I've long been on the hunt for a good "what's your life about?" question. I've always been a bit (maybe too) shy about "so what do you do?" since it sort of too strongly implies "for work", and I want to leave space for the person not defining themselves that way.

My default has been the joke-y "what do you do for fun or profit?" - I like the mood of it but too often it turns the conversational spotlight to the goofiness of the question itself.

Recently I heard "What keeps you busy?" which I kind of like... on paper it's not that different from "what do you do?" but somehow leans more towards the "for fun" part - like work is hopefully 9-5ish but the busyness might come from family or hobbies which might be cooler to talk about. On the other hand I'm not sure I like the possible suggestion that "busyness" is a goal.

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I co-lead a reading + discussion group on Science and Spirituality - here's a snippet I'm encouraging group members to share on social media about our next meeting:

Come join Belmont's UU Science + Spirituality group on May 23rd (via Zoom) - we have a lively monthly reading and discussion on the world in general and the tensions and synergies of different spiritual and scientific outlooks.

In May will be discussing the book "Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most", with topics including Mary Wollstonecraft (early feminist), Confucianism, Buddhism, Stoicism and Utilitarianism as components to living a good life.

Please email kirkjerk@gmail.com to be placed on the groups announcement list to get the zoom link and a PDF of an excerpt of the reading.

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Kind of an anemic month for new music, but at least two great finds:

4 star:
* Lost With You (Patrick Watson)
Beautiful, stirring tender song. Ran into on the excellent Hulu miniseries adaption of the novel "Conversations with Friends"
* Life in the Old Dog (Magna Carta)
A friend posted a different version of this - very sweet and nostalgic
* Proud Mary (Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes)
Melissa on a deep Proud Mary live kick but I keep it simple.

3 star:
* Regulate (feat. Nate Dogg) (Warren G)
* Up From The Grave He Arose (Salem Corps Brass Band Collaborate)
every once in a while I get nostalgic for music I played in Salvation Army band... this one is especially melancholy as one of those 2020 "everyone puts down a track remotely" arrangements.
* BLACKBIIRD (Beyoncé, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy & Reyna Roberts)
* Rush E (Dragonwave Version) (Erhu4All)
* Polka Face ("Weird Al" Yankovic)
* Demons (Guster)
sQ's cross-generation song that isn't "Fat Bottom Girls"
* So-Claybe (Second Beat Songs)
"Call Me, Maybe" with every other beat removed...
* Notoriety II (Malcolm Kirby Jr.)
from a Saints Row video game soundtrack.
* Workin' On the Railroad (Raffi)

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I just want to say – you know – can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids? And ... I mean we've got enough smog in Los Angeles let alone to deal with setting these fires and things ... It's just not right. It's not right, and it's not going to change anything. We'll get our justice. They've won the battle, but they haven't won the war. We'll get our day in court, and that's all we want. And, just, uh, I love – I'm neutral. I love every – I love people of color. I'm not like they're making me out to be. We've got to quit. We've got to quit; I mean, after all, I could understand the first – upset for the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on like this and to see the security guard shot on the ground – it's just not right. It's just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again. And uh, I mean, please, we can, we can get along here. We all can get along. We just gotta. We gotta. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's, you know, let's try to work it out. Let's try to beat it, you know. Let's try to work it out.

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My favorite sci-fi author Ted Chiang wrote ChatGPT is a blurry jpeg of the web:

Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she's read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn't an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT's inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we're dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

Admittedly this was written last year but I think he underestimates the usefulness of ChatGPT in applying knowledge to a particular case at hand:

This analogy makes even more sense when we remember that a common technique used by lossy compression algorithms is interpolation--that is, estimating what's missing by looking at what's on either side of the gap. When an image program is displaying a photo and has to reconstruct a pixel that was lost during the compression process, it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average. This is what ChatGPT does when it's prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence: it is taking two points in "lexical space" and generating the text that would occupy the location between them. ("When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one to separate his garments from their mates, in order to maintain the cleanliness and order thereof. . . .") ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they've discovered a "blur" tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

I'm willing to grant that asking ChatGPT to apply its embedded gleaned knowledge to a particular problem is basically that kind of of interpolation, but in practice it is far more useful than making entertaining mashups. In my case, especially for technical tasks - to quote David Winer

ChatGPT is like having a programming partner you can try ideas out on, or ask for alternative approaches, and they're always there, and not too busy to help out. They know everything you don't know and need to know, and rarely hallucinate (you have to check the work, same as with a human btw). It's remarkable how much it is like having an ideal human programming partner. It's the kind of helper I aspire to be.

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Jessica Valenti goes hard into the damage Republicans know their actions against a woman's right to choose will be and it's fundamental unspoken premise - "enforcing a worldview that says it's women's job to be pregnant, and to stay pregnant to matter what the cost or consequence."

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(I'm not saying there aren't some counterpoints but in it seems like a good rule of thumb)

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I really have trouble squaring "Google is poor" (has to conduct layoffs, offshore and outsource jobs, remove staplers) with record revenue and profits, CEO pay so high, stock buybacks and now even dividends. I can't connect the dots -- not charitably.

People are worried about AI becoming a paperclip maximizer. But the thing is, wall street already is a paperclip maximizer.

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When I was in Bennington VT I bought an old copy of "Amiga World" that had an interview with Andy Warhol in it. (Though famously he doesn't really do interviews, so it's more like him answering some questions while being a little distracted.) He most frequently compares the Amiga to the Xerox, in terms of a new technology for artists to explore - especially interesting given his exploration of what endless reproducibility means for art.

I was considering transcribing it but The Internet Archive has it. (For now... I hope they get past these stupid lawsuits.)

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you didn't even have a name for.

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PICO-8 - I'm sort of surprised I never got into the PICO-8. It's a kind of fictional virtual console for 8-bit games... but one that really encouraged homebrew and community, and that "everyone can write a little game" that was a hallmark of the BASIC/magazine type-in days.

I'm particularly taken by this game, 8 Legs to Love -
I don't know what the CPU limitations are on a PICO-8, but the physics behind the dangling parts of web are beautiful