Quick bits:

• I published a bug-fix release for my Solitaire game.

• I picked up a book on playwriting, where one of the recommendations is “Typeface: Use pica size type, not elite.”¹¹1 Pica and Elite refer to pitch. Pica is 10 pitch (horizontally 10 characters per inch), and Elite is 12 pitch (12 characters per inch). As I understand it, both are 12 points: 72 points per inch, vertically, and 6 lines per inch, thus 12 points per line.  I think this book might be several decades out of date.

• Cyclists in Berlin continue to be a menace. In the last few weeks, I’ve been nearly hit twice while walking next to an outdoors restaurant where hot food is served. Sooner or later, this’ll result in an accident with not just scrapes and bruises and broken bones, but burn wounds as well.

• I started a new acting class, in 31°C (89°F) weather. I couldn’t quite focus. I long for cooler weather.

Quick tech bits:

• In this hot weather (31°C, 89°F), my macBook Air M2 seems extraordinarily slow. I believe that this might be the thermal throttling kicking in.²²2 I first wrote about the thermal throttling issues back in Week­notes 2022 W40: Fire. 

• I have switched to Zed again as my main code editor, from Visual Studio Code. Half the reason why I’m switching is because I can’t stand a status quo.

• I learned that Node.js will ignore a shebang line (#!/usr/bin/env node). This, combined a JavaScript bundler, means you can create self-contained CLI tools that you can execute like any other command. Neat!

• A pet peeve: I am so used to the ⌘-R keyboard combination for executing queries (like SQL queries), but in browser-based apps, that keyboard combination typically means “reload page.” Un-training muscle memory is tough.

• My RSS feed collection has grown big, and I need to rethink How I organize my RSS feeds. I wish I could organize feeds by topic (like week­notes, fiction writing, game development, …), but many RSS feeds are multi-topic — like my week­notes.

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NaNoWriMo put something out about their stance on AI,³³3 See also my note on Generative AI. And yes, I grew sick of putting “AI” in quotes.  and, boy is it a garbage take:

We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.

Condemning the use of AI is classist and ableist, they say. I disagree. Their three-pronged explanation is wrong, too:

• NaNoWriMo says that condemning the use of generative AI is classist, because “not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing.”

  Generative AI is not cheap — it is incredibly expensive, even.⁴⁴4 It is very costly for the environment, too; AI is fueling the climate collapse.  For now, the costs are borne by tech companies and their investors to drive adoption (capture the users) so that they can begin charging them later. This is a classic tech/corporate strategy that has been repeated over and over again.

• They also say that condemning the use of generative AI is ableist, because “not all brains have [sic] same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing.”

  The output of generative AI cannot be trusted, and if you are unable to properly judge the output of generative AI in terms of quality and correctness, then you should absolutely not be using that generative AI model in the first place.

• Lastly, they describe general access issues, saying “writers don’t always have equal access to resources along the chain.”

  I fail to see how generative AI can have any impact here at all.

I’ve written before about how low of an opinion I have about this tech.⁵⁵5 e.g. in Week­notes 2024 W15: String of bad luck and Week­notes 2024 W32: AI cult.  I’m not going to rehash my arguments here; go take a peek at my previous writing if you’d like.

About NaNoWriMo specifically, though: using generative AI takes away the fun and the challenge of writing a novel. In fact, it entirely misses the point of why you’d do this in the first place!

Creative people do not benefit from generative “AI.” It is the tech companies and their investors who incessantly push their LLM tech onto others, and people in power who demand higher and higher productivity.⁶⁶6 An executive at my previous employer stated that employees could choose either using AI or get used to twelve-hour working days. A coworker assured me it was just tongue-in-cheek, but — is it really? 

The fun about writing a novel is the process, not the output. The output of generative AI is regurgitated mediocrity, and I don’t think anybody wants to read an AI-generated novel.

There are good non-AI tools out there, like thesauruses and dictionaries, dictation software, spelling and grammar checkers, writing prompts, and more. Those are often free or at least cheap — much cheaper than the generative AI tools out there.

