Jonny Greenwood

Name your top three favorite guitarists.

Genre doesn’t matter, just three guitarists whose work blows you away.

* Bill Orcutt
* Marc Ribot
* Mary Halvorson

(Ouch, almost impossibly hard to pick my top three. Sorry, my other favorites...)

If an AI was a good creative co-brain it would say; this bit’s shit; that’s weird; you wrote that metaphor already; who talks like that?; wow the snarky girl suddenly got polite; who cares what a tree looks like; bored now!; that rhymed, cut it; what does this add?; you spoilt the joke…

Sorry, but I thought the lamp was edible.

THE WAY INN | Kirkus Reviews Kafka updated to the 21st century.

There was a cool book with that premise! www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...

A screenshot of an error message saying "Error / ! / Not Found / Rate Limit Exceeded / Try Again"

Not with a bang, but with an "Error, Try again"

Steve Aylett's The Book Lovers is remarkable. It has the densest occurrence of profound and hilarious one-liners of any book I've ever read (except maybe Steve Aylett's The Heart of the Original, which would be an excellent companion piece).

It's freeing and actually kind of fun to ditch social media when it goes bad! We'll meet again on the next place...

I'm reading this now -- so wonderful!

🏰 Upon reading this cryptic message, you can’t help but think that this is a thinly-veiled attempt at teasing an upcoming announcement. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow... 👑

Do you have a favorite Portis? (Mine is probably Masters of Atlantis)

Woah! That is wonderful

Pax Pamir is one of the best board games of recent years! The real-life players are trying to thrive alongside or in-spite-of the Imperial "players" of the "Great Game".

wehrlegig.com/products/pax...

Playtime's one of my all-time favorites -- shortest 3 hour movie I can think of! (Though when I first saw it in college, I found it boring. Probably didn't help that I saw it on a tiny dorm room tv)

Just seen on a neighbor’s front door:

“THE FORCE IS LIKELY NOT WITH YOU.”

I found all the recorders! They were in the crushed cardboard box labeled "recorders," but first I had to take out all the boxes on top, one of which was labeled "MISC - PLEASE SORT THIS BOX" (which I had never done and still haven't. But I did take out all the corroded batteries that were in there)

Playing music! Learning new instruments, and making music as weirdly as I can

1879

I took the rattler to Forest Hill, and touched for..a kipsy full of clobber (clothes).

Macmillan's Magazine October 501/2

(via the subscription of my local library!)

So, since it is clearly possible to write amazing novels without using LLMs, I will keep trying to do that. It would take just as much work to write something good with LLMs as without,

Unless you are a good writer, how would you ever know text the LLM extruded was any good? Novels are complicated! It takes time and thought to see how everything connects! (I know because I have written half a dozen. Are they good? They are not! But I recognize they are not...)

But the idea you could squirt out a good novel in a few days? Ludicrous.

But can you make good art from them? Here I'm more agnostic. I don't see any real reason why you couldn't make a good novel using an LLM, if (important part) you put the same amount of creativity and work into it as writing a novel without one.

LLMs aren't the kind of tools you own, they're the kind you rent from a greedy owner who is just itching to jack up the prices once you rely on them, or to change how they work on a whim.

Longer version of my thoughts: The LLM companies are obviously bad and I don't trust them one bit. This would probably be a good enough reason to avoid using LLMs for anything important.

The "ai is just a tool like any other" argument is so dumb. It's a bad tool. Do you rent your hammers from a creepy tech bro? One who is drooling to jack up that rent once its catastrophic failure rate falls just a bit more? Even it you could make good art with a plagiarism machine, you shouldn't.

I think his point is that slop's always existed and that human creativity can still be applied to a project using AI tools. I haven't/won't read his novel, but from an old interview it does seem that human creativity was involved. It's still not a compelling argument for why AI must be accepted!

Two of my favorites!

I am walking down the street when someone throws a pickle at me from a moving car. I try to swat it aside with my badminton racquet but the pickle jams in the strings

From the 1973 Tolkien Calendar, Tim Kirk's painting of Mount Doom erupting. The silhouette of a small hobbitlike figure can be seen against the wave of fire destruction.

Happy Downfall-of-Sauron Day to you. But remember: "Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again."

I found out about Greenaway and Nyman in the weirdest possible way. The library had 2 CDs in its "alternative" section, and one was The Best of Michael Nyman. I checked it out on a whim and thought the music was awesome enough to check out the movies (mostly Greenaway) it was from. So good together!