Speech to text generation

AI

I have been working on the writing of Gilles Deleuze for over 15 years, and so it is interesting to see his theories manifest in the computational science of AI neural networks and large language models.

If there has been a touch of anxiety and existential dread to 2023, it is because AI that could easily pass a Turing test has been created, leaving us to admit that our brains, our consciousness, maybe even our sentience is more biological, material, and mechanical than we ever believed. In essence, what is special about us, and are we evolving towards a future where our co-habitation and maybe even integration with AI will fundamentally upend what we thought it meant to be human?

my love

 

Spiritual Ascent

The hypothesis is that if we are going to live fulfilling lives, we must prioritize spiritual fulfillment: rest, caring, love, tenderness, fun, joy, weakness, pain, growth, community, communion with nature, exercise, etc. I would say that "back in the day", many people got these things mainly through religion. They also got the bad parts as well: guilt, shame, dominance, ignorance, violence, trauma, brainwashing, war, sexism, classism, racism, etc.

Religiosity, in my day-to-day, and in that of many of my peers, is minimally impactful. I don't go to minyan, or even pray every morning. Even beyond religion, I rarely engage spirituality actively. I often prioritize work, family obligations, friend obligations, social media, travel, consumerism, video games, housework, TV, restaurants, etc. ahead of any kind of meaningful spiritual fulfillment.

I must prioritize the things that are actually improving my spiritual fulfillment, and question the value of everything else. The idea that there is not enough time is a straw man. I was lying in bed doing transformational breathing, and I hit the 20-minute mark, and I had 10 minutes left to go, and I felt a real pang of guilt that I was spending a whole thirty minutes on this indulgent exercise and then, as my palms and legs tingled and I became lightheaded, I realized that anything else I did today, or even this week might not be as important as this moment of self-love and exploration. Challenging myself to breathe continuously for thirty minutes, having a mild out-of-body experience is exactly where I wanted to be. Everything else can piss off.

It begins with practice. Spirituality is not something to be engaged, thankfully, in the abstract. It is lived through. What are the practices that I will calendar to engage in this, and will I make it the priority, or will I let other obligations get in the way? How deep can I go into my mind and intellectualism? Where will it take me?

 

AI: The Story Up Till Now

 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/technology/ai-openai-musk-page-altman.html

The Age of Jedi

Where the people can sing, the poet can live

- This is no place for love.

- One day, perhaps, unimaginable generations hence, we will evolve into the knowledge that human beings are more important than real estate and will permit this knowledge to become the ruling principle of our lives. For I do not for an instant doubt, and I will go to my grave believing, that we can build Jerusalem, if we will.

- James Baldwin, "Nothing Personal"

The Montessori Method

 https://harpers.org/archive/2022/02/every-child-an-emperor-on-maria-montessori/

sick bass chops

 

Kendrick's Breathwork Song

 

Mid-Transition Risks

 

The end of automobiles

The end of automobiles

When I first got hooked on reading about Peak Oil, it was the mid-aughts, there was apocalypse on one side, and on the other a technological solution that would allow us to live exactly as we were ad infinitum. Now, nearly 20 years later, the two sides have moved closer together. On one hand, we didn't run out of oil, nor did it get prohibitively expensive. On the other, we have more research into hydrogen and batteries that may in fact pose a partial solution to the end of petroleum. That does not mean that we're not heading for a deep correction and a reconfiguring of our planned landscape.

We are still going to run out of petroleum. A host of solutions will come to the fore. But ultimately they will be more expensive. Our commuting and individual-use automobile lifestyle will end. People will have to live closer together and public transit will increase. Our capitalist economy is based upon the smooth and cheap transport of goods and people and when that ends, the economy will also suffer. The poorest nations will be hit the hardest. We don't have enough electricity or critical minerals to create a long-term battery-powered or hydrogen car infrastructure. Perhaps it will be golf cart cities at best.

Is the Tao in all things? 

What would it mean to dance without ego?

