All posts by keith

Monday Musings

Monday Musings –9SEP24

Let’s start the week off with a glorious cover of Devo’s Gut Feeling:

From Ted Chiang. Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art: https://archive.is/uTnxC

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

This is a fairly long but good article on why AI isn’t going to make art for us anytime soon.

Well that’s it for today. I’ve been sleeping most of it for some reason. I hope this finds you awake ,and feeling good.

Health, Life

“Exercise May Be the Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known” – The Ringer

 

Euan Ashley joins Derek to discuss the benefits of exercise and our current scientific understanding of why it helps

Source: “Exercise May Be the Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known” – The Ringer

Given that I have sarcopenia due to chemo, etc. this is important.

Ashley: I think it’s because it’s just such a potent intervention. I mean, I think of it as an intervention as a doctor. Exercise is just the single most important intervention you can think of for your health. There are plenty of other important ones. I’m sure we could talk about diet, we could talk about sleep, we could talk about other things. But I truly believe that nothing is more important among those than physical activity and exercise. And that there are deep-seated reasons within our human history to believe that that’s a reasonable assumption to make.
Monday Musings, Music, my art

Monday Musings — 2SEP24

Well Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds newest album dropped last Friday. It’s beautiful and haunting. You can stream it In many different places. Like here: https://open.spotify.com/album/0TRr4JGEPJ4eAb5QKRaunf

and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIN5F5UNw5E

Or buy the damn thing, you won’t regret it.

I’ve been in the studio more this past week. Working on the (long delayed) comic, and I’m making headway. I belong to a zoom group that meets between 9am and 11am weekdays, that is helping me keep up with the script writing, which I was having problems with. The group keeps me kinda accountable, but of course, there are days I have appointments and can’t join in. Most afternoons are spent in the studio, penciling pages, which sometimes goes well, and sometimes: not so much. 🙂

Today is Labor Day in the US and Canada.

Labor Day is a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the first Monday of September to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements in the United States.[1][2][3]

Beginning in the late 19th century, as the trade union and labor movements grew, trade unionists proposed that a day be set aside to celebrate labor. “Labor Day” was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, which organized the first parade in New York City. In 1887, Oregon was the first state of the United States to make it an official public holiday. By the time it became an official federal holiday in 1894, thirty states in the U.S. officially celebrated Labor Day.[4]

Canada’s Labour Day is also celebrated on the first Monday of September. More than 150 other countries celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1, the European holiday of May Day. May Day was chosen by the Second International of socialist and communist parties to commemorate the general labor strike in the United States and events leading to the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago, Illinois, from May 1 – May 4, 1886.[5][6]

Contents

The best union is the Wobblies (IWW), you can join them even if your workplace isn’t organized.

You don’t need to be already organizing with the IWW at your job to join and help build our union. Join today and connect to other workers in the IWW in your area’s closest General Membership Branch. You aren’t alone in the IWW!

That’s it for today. Check out my other posts from last week to see some cool art.

Remember that you have good days and bad days. With help from others the good days can outnumber the bad ones. Find those people who can help you to make them good.

Art, books, copyright

Ursula K Le Guin’s speech at National Book Awards: ‘Books aren’t just commodities’ | National Book Awards | The Guardian

My love for LeGuin knows no bounds

In a passionate speech at the National Book Awards, the science fiction author, who was picking up a lifetime achievement award, takes aim at publishers who put profit before art

Source: Ursula K Le Guin’s speech at National Book Awards: ‘Books aren’t just commodities’ | National Book Awards | The Guardian