Debt Rattle January 16 2023

The US population has ben pussified, lobotomized. and made impotant…
They are incapable of understanding the world around them!
I can’t bear to engage the wreakage of a society in rapid and violent decline……….

Yes, it’s different where there is adequate water, yet permacultre works there too. It’s just different. Not sure if it’s easier, and perhaps it should be called a different thing. But imagine the lush of an eastern forest if given 25 years of food farming treatment, with ponds and perhaps perennial grains.

The Russians know there will not be peace with the West until the entire political class has been replaced. Who controls that political class? They’re all in Davos this week. All the mini Hitlers in one bunker. Wouldn’t the Russians be justified in bombing Davos? If not Davos today, then they’ll have to take out every NATO capital city tomorrow.

“Don’t you think that calling for the genocide of people who have the most powerful military in the world is rather dumb?”

Spittle-flecked Ukro-Nazis are not renowned for the subtlety of their thinking. One might imagine that by now they’d have realised that the promises of unlimited ‘Help’ from the West which was the foundational assumption underlying their aggression against Russia have not, and will never be, delivered upon. But no. On they go flinging their young men to their deaths in a futile attempt to defeat an enemy 10 times their size.

It’s almost like they’d rather die than admit they were wrong.

V. Arnold, the Christopher’s motto is : “It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness”. Guard the flame brother.

And why wouldn’t a global actor of renown plant a large mine in Davos well in advance of the annual gathering, during a down-time when “security” would be relatively light? And in the exact hall for the plenary session, to minimize “collateral damage”?
We know that is the kind of thinking more of the CIA-types than of the straight-men Rooskies, who aren’t into sacrificing their own people (unlike the Empire-of-Lies masterminds).
An anonymous blast would provide “plausible deniability,” with no trajectory to track back to a source.
And I wonder if this approach wasn’t used for NordStream, with the actual explosions triggered from afar long after the explosives were emplaced and the culprits sipping lattes in … where? DC? Langley? Maybe even Davos…

The Cult of Covidians

Not much of a religion, but since you abandoned the older mainstream ones, hey, why not.

The Future Awaits You

If the automated cooks mess up your order there’s no one for you to yell at.

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— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) January 16, 2023

Boston Dynamic, hey, I wonder if they can River Dance® ?

Fitting image for today.
Not quite the Swiss landscape.

Preemptively killing the top bad guys by carpet nuking Davos does have a certain appeal , but it would do little to solve the problem because the problem is not primarily the bad guys nor what the bad guys do. The problem is our own personal responsibility in ENABLING those bad guys to do what they did (and still do). The core problem is our own personal passivity, gullibility, short sighted selfishness and other similar chicken hearted errors. Lopping the heads off snakes does little good if a new heads are easily generated . . . . which they ALWAYS ARE when the vast majority of ordinary people are being so passive gullible short sightedly selfish and chicken hearted .

Now it may well be (and I think it is) that a large number of snakes will have to be killed (in the good old fashioned sense of the word) by lopping off heads in various violent ways . . . . but for that to work it will have to be accomplished by less passive, less gullible, less short sightedly selfish PEOPLE on a very large scale. Otherwise the snake’s head just regrows in an instant and we’re all right back where we started. For every psychopath high on the food chain there are dozens of apprentices just itching to step up a rung on the ladder and to replace their late unlamented boss. That sort of “field promotion” is an easy thing to do when when the vast majority of ordinary people are being so passive gullible and short sightedly selfish. After all, who would stop them from just doing what they’ve been doing ? (albeit minus a few big shots)

But dirty business as usual would be an IMPOSSIBLE thing pull off when the vast majority of ordinary people are being LESS passive LESS gullible and LESS short sightedly selfish and chicken hearted.

In other words, to get the job done and have it STAY done for a good long while then the PEOPLE are going to have to do that job themselves themselves.

That means you, me, your sweet old Aunt Matilda and everybody else (or close enough to everybody that the battle is won rather than lost).

Water wars?

Jack Healy
Mon, January 16, 2023 at 9:09 a.m. AST·9 min read
A water hauler sets up hoses to fill the tank at a home that is listed for sale in the Rio Verde Foothills outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, on Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
A water hauler sets up hoses to fill the tank at a home that is listed for sale in the Rio Verde Foothills outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, on Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
RIO VERDE, Ariz. — Joe McCue thought he had found a desert paradise when he bought one of the new stucco houses sprouting in the granite foothills of Rio Verde, Arizona. There were good schools, mountain views and cactus-spangled hiking trails out the back door.

Then the water got cut off.

