scarecrowbob
I'm not the biggest fan of Orwell but the idea that authoritarians work by asking us to stop using language in normal way has been unfortunately helpful.
Though you're the one comparing getting a 50-year sentence for being a member of a signal chat to "only 36 presents for his birthday".
I am sure you have a reply but "it can only get worse".
The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.
If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
For a while in the oughts I taught a film history class, though, and even 2 decades ago the kiddos thought anything in black and white, much less with no sound or with subtitles, was literally unwatchable. I'm okay with the idea that the students' tastes in media are legitimate, though I have my own tastes and think they are differently-informed.
And further, I dunno if "silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle" are new. Think Keystone Cops and Busby Berkley.
I like Battleship Potemptkin and Citizen Kane as much as the next person, but that's not all of what was popular.
Paring the thousands of films from the 80s down to a list of 10 does a lot of work to make that looks like it was better, when in fact I was in middle school and I could literally go see a movie for 75c. I remember some really bad ones, and I am certain I've forgotten a lot of bad ones.
I also have problems making a list of good films from the last decade, but I think that's because I got burnt out and stopped watching long-form video mediums when I left my PhD program. I am not sure I have seen 10 long form narrative works in the last 5 years.
I suspect, though, that many of those patterns are inaccessible by an audience, or even the other musicians. Or sometimes to the person performing said patterns.
Having participated in a lot of free improv music (one of my cohort has a grammy related to it), I am not sure if there really are a lot of patterns going on there. I am not a fan and it doesn't feel fun for me in the way that sitting with a band and playing Django-style music ("Tears" or "Swing 42" or "September Song").
I don't think it's a noise thing, I think there just isn't much "signal" getting compressed so the decoders are doing way more than they should.
Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.
Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".
And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.
What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.
With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.
I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.
But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).
While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.
My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.
Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.
With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.
Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.
But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.
So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.
So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.
The last several folks I've dated have been very odd people, mostly living in vehicles.
I don't have health insurance, either. Or indoor plumbing.
But I do play a lot of music, have time to volunteer, and only take work that requires an alarm clock when I feel like it.
I think "the authorities" don't care and that they seem to be able to force these systems on folks anyhow, and that the if->then syllogism you propose doesn't work.
The people committing these kinds of crimes don't seem to understand them as crimes and believe they will not and should not be punished. Further, the people who those folks report to seem to feel the same way.
I see them as crimes.
I am, however, ambivalent about what punishment should look like because the entirety of the carcerial system in the US (and the so-called immigration systesm) are so rotten to their cores that I just give up on them. It doesn't matter -what- I think because, as this kind of event shows, we do not in fact live in a system that represents me in any meaningful sense.
That's bad, and and it's not local to me. After all "those who make peaceful change impossible..." and such.
But I don't agree that they won't get the politically orthodox folks in the US to accept these systems; they seem to already have accepted them.
You too will (hopefully) watch your children move away.
Personally, when I am down I've been feeling a little like I've finished the main quest in a video game. I can look to my kiddos and be happy that they are doing okay but I still have almost as much adult life in front of me as I have behind me.
While the philosophy degree I got when I was young has helped a lot, I'm middle age, twice-divorced, and haven't had (or needed) a "regular" job, bald (well, I rock a skullet and have 'aura' according to the youngesters), and I can't rock climb as hard as I used to. I don't really enjoy drinking anymore, and I don't enjoy many drugs at all. I've gotten to a position where it's hard to maintain the fantasies that make romantic partners appealing, and while I have deep and diverse friend groups, I still spend most of my time in a shack in the middle of nowhere writing music for no one.
When people shit-talk on humanities educations, it's been hard to keep my mouth shut because the real payoffs have been in being able to meet the long and large world with some equanimity and I feel incredibly privileged to have been so misguided in my early life that I got a deep and canonical education.
There are plenty of things that I can do- keeping with the video game metaphor, I feel like I am working through all possible side quests on hard mode. Being emancipated from my children means that I no longer have to earn very much money or even maintain a stable home if I don't enjoy it.
I bought some off grid land in the middle of nowhere and I am slowly getting utilities working in the shacks. I started doing way more direct political action, including getting an EMT cert so I could volunteer at the local free clinic. I have 4 bands and play 5-6 gigs a month and run an A/V company where I do another 2-3 gigs a month.
So, yeah, I've got a pretty good skill set, I have however easy a life that I choose, lots of engagement in my enclosure. I have kids I am proud of.
And even looking at all that, I look at even a couple of years and sometimes wonder "shit.. what I do all of this for?". And I know that in another 25 years I will still probably asking that question, wondering if there had been a better way to do the things.
Enjoy browsing stuff with your kiddos. That is indeed the important kind of activity. But also, understand that you too will (hopefully) face existential choices in the future.
So, yeh, red is certainly a different color than blue, but they are still two colors.
Personally, I don't care if "enforcement" happens at all, though I don't expect you to care about that for the same reason you don't care about your neighbors.
What I do think is that if it was your mom that bad things were happening to, you'd have a different position on what "acceptable errors" look like.
The big difference here is that I care about my neighbors just as would care about my mother. You don't, and that's fine. Maybe you can get Grok to grow you a prothstetic soul or something.
They had jobs and reputations and self-images about being "good" at what they did and psychological needs. And further, they had the same incentives as me to not ship bugs when they could avoid it. And I could see, in general, the conversations humans were having, first on usenet and listservs and then on all the little situations on the larger internet.
