super excited to have the one and only Jeff Whittington in the studio

one more reason people like vinyl: conciseness

AI is currently in the "worker empowerment" phase - everyone keeps talking about how they use it to accomplish more in their jobs.

The end state is that your job is gone.

The first use of computers in printing was of course word processing (ASCII based). We replaced typewriters with better typewriters.

Then came the GUI and we eliminated the entire printing division.

Then came the internet and we eliminated the magazine altogether.

People are only seeing the current, intermediary phase of AI and are completely missing the big picture, which is disintermediation.

The future of AI is that "artists" and "creators" and "dev teams" go the way of typesetters post MS Word.

this is a post about ai

The Black influence on popular music in the 20th century is what defines the overwhelming majority of 20th century American popular music. It's what made almost all the important breakthroughs! Without it, you don't get jazz, blues, rock, or hip-hop!

Basically descriptive of the entire British invasion. Elvis, too.

Mick Jagger's entire act can be described as a white guy from Dartford, Kent trying his best to do a James Brown impersonation (highly complementary)

We're the Uber drivers of the information highway and everyone drives a Tesla.

Likewise the early internet. Remember the blogosphere?

The original vision was that each person would have their own site which fully expressed their views and personality.

Now everyone just pays rent to substack or medium and everything looks the same.

The 80s and 90s were the heydey of PERSONAL COMPUTING.

Those of us on the leading edge believed we were bringing emancipation to the individual. This was supposed to be LIBERATING tech, giving information weaponry to the common person.

By the early 90s that world had moved to Usenet or AOL/CompuServe and by 2000 most online communities had moved to the web. Now they mostly live in apps.

I first started using "social media" in 1983: dialup bulletin boards. I even ran one for a year or two.

Almost everything that exists today in social media, we had back then, in microdoses. Ebay, Tinder, 4chan - a tiny version of all those things was always going on online.

Let's look at the budget for new schools

*taps sign*
bsky.app/profile/ripr...

And even when it's more than "paperwork" it's still usually not anything we'd normally consider criminal behavior. In all such cases the obvious right thing to do is get these people in the system provided there's nothing prohibiting it. Instead, no, let's spend billions brutalizing people? Huh?

JFC it's like these people have never had to deal with a bureaucracy.

I like to say "imagine your driver's license is one day out of date so they throw you immediately in prison" to try to break through this word "illegal"

In the majority of cases it's literally paperwork issues nothing more.

I will add, on a more personal note, I think what the "Religious Right" have done to politics in the last 50-60 years is an absolute travesty, so I'm very cautiously hopeful that Talarico represents the possibility to subvert the entire movement, which would change so much in America for the better.

So on essentially that calculation alone I'm giving my endorsement to James Talarico and my full support to Jasmine Crockett in all of her future political endeavors.

It's an ugly calculus and I could be very wrong but I don't think Talarico will be a turn off to the Black voters that Crockett can energize in nearly the same way that Crockett will be a turn off to the white voters that Talarico can energize.

So this raises the completely pragmatic question: if I would love to have either candidate, which one do I see most likely to win?

But the thing is:

The people that will get flipped by Talarico's subversive message are the same people that won't be able to hear Crockett, because she is a Black woman.

I know this in my gut.

Which brings me to the problem with Crockett, which is the cynicism here: she's a Black woman.

I know I'm going to get dragged for saying it even though I like her as a candidate. A lot!

The reason Talarico is so subversive is that he uses the language and mannerisms of traditional conservative religious Texans.

You just cannot come at Talarico from the point of view of Christianity. He'll eat you alive and resurrect your bones in three days.

The thing is, as a middle aged white man from Texas, I can tell you that Talarico is the most subversive candidate in my lifetime. This guy has precisely the approach required to grab the attention of millions of otherwise low information R voters in Texas.

I'm endorsing James Talarico and this is why:

First off, both Talarico and Jasmine Crockett are outstanding candidates and the entire world would be better off with either of them replacing John Cornyn.

I admit that my reasoning is equal parts cynicism and subversion.

Reinforcing the premise that conservatism is founded on ignorance, Marco Rubio also seems clueless that both the Beatles and the Stones got their start trying their best to recreate Black American music and the fifth Beatle was a Black American man who also contributed heavily to the Stones.

to be clear: I am not advocating for the production or consumption of AI generated content.

Sorry but I don't agree whatsoever that consumers of AI-generated music are looking to share a sense of connection with the creator, and vice/versa.