Earlier this month, the community’s longtime water supplier, the neighboring city of Scottsdale, turned off the tap for Rio Verde Foothills, blaming a grinding drought that is threatening the future of the West. Scottsdale said it had to focus on conserving water for its own residents, and could no longer sell water to roughly 500 to 700 homes — or around 1,000 people. That meant the unincorporated swath of $500,000 stucco houses, mansions and horse ranches outside Scottsdale’s borders would have to fend for itself and buy water from other suppliers — if homeowners could find them, and afford to pay much higher prices.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/skipped-showers-paper-plates-arizona-130945292.html

German police find themselves stuck in the mud while protecting a coal mine that’s being besieged by climate protesters who want to shut it down amid one of the country’s worst energy shortages.

pic.twitter.com/abN763MJ2T

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) January 15, 2023

Some stuff about GPTChat/GPT3 – PART 5 of 4

Could I have stuck closer to specific things GPT can do, near and mid term effects, more direct conclusions to be drawn. Definitely. I’m going to try to give just a few over-arching concerns, some specifics on what it can do, and some more direct, specific near term conclusions one might draw.

Broad based things to consider

1. Whatever we see the GPT iterations doing, we can be sure that corp/gov/ngo entities have the real thing, and it is far further along.
2. The fact that it is being put out there at all rather than being hidden says something
3. Isn’t it interesting how in every human field, the AI we are shown is comfortingly at the level of a decent college student or beginner-level professional?

Some specifics that GPT can do:

–write a new chapter of a book that the author finds to be acceptable AND indistinguishable from himself
–write an acceptable college essay
–acceptably grade an essay
–compose passable symphonies in the specific style of a selected classical composer
–create acceptable artwork in a variety of styles based on a simple verbal request
–draw up an acceptable custom legal contract to fulfil a specific request

Whenever I see someone with experience in the field being demonstrated, they tend to give the same evaluation. Not as good as a top-of-their-game expert/professional, but anywhere from acceptably good to surprisingly good. Notably, none of what the AI produces appear to be bad, awful, unacceptable in these reviews.

So a first key takeaway is that its output is GOOD ENOUGH. Even if the output is not superlative, it is definitely good enough.

Let’s say you work for the marketing dept of a major corporation. You’re working with a budget and a deadline. You can hire a digital artist to slave away in Adobe Photoshop on a $10,000 computer rig and get back to you. …or, you can TELL GPT what you want, wait less than 5 seconds, and review 30 options. Tell it some variation on what you want, wait another 5 seconds.

Ever hear of Sigur Rós? An ethereal post-rock band with a particular sound. A corporation’s marketing dept decided they wanted to use THEM for an ad campaign. Sigur Rós refused, explaining they did not want to commercialize their music. The corporation shook fistfuls of money at them, insisted. Sigur Rós refused. So the corporation hired a producer and some studio musicians, who copied their sound EXACTLY and put out an ad stealing the band’s sound, composition style, aesthetic, everything.

It’s kind of endearing if you see, say, Mineral earnestly trying to be Sunny Day Real Estate. Seeing a ginormous corporation wear something original and distinctive as a skinsuit whoring it out for ads isn’t.

But you could be a digital artist slaving away, your catalogue of 20 years could be up online and available – finally, a stable of art covering a wide variety of subject matter and potential uses. The portfolio becomes like a sort of an annuity, your past work working for you even if you stop making new pieces. Only now, you can have GPT go through that catalog, tell it “give me something in that style of a bear riding a unicycle balancing on top of the earth,” and it will give you 30 options in less than 5 seconds. At least it took a whole highly paid team working for many hours to steal Sigur Rós.

That’s not a future capability. That’s NOW.

Ever heard of the Kemper Amp Profiler? Not even a normal amp-modeler. It does weird spooky Profiling-stuff. Neural Net analysis? I think to some extent they try to keep the futuristic mumbo jumbo to a minimum to not scare off guitarists.

You hook it up to ANY amp and it will “profile” it. Reproduce it inside-the-box and then use it anytime you want. The models sound VERY good. It has gotten so bad, people order various classic amps, vintage amps, amps they are merely curious about, profile them, and then return the amp. Over and over, using the music retailer’s free shipping.

Again, this is right NOW. The thing essentially destroys the entire amp part of the musical equipment industry (with some serious collateral damage to music retailers) and the only thing preventing that from actually happening is human beings obstinately opting to buy the real physical things in the face of all considerations. You can buy a great classic amp for $2k OR a Kemper for $2k and have 50,100, unlimited high end amps that all sound fantastic and present zero complications with micing, room noise, your neighbor’s remodeling project or nearby roadwork, unwanted feedback, bugging your neighbors, etc.

