I have enjoyed nearly every album this band has put out, so I was happy to see that they have a new one today. Unfortunately, I kind of hate this album. It is—as far as I know—their first album with lyrics and my friends, this is not a change for the better. Are they deliberately trying to make a Morrissey album? Because that is what this one sounds like. Actually, more like Morrissey on muscle relaxants.
🔗 AI’s Ostensible Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage
Indeed, as he and his colleagues Brando Miranda, a Stanford PhD student, and Sanmi Koyejo, an assistant professor of computer science, show, the perception of AI’s emergent abilities is based on the metrics that have been used. “The mirage of emergent abilities only exists because of the programmers' choice of metric,” Schaeffer says. “Once you investigate by changing the metrics, the mirage disappears.”
🔗 Humane’s AI Pin Wants to Free You From Your Phone - The New York Times
For music, the device currently works only with Tidal, an unpopular music streaming service.
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This is completely ridiculous: I was going to say that someone at the Times must have decided that they only need to appeal to people browsing the site via their phones. Then I realized that this design is probably intended to make going to their web page in a browser (where ads and data-collection can be blocked) as miserable an experience as possible in the hope that I will be more likely to finally give in to their incessant pop-up nags to use their app instead.
🔗 Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation
Other columnists are gifted with a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad. Thomas Friedman is the Platonic Ideal of this type: taken seriously by important people and utterly full of shit. Will smart phones change the Middle East? Thomas Friedman will most certainly coin a phrase to answer that question, and his answer will be wrong. This sort of columnist is actually malicious, but hard to uproot. The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions, like everyone else.
I was talking with someone yesterday about local politics when the topic of one of our legislators at the federal level came up. As it turns out, person I was talking with (who shares my political affiliation) absolutely cannot stand this legislator (who is also of the same political affiliation). I was not terribly surprised, as it goes back to something this legislator said early in their political career. A lot of people were upset about it and much political hay has been made out of it in the years immediately following the kerfuffle.
But collectively they paint a picture of a society, and a culture, utterly unequipped to register the violence that is being done to it, merely because historical process is draped in the ribbons of “technology”. This violence is enacted simultaneously on the high street and the global stage. What makes me angry about how often we keep falling for it is not merely that we should know better, but what the costs of doing so actually are.
I bought this album right around the time it came out and listened to it a lot in the late 1990s. Thrash and industrial were among my favorite genres at the time, and Fear Factory had a pretty sweet spot right at the intersection of the two. For whatever reason, I don't think I have listened to Demanufacture at all in the intervening 20+ years. There was a mention of the band in something I was reading a few days ago, so I decided to revisit the album.
I wish that people would stop obsessively trying to catalog the qualities that make some piece of work uniquely human so as to be able to figure out what of all the stuff we do is valuable and instead focus on valuing the work that humans do because humans do it.