Month: May 2024

The LLM Copilot is More of a Companion.

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I almost forgot to write something here today. I’ve been knocking out scenes and finding the limitations of the LLM as I go along, which is great.

The particular LLM I’m working with is llama3 which I’ve tweaked and saved as I’ve worked with it.

It’s fun because it sucks.

It can handle about 500-1000 words easy to analyze at a time – figure a scene at a time. Meanwhile, it forgets all the other scenes it has seen. It does ask pretty decent questions within the scene, which is a nice way to make sure that the parts it can’t answer are the ones you don’t want the reader to be able to answer yet. It echoes the questions a reader might ask – if they have memory issues.

It’s terrible, however, at following along with what was previously written. Despite saving, etc, it just lumbers along thinking each chunk of text is all by itself, and maybe some of the things you had written before. It mixes up character names as an example.

I’ve come to think of it as a funny mirror for writing. It kinda gets it, but not really. I’m happy with that. I’m the writer, it’s just a funny mirror I bounce ideas off of.

It never comes up with original ideas – how could it? It’s trained on things that have been written before, and sure, it can string words together in ways that can impress some people – but it strings together words just so based on what it has seen before.

It lacks imagination, vision, and because of that, it’s terrible for any form of long form prose. Maybe some LLMs are better at it, but I’m perfectly happy with it not being good at imagination and vision.

That’s my job.

What it does do, even when it screws up – especially when it screws up – is keeps me on task. I don’t know how many other people have that particular issue, but if you do, LLMs are pretty good for that, for developing characters, and… shaking your head at.

Is it worth the trouble of installing a LLM? I don’t know. For me, I think so. Having a goofy tool asking dumb questions is handy.

Writing With a LLM Co-Pilot

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I wouldn’t characterize myself as an advocate for AI. I’m largely skeptical and remain so. Still, with generative AI all over and clogging up self-publishing with it’s slop, it’s impossible to ignore.

I’ve embarked on a quest to see whether generative AI that is available can help me in various ways. One of these ways is with writing, not in generating text but helping me write.

Since I don’t really want companies that own AI to have visibility into what I consider my original work, I installed my own LLM (easy enough) and set about experimenting. With it local, on my machine, I had control of it and felt safer sharing my thoughts and ideas with it.

I wondered how I would use it. So I tried it out. This idea I’ve been working into a novel needed a start, and yesterday I got that done with some assistance. It’s advice on writing wasn’t bad, and helped me be more of an active voice by nagging me a bit when I had it look at my work – like a good editor, though not a replacement for a human editor.

The general theme I go with when writing is get the draft done and re-read it later. Yesterday, I sweated it out over about 1,000 words of an introduction to the novel with foreshadowing and introductions of some of the characters who had placeholder names. Names in the context of the novel seemed pretty important to me, so it was sort of a ‘hold back’ on allowing me to write more fluidly – a peculiarity I have.

The LLM did provide me with names to pick from based on what I gave it, and I researched it on my own – and lo! – that was finally done. I had to rewrite some parts so that it flowed better, which I must admit it seemed to once I took the LLM’s advice, though it does nag a bit on some style issues.

All in all, it was a productive day. I treated the LLM as something I could spitball with, and it worked out pretty well. This seems like a reasonable use case while not letting it actually write anything, since a LLM is trained on a lot of text.

I’d tap out a few paragraphs, and paste it into the LLM to see what it thought, and it would be helpful. Since I was doing this as I wrote, it commented on the story as I went along and noticed things I had not, giving inputs like, “There is potential for tension between the characters here that might be worth exploring.”

Of course, it does seem to be equipped with a Genuine People Personality. It sometimes comes across as a bubbly personality that can grate on my nerves.

Much of what I did yesterday I could have done without it, but I think it saved me some time, and I’m more confident of that introduction as well. It is nice that I can be alone writing and have a tool that I can spitball ideas with as I go along. Is it for everyone? I don’t know. I can only tell you how I believe it helps me. At least I know it’s not going to blabber my ideas to someone else.

As I use it in other ways, I’ll re-evaluate subscriptions I have to AI services like Chat-GPT. I don’t need to be bleeding edge, I just want something that works for me. In the end, that’s how we should be measuring any technology.

Experimenting With LLM.

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I’ve installed AIs locally so I can do my own experimentation without signaling to tech bros what I’m doing. I’m trying to get away from the subscription models that they’re selling.

