Face it--The Pod Bay Doors are Not Going to Open

 I'll open with a digression. A "pre-digression," if you will. I wanted to use the expression whining and pewling in my opening sentence, but thought I better check the spelling of pewling. Is it puling? Turns out, it varies, sort of. The two Google hits at the top referenced Shakespeare, and then Peter Pan. So pewling is an archaic term, though I'm not so old that it would have rolled off my tongue with such alacrity--the whole thing could be traced back to the the time that great big book fell on my head at the library when I was a kid. If you believe in that sort of thing. 

This post is about AI. I mention that early in the post, in case you want to hit backspace now and go back to the Weather Underground site, to save you some time. What's at the top of my head at the moment is, how can I write to differentiate my "product" from that of an AI LLM? To throw in a few grammatical or punctuation errors is just too easy. 

Anyway; moving on. 

I'm used to the idea of AI now, and to me it's just one more irritant in today's technological world, like spam email, cell phone apps, or car dashboards that have a learning curve. 

I don't "fear" AI. When I write something, I absolutely know that somewhere there is a human who is writing better stuff than me. I might even resent them if I knew who they were and it seemed like they were so good that writing well was effortless for them. So now there's AI also. It may produce a good story worth reading (I'm still not so sure about that, though,) and so might I. Nothing has really changed.

I will also say that I put very little extra value in a piece of writing just because it is completely and totally free of grammatical and spelling errors.

In addition to all that--and I just thought of this--the existence of AI writing may trigger a good effect among human writers. We may strive now to make our writing more human, and this may result in some pretty interesting stuff. As far as the "hack" human writers, of which there are aplenty, it seems like their lifeless and unimaginative stuff that takes so long to churn out just won't be able to compete.

End of Blog entry, mistakes and all. I'm not even going to check. This is very liberating. Silver lining! 

Conservative Readers?

 I know this blog is fairly pathetic, statistically, in terms of readership, (despite my engaging run on sentences,) but I wonder if I have any conservative readers. If I do, I want to say I am trying hard to be inclusive, and I recognize that most political or ideological issues have at least two sides. Furthermore, I don't claim to be right all the time; only that at any given moment I think I'm right--that is until I see otherwise, whether from internal logic or external conversation. 

That said, I see the logic, that is, I understand, in some conservative takes on some issues. Not mostly, but I can see their point. What I have trouble with is the underlying philosophy that government should leave people alone so that the "social order" can shake itself down, with winners at the top and losers at the bottom. 

I actually wonder if all the Trump supporters or far-right conservatives I know think that they are the "winners," or at least if they think they can become so if only left alone by the government. I would imagine it would be difficult to support Trump and Musk right now if I thought it meant I was going to be a peon in the new feudalistic order that would arise under them given enough time. I would much rather be any ordinary citizen in the country of Jefferson. 

Sunday Musings in Central Standard Time on Less-than-optimal Sleep

 I want to write another blog post--I mean, it's about time--but there's so much going on and almost all of it outside my control. The one situation I seem to have stewardship over is the making of an appointment to repair a root canal, which may be easier than ousting the GOP or its offending parts but still not something you would characterize as "fun." Plus I got some weird virus over the night that's making my body ache and my brain feel like it's floating in an insular, room-temperature bath of incredulity and dread. Although the latter might have to be referred back to the GOP thing. 

I have just one or two observations regarding this. Now, I'm not an "Internet hater" but it occurred to me that without it, recent history might have had, by necessity, gone another way. Maybe a better way.  I love to say that when King George said something stupid or obnoxious, it took six weeks for the news to reach the per-Revolutionary War Colonists. I can't help but think if they had Internet back then it would have gone worse. 

Anyway, maybe I'm wrong but I'm pretty certain that without the Internet, without computers and databases, in a world where bookkeeping was done by clerics, it would be very hard indeed to wreak so much havoc on a country in such little time as we have witnessed lately. 

Or maybe in writing this blog post I'm just pandering to a fantasy where a government pseudo-agent is beating on the door of a government office and is suddenly and violently repelled by a well-placed musket ball.