that the EU appears to hate vertically integrated companies like Apple, throwing all sorts of antitrust cases at them, but they also hate crypto, which is basically the opposite of a vertically integrated company? #

• cat << EOF > Enough will never be enough

  The folks at TWIT have an interesting discussion about AI destroying the web [53:35]:

  Paris Martineau: The question I always have about these Large Language Models and generative output machines is what is the end game? Assuming something like Perplexity becomes successful, let’s say in their wildest dreams everything works, everybody uses Perplexity instead of Google search. They are looking for answers instead of combing through all these links. In 5 - 10 years what is going to happen? If you have a world where all of it is you have users coming to your site to look at your content and not going away to where the content is coming from, no one is going to be creating content to feed into that machine. It seems just incredibly short sited. And as of right now this is not a business model…like they are not making any money.

  Leo Laporte: No you are right they are not making money, that’s why they are trying to raise money, but you are right, in the long run if you cannibalise all your sources, there won’t be any sources left. And then what do you do?

  Since you have to eat or you will die, it only works if all the AI companies club together and enslave the content creators in a giant communist prison gulag. They give you food and you give the world content. But they will never be happy because they want to be free and you requiring food will make them think you are enslaving them, even though it is they that have enslaved you. You will be blamed for everything always, and made to pay for the horrible things they do to you, with your life, and it still won’t be enough.

  EOF

Today’s links:

• ‘Britain is back’: Keir Starmer promises UK will be at the heart of Europe - With both Germany and France in disarray politically, thd UK is stepping up efforts to strengthen relations with Europe around defense. Seems like a good strategy that could lead to other deals. www.theguardian.com #

• ‘A galvanising sense of unity’: a football team that is multiracial and distinctively English - As I write this the match will have finished a few hours ago. I need to get to the internet place so I can see the result. What a way to start a new government for England it would be. I find this whole thing about englishness fascinating. I wonder how it will trickle into other non-football parts of society. www.theguardian.com #

• Spain beat England 2:1 in Euro 2024 - Oh crap. And the bloody world is defo on the warpath again with me too. Just another day in passive aggressive escallation hell. #

• The return of crypto venture capital - Investments from VCs rose from $2.5bn in Q1 to $3.2bn in Q2, median deal size rose from $3mn to $3.2mn. www.ft.com #

• Webvm - A serverless vitual linux OS running in your browser using HTML5 and Web Assembly. Pretty darn cool. It’s entirely running in your webvm.io #

• New Post: Parodying yourself markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Enough will never be enough markjgsmith.com #