Poverty is a ever-present emergency

Poverty is a ever-present emergency

In squeezing businesses and people to the brink, the just-in-time business philosophy that began with Japanese auto industry in order to reduce inventories has morphed into just-enough for our workers and even the unemployed humans that want to try to get by on scarce public services. The philosophy that the average worker now understands is one that by impoverishing our neighbor, we enrich ourselves, will end with a nation impoverished, a tower of babel surrounded by empty parking decks.

This was a short reaction to reading Matthew Desmond's Poverty, By America

Why are you crying?

 

Democracy falls apart

 

 

Transportation

My assumption is that over the next 40 years, the amount of gas-powered vehicles will go down due to cost of fuel.  

Some will be replaced by electric vehicles or hybrids.

Ultimately, we don’t have enough generation capacity to power all the EVs, even if we could produce them.

The result? 

- Denser communities. 

- A shift towards public transportation. 

- Golf cart-like, short driving radius EVs. 

- Higher stratification as these vehicles will be more expensive. 

Does the bee understand it will die before it stings?

Poetry is a tenderness doubled

 

A culture is no better than its woods

 - W.H. Auden

Love is of the body

 "Love is of the body; not a body, but of the body."

- A Room with a View, E.M. Forster  

Another Great Day of Saving the Bees

 https://www.instagram.com/texasbeeworks/

Looking forward to 2037

 

You're the only power

 

Gene!

 

Lewis Lapham

 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-harpers-podcast/id1405872370?i=1000609289335

calmer woker softer slower

Capturing Democracy

"And I take that to be basically right in an important way with the result that the work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again. So we have to do work to introduce new governance mechanisms in the place of those that are not working.

"Now, this doesn’t always have to mean consultative process exactly. And I think one of the things that is exciting about the time we now live in is there’s lots of room for experimentation with alternative approaches to decision making."

Danielle Allen, 4/14/23

AI

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000604814130 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freaked-out-we-really-can-prepare-for-a-i/id1548604447?i=100060513289

Demis Hassabis: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-demis-hassabis.html

"I think that eventually, from a certain vantage point, the values of our current society are going to look incredibly sick.  

"This is a quite good time for more radical politics, to think about more radical political ideas."

-Ezra Klein, 4/7/23

Ruin, by Roxane Gay

 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/opinion/jordan-neely-killed.html

I been in the field like thе children of the corn

Jamaican Pan Jerk Chicken

 

 

beyond the tower of babel, a descent into depravity

 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/phoenix-businesses-homelessness.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/magazine/poverty-by-america-matthew-desmond.html

air is painless

 

Water and Agribusiness

 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/02/09/grim-reapers-american-farming-ian-frazier

When it stops / Feel it now

 https://www.instagram.com/p/CoDEGZUL9et/

B C

 

Why care for these dead bodies?

 Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends but the worms or fishes. Their owners were coming to the New World, as Columbus and the Pilgrims did,—they were within a mile of its shores; but, before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there is far more universal and convincing evidence—though it has not yet been discovered by science—than Columbus had of this; not merely mariners’ tales and some paltry drift-wood and sea-weed, but a continual drift and instinct to all our shores. I saw their empty hulks that came to land; but they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some shore yet further west, toward which we are all tending, and which we shall reach at last, it may be through storm and darkness, as they did. No doubt, we have reason to thank God that they have not been “shipwrecked into life again.” The mariner who makes the safest port in Heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for they deem Boston Harbor the better place; though perhaps invisible to them, a skillful pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest gales blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in halcyon days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his old hulk tosses in the surf here. It is hard to part with one’s body, but, no doubt, it is easy enough to do without it when once it is gone. All their plans and hopes burst like a bubble! Infants by the score dashed on the rocks by the enraged Atlantic Ocean! No, no! If the St. John did not make her port here, she has been telegraphed there. The strongest wind cannot stagger a Spirit; it is a Spirit’s breath. A just man’s purpose cannot be split on any Grampus or material rock, but itself will split rocks till it succeeds.

Thoreau, Cape Cod

Fire Monks

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/monks-wildfires-tassajara-big-sur.html

UMD

 

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