I didn't trust them blindly, but if a bunch of us all seemed to be okay with the software for the mysql database or the apache webserver. And while I certainly have no idea who those specific folks were I do know how human communities work. When folks found malicious things in, say, a ruby yaml parser or a node package, it was loud.
And like all human scale things, the pacing was much slower so that things like a person's situation in a community and the human trust associated with that trust were things we could evaluate.
I can't evaluate the output of an LLM in the same way. It does not have the same incentives or needs. And it's not deterministic- if you recall comparing checksums between what you downloaded and what the folks putting the software published, then you understand what I mean here when I note that we could trust-but-verify a lot of things.
With the output of an LLM, it actually is important to check over, much of the human-level surface of how we review software is stripped out.
I used to enjoy playing "good" characters in the fallout games, as it's kind of a pleasant way of pretending that I do good things in the larger world.
And, to be fair, recognizing my need to be validated by helping folks has helped a lot in my personal life; being able to see hat I actually am getting out of helping folks has helped me to set firmer boundaries. It's possible that you could look at those games as a kind of "moral instruction" as would be the case with this proposition from the OP.
But the game itself is just "ethics porn".
There is no actual good that comes from me not stealing from NPCs or from taking up some weird political crusade. I'm not actually doing anything among my fellow humans and, most importantly, there is no actual cost to me.
Further, I don't mean to make a casual comparison to what folks might get from porn and what folks might get from thinking about their interactions with AI- I think that in the same way that if someone took their cues about how to have sex solely from porn, they might have a harder time interacting with real humans.
If I solely took my cues about how to help folks in the world from the heroes of highly scripted video games I would have a very difficult time interacting with the people around me and my expectations would be very out of sync with the world around me.
In the case of AI, the meatspace give-and-take between people where we requires a lot of subtle things- respect, enjoyment, equality, reciprocity. It might be just as bad to burn compute building some reciprocal sycophancy, which might also be considered just as much of a harm as practicing cruelty on these agents.
I find the effort to find lost media interesting, personally. It might sound weird, but the ephemerality of these things is something I personally find a bit liberating.
I've performed in maybe 130-ish bands over the last 30 years almost none of which played more than 10-20 shows. I've put out a lot of recordings for other people, and am around a lot of folks who have put out a lot of recordings for a lot of people.
All that work was highly ephemeral and mostly lost as soon as the band stopped playing. If there were recordings at all, they probably ended up in a cardboard box in someone's flooded basement.
At times, it's been kind of odd to think about how far all that goes back in time, like, probably as far as there have been people playing music. The idea that we could somehow track these incredibly short-lived events that touched a vanishingly small group of people at all would have a meaningful trace that you could pickup at a granular level is a bit odd to me. It seems so impossible that when I don't have access to the specific musicians involved, the chance meaningfully following up on the history or finding artifacts like recordings or t-shirts seems improbable.
For instance, in the mid-60s in Texas there was a big swell of garage rock in the wake of the Beatles playing on Ed Sullivan. It seems like a measurable thing to me, insofar as I played a whole lot of music with folks who came out of that scene, specifically ex 13th Floor Elevator guys. Some of that work from those bands eventually went to get large enough to become visible, The Moving Sidewalks prefigures ZZ Top, for instance. And so it's a bit easier to track. And some of the folks in that scene had longer careers, I used to work for a guy named Jay Boy Adams, who still performs in Santa Fe.
All that happened before I was born in the late 1970s.
But as it was told to me there are many dozens of other groups that were trying similar kinds of music, to varying degrees of success, many of which are barely even remembered by the people who were in those groups. Which is relatable to my own experience- sometimes some old project will come back in a memory, 3-4 folks who were on the same page artistically for a moment but then moved on.
I personally enjoy that situation- it's been a long life and it's statistically only half-over, and the idea of forgetting even the bands I will perform with this month makes playing with them a lot easier. The stakes become so low that following whatever creative impulse becomes less of a feat of overcoming. At the same time, the music is both important enough that I can take hard-lines in my opinions and not have to worry about those boundaries biting me in the ass by preventing me from attaining some artistic recognition that will never come.
All that is kind of immaterial to what I was intending to respond, which is that unless you can find the folks who were in that band (which is not unlikely) your quest to find the other tracks will likely be fruitless. You would have a lot easier time finding Dave Laredo and company (whoever that is) personally.
Personally, I am hesitant to start messing with firmware- I have just gotten to where I'm productive on my setup (octatrack for samples and mixing, DT keys and hydrasynth for sounds, squarp pyramid for programming).
I'm hoping to lock that setup for a year or more and just do electronic music on that system, as I find it productive... I am not sure that adding features would be helpful.
But it's neat to know that I might have a bunch of options when I move out of my self-imposed embargo on system changes next year and I think it's rad folks are enjoying that change to the ecosystem. I'm generally very opposed to LLMs and had happily retired from programming about the time the first bit of that hit, but if folks are successful in making software for hardware that functions well, then that's rad.
It's pretty straight-forward to learn and it's worthwhile.
I'm not sure who this post is for. If you find the advice in the post helpful, then go take a BLS course. The AHA one is very good.
Just reading this post that is essentially suggesting to treat cardiac arrest with Trendelenburg position isn't going to do much even compared to the very low chances of a ROSC even with an AED and quality compressions.
To the extent the advice is to do anything other than go take a short BLS course this post seems almost irresponsible. I don't care who is suggesting it.