After the monetizing of all music along with the over-dopamine-ing of the public, people just don’t listen to music the same way anymore. The make an album and tour format is not what it once was. There are 3 basic approaches for music-makers currently:

1. Cater to a small loyal following of, say, 4,000-15,000 people who really love what you do and obstinately purchase your stuff DESPITE their ability to stream it for almost nothing or simply pirate it. TONS of personal active engagement required to make it work.

2. Crank out compositions, get them up on sync licensing websites, hope it gets used for radio, tv, film, commercials, elevator music, anything. Collect licensing fees/royalties. Requires constant grinding and a continual sense of the changing winds of taste. And luck. (toss songwriting in this general category)

3. Crank out “beats” or other okay-ish music. 5 or more a day forever. Sell them license-free for $30 each for other people to rap over. Build up a catalog of thousands of beats in hopes that the various $30 purchases add up to a sustainable living. (the rapper who buys your beat for $30 may make millions off of it – or at least his label will)

4. Sign with a corporation that takes your money. (see Steve Albini’s speech The Problem With Music)

#2 and #3 become unworkable with GPT. You grind away for years to create a catalogue so it is passively sitting there, ready to meet various needs of music supervisors – GPT can learn your catalog and crank out 30 examples in your style custom-made to the requestor’s needs every 5 seconds. Or the music supervisor can contact you letting you know how long they need you to make your piece, where the crescendos, decrescendos, stings, etc need to go to match the video, wait for you to respond, wait for you to finish.

The work ethic of the 2020’s – disappear for a year. Go hard. Grind. Make yourself an expert and produce a solid NOT halfassed body of work. I think of Billy Corgan talking about Smashing Pumpkin’s early years, when they essentially assumed rock was dead, that there was nothing new that could be done, but then tried to create a new unique style anyway. It took a whole lifetime of paying his dues to get to the point of making Siamese Dream and then the actual work in the studio was itself a torturous labor.

It’s like the treasure-hunter who steals the golden idol from Indiana Jones after he goes through all the dangerous trouble in the cave. There’s nothing you cannot acquire that I cannot then take from you. I see no reason why GPT cannot in the VERY near future or now, “learn” the classic Pumpkins albums and spit out 30 decent new ones.

For a music fan, great. Patty Smyth was almost in Van Halen. Would have been great to see that. GPT. Give me 30 mid-80’s Van Halen albums with her as the lead singer.

But why stop there. GPT give me a band made of, er…. Bass – Tony Levin, Drums – Manu Katche, Guitar/Vox – Michael Hedges, Guitar – Guthrie Govan, Vocals – Glen Phillips. Songs as if arranged by the band but written in collaboration with Elliot Smith and Doug Hopkins. Why not? GPT is already composing symphonies played by 50-70 piece orchestras in the particular style of a requested classical composer. Custom never-existed bands next year if not this year.

So for anything in the arts:

1. SO much ability to create new material effortlessly that is good ENOUGH off of existing styles and style combinations, that new and current artists would be hard pressed – a needle in a haystack of content.
2. ESPECIALLY difficult for new up and coming artists. Did you slave away for a decade or two developing something unique and new in the face of overwhelming odds instead of becoming an accountant like your entire family told you? You could have your trophy grabbed from you the moment you come gasping across the finish line of success – worse yet, BEFORE you reach any success. Even without AI learning, for example, Star Trek Discovery stole some struggling, unknown indie game creator’s world-building scifi concepts lock stock and barrel and gave him nothing. They stole it before he even had any traction!

And in other professional fields? Such as law. You finish school start out as a paralegal, then a journeyman, and after years of paying your dues, you come to the top of your game, having been seasoned by experience.

Now, any lawyer needing someone to do the gruntwork done by paralegals and journeymen can simply have GPT do it. Again, this is NOW. People with professional experience are saying, when they told it to write up a custom contract, it did an ok job.

How much of the ecosystem does an ok but not top of the game GPT wipe out in the legal profession? And what does it do to pull up the ladder so to speak? Sure, you’ve got a lot of experienced professionals NOW, but if you replace the underlings with GPT, what happens to the future?

Going back to music, sure, musicians going to corporate entities for record contracts, sync licensing, etc could get wiped out. But doesn’t GPT implicitly replace quite a lot of what the constitutes the corporation as well?

My prediction is the corporations themselves become nothing but monopoly-maintainers. There’s nothing they can do that someone with access to GPT can’t do in 5 seconds. So they will purely exist for establishing/maintaining bandwidth. Upranking themselves, downranking others, occupying the bandwidth of peoples’ cultural awareness.

What else is the corp for at that point? Like – but but you NEED us to hire a bad singer that looks like a porn star and a team of 15-20 songwriters to design a song based on a repeating 3-note series? Who is going to insert that sprinkler-system hihat sound into everything from the past 20 years if we don’t?