Learning how to write is part of the fun, too! The shortcut that generative AI promises is that you don’t need to learn but can get straight to the good stuff — creating the content you want — but then you’ve cheated yourself out of having fun.

Learning is not just fun, but essential. We cannot offload the hard work onto generative AI, because then we’ll stop learning how to learn. Imagine a generation of people who don’t know how to create, and only know how to use generative AI — a certainly dystopian future.

Perhaps what bothers me the most is that NaNoWriMo dresses up generative AI as if it is this power for democracy and fairness and justice. They couldn’t be more wrong; the people who make and promoting generative AI technology think the diametrical opposite.

Bizarrely, even the AI company that sponsors NaNoWriMo disagrees with NaNoWriMo’s stance on AI:

We fundamentally disagree with the sentiment that criticism of AI tools in [sic] inherently ableist or classist.⁷⁷7 This citation and the one above both had grammatical mistakes. I find this curious, because neither organization/company seems to be using the technology that they claim to be so fond of. Both errors were caught by the built-in macOS grammar and spelling checker. 

The good news is that creative writing of any sort can be done entirely independently from NaNoWriMo.

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Generative AI is also a fluff generator. If I provide a 20-word prompt and I get a 2000-word output, then only $20 / 2000 = 1$ of the story is going to have meaning; the remaining 99% of the words will be nothing but fluff — meaningless filler that nobody wants to read.⁸⁸8 Notion has this “Make longer” feature, which takes a sentence as input, and uses a LLM to spit out something that has more words. Why this feature exists is beyond me; I cannot imagine anyone deliberately wanting filler content. 

When I edit a draft, I decide — like any good writer, I suppose — on every word that goes into the draft. Each word is chosen for a specific purpose. If a word doesn’t fit the purpose, it gets replaced or cut. Generative AI can’t do that.

You could go over the output of a generative AI model and edit the heck out of it until it fits what you wanted, but that defeats the purpose of using a generative AI model in the first place.

This applies to other media as well, like images and video. When I see an AI-generated image or video, I know that there are a thousand elements in there that were not deliberately created by the author. It’s mostly incidental, which is the reason AI-generated content feels so bizarre, so wrong, so otherworldly.

No matter how good and realistic generative AI will get, it cannot surpass human creativity specifically because there is no human involvement.

Humans create art to tell stories and share their experiences. Generative AI cannot tell stories and does not experience, and it is therefore fundamentally incapable of generating art — no matter how advanced the technology gets.

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Entertainment:

• Moonlight⁹⁹9 Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins, written by Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney (A24, Plan B Entertainment, PASTEL, 2016).  is wonderful and is worth a rewatch.

• Nimic¹⁰¹⁰10 Nimic, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, written by Efthimis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos and David Kolbusz (Droga5, Droga5, Merman, 2020).  is a delightfully weird 12-minute film. I remember saying “what the fuck?” out loud.

• Midsommar¹¹¹¹11 Midsommar, written and directed by Ari Aster (A24, B-Reel Films, Nordisk Film, 2019).  — what a film! A gruesome masterpiece. This film is flooded in sunlight (as the title would suggest), which is a rarity for horror (or horror-adjacent) films.

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Tweets and toots:

• Sven A. Schmidt on his smart cat troubles: Some cats are terrifyingly smart and capable.

Links:

• Why Are Movies So Obsessed With Trains? (Patrick (H) Willems)

• AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds (Cam Wilson for Crikey)

• Intersect (Oscilloscope Music): New Jerobeam Fenderson just dropped!

Tech links:

• The Humble Link (Jim Nielsen): At one point, I decided to publish my week­notes on Instagram as well, but then I realized that you cannot link from an Instagram post to anywhere else. Ugh. (I deleted my Instagram account soon after.)

• YubiKeys are vulnerable to cloning attacks thanks to newly discovered side channel (Dan Goodin for Ars Technica): I’ve got a few YubiKeys. Fortunately, this vulnerability is exceedingly difficult to exploit: “The attacks require about $11,000 worth of equipment and a sophisticated understanding of electrical and cryptographic engineering. The difficulty of the attack means it would likely be carried out only by nation-states or other entities with comparable resources and then only in highly targeted scenarios.”