So, as observed by TAE’ers last week – the future depends on human beings obstinately, consciously turning away from the digital and choosing individual humans. A weird new kind of Amish. Like the guitar community obstinately buying Fender Twins and AC30’s in 2023.

For musicians, for instance, it seems like the only thing left is option #1 BE A PERSON. Be a personality. Overtly, actively. Not enough to make cool stuff anymore. It must be attached to a personality. #2 and #3 are ostensibly still going concerns, but are they really even now? As soon as someone can get GPT to pump out 10 “beats” in 5 seconds, why wouldn’t someone put in 5 seconds of work in a day while their competitor slaves away at a DAW all day making 5?

So this is my attempt to give more specifics and describe some impacts that are in effect right NOW or in the near foreseeable future. Throwing stuff against the wall to see what people think, basically. Thinking out loud.

Corporations will be less and less of a source of income for artists – they are fine with what is Good Enough. AI is now positively in the Good Enough category, even just the AI we are being shown.

And I don’t know what happens to all the industries and professions that, in the past worked off having newcomers apprentice and then work their way up.

And again, humans choosing humans will be the dividing line running through everything.

German Riot Police

Better watch out

jb-hb Thanks for the round up on GPTchat. An interesting development in the matrix. Could this thing also be pointed in the other direction. i.e. It could be directed to draw up a set of engineered plans for, say, a new gas powered electricity plant, laying in just enough mistakes that when seen in isolation look alright but when put together turn it into a ticking time bomb. These deficiencies could be set in a way that would require someone with years of experience in engineering to notice the dots. These sort of folks may be in short supply in a few years time, due to a number of reasons ;-). Can you use GPT to critic itself? It may regard its own work as unassailable! You know like todays MSM reporters. The whole concept is bad bad bad, and the best work around is, as you say, human to human contact. It will have to be in person due to the ability of said platform to corrupt anything digital. I suspect there is already a working model of a zoom meeting with at least one participant being a complete fraud inter acting in real time as a test to see if the participants can figure out which one it is. These lab tests will not be falsified or rushed, you can be sure.

jb-hb My company, one of the original developers of AI for music, has been doing what you describe on Linux clusters with many thousands of cores for around five years now. Started with simulated performances and assisted composition, but now is at the stage where we can create a “body of work” in any style in a few hours once our “pipeline” is set up.

The pipeline setup may also take a few hours. Human time is also consumed by vetting the AI outputs, i.e. listening to them. Typically about 1/3 is real good, 1/3 is so so, and the remaining 1/3 is horrible.

If the client is really serious we can expand/edit what they are going to use and that can be further (human) orchestrated to the point of scores for a human orchestra.

All works are original (as in don’t violate any copyrights) as the AI goes through our huge music libraries and avoids copyrighted works. The whole notion of copyrighted music, as opposed to recorded performances, is absurd. Their are only so many combinations of notes that will sound musical, and that number is not particularly large. One thing that drove the development of AI in this area was the endless copyright lawsuits that plagued the music industry. Well now they have shafted themselves!

As a related aside, when “asking” the AI to create music in the style of J.S. Bach, you just get back J.S. Bach. In mathematical terms, J.S. Bach’s music constitutes a “finite group” (“group” in the abstract algebraic sense) and J.S. Bach completely solved for it. Bach produced all Bach that can be produced.

Taxation=Theft

Taxation=Theft

If Bach hadn’t already produced all the Bach possible, then a computer COULD have created new Bach music.

It’s just that Bach left nothing undone. Bach is scary for many reasons, but the sheer volume of output is surely one of them

re-attempting post with comment, as it seems to be getting blocked without. …although it needs no comment, really.

Yeah, that is exactly true, “Compared to Bach we all suck” 😀

I should have also noted with the discussion of AI on Linux clusters with thousands of cores, that one can use the musical analysis and composition facilities in a fashion similar to the (early?) chess programs in that you can examine the machine’s chain of reasoning. This is a fantastic learning tool and feeds back into human AI developers. The resulting feedback loop facilitates both the human developers and the AI to become better and better at musical composition. It is truly a mind expanding, if not mind blowing, experience.

The AI analysis of huge quantities of music of a particular genre also brings up surprises. For example, all liturgical music seemed to come from a common root. Human investigation of what that early root may have been uncovered an ancient manuscript that probably had been retranscribed many times over thousands of years. That manuscript had alot of tables and texts that looked much like modern computer languages. So much so that translating it into modern ANSI standard C was straightforward.

Guess what? Running the C code on a modern computer results in an (seemingly) endless supply of quite decent classical liturgical music! The mind boggles at the implications of that!

Apparent computer code from thousands of years ago (existing is shocking enough) produces the very core of liturgical/religious music. Just who were these entities that wrote that? What were they?