I’m auditioning various models to find strengths and weaknesses, mainly to help me with infoglut. So much of what is written on the internet is just a new rendition of the same crap, particularly with AI these days, and to find the things that are new, or reveal something new from the same information.

If you want to know how to do this yourself, it’s not hard, and it costs nothing. I wrote up a quick ‘How To install your own LLM’ here.

This requires training a model. Presently I’ve been training Llama3. It has been a little too bubbly for my taste, but after a day and reading a few books from Gutenberg.org, I fired it up this morning and this happened.

Now, it remembers who I am, which is always nice, but I decided to ask it what I should call it. It’s answer is interesting. By saving the model after our interactions, it is learning to a degree – but, it’s not human, and no, I know it’s not actually intelligent. But it has been an interesting endeavor.

I’ve fed it some of my writing, and it called me out on not using enough active voice. That’s a good tip.

In all, the overall plan is to have it do some of the heavy lifting in dealing with infoglut. I spend way too much time daily reading stuff that isn’t worth reading because I don’t know it’s not worth reading until I’ve read it.

The plan is to outsource to ‘Teslai’, or whatever LLM model I choose in the future. By allowing it to get to know me – not something I would do with a LLM controlled by someone else – it might be able to tailor things better for me, not based on what I used to like, but based on the patterns it finds in my own behavior. And even then, like anything else, a healthy dose of salt with it.

Remembering Robin.

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It’s a funny thing. Because of the last post I was thinking of people who were strategists in my life, people who thought ahead a distance beyond most, anticipating things, ready for things… You can read about people, but knowing people is a very different thing.

There are a few in my life that I’ve known well that were strategists. One was my Uncle Robin, my father’s brother. He was a thinker and planner, which is why he and my father may not have always gotten along very well, and why he and I did.

And then I had a fond memory.

Now, when I grew up and Uncle Robin and I grew close again, Uncle Robin was on a trip with his new wife in Florida. I had some money for him.

I had a car with a busted transmission at the time and didn’t have enough cash on hand. Uncle Robin loaned me a few hundred bucks, and I wanted to get it back to him.

I met up with him, met his wife, and the hotel had someone playing classical piano. We went downstairs, and he and I sat and sipped scotch, didn’t say a word, and just drank in the piano. It was Mozart.

He and I talked then a bit about our favorite composers. I was more of a Mozart person, he was more of a Bach person. I’m walking him to the elevator before I get a cup of coffee. He’s had much more scotch than I. He stops by the elevator, turns perpendicular to me with his head shifted down, and says, “Your execution improved.” We laughed.

One of the earliest stories he and I had was in his mother’s house. It was my first few months in Trinidad – about age 9 – and there was a rat that would run the top of the open air walls in the old colonial style house. It is an old wooden house, it stands to this day, but there was this enormous rat that would just run around at certain times.

The funny thing is the rat didn’t show back up after that, my grandmother was pleased that the rat was gone and whenever the rat came up in conversation with her, he just quietly laughed and said nothing to her about the entire thing.

I noticed the times. Uncle Robin had a clock on the wall I used to time the rat. It bothered me. They’d laid out poison, but this rat didn’t seem to find it.

If you’ve ever built a model made of plastic, you’ll know you’re stuck with this plastic piping where the parts come from. I had decided I was going to kill the rat, and using that and some string borrowed from somewhere or more likely someone, I would sit in the rocking chair and wait, and when he crossed the path of it I would jerk the string and bring him hurtling down to the floor.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a great plan. It was a bit naive.

Uncle Robin walks in, sits at his seat at the table behind me. He looks at my little trap. “So you’re going to kill the rat?”

“Yes Uncle”

“When it comes down, what will you do?”

I raised the hammer so he could see it.

“Then?”

He was always the one who asked, “And then?”. One of his quirks.

I pointed at the open door to the front of the house. My trap was above it. “I’ll kick it out the front door, it will fall down the stairs and I’ll get some paper towels to clean it up.”

You see, when I had a plan, I had a plan. It was thorough. Not entirely good, but thorough.

He made one of his sounds – sort of like a grunt, but with an inflection at the end. “Do you think your grandmother would be more upset that you killed the rat than she is now about the rat?”

Well, hell. She didn’t like the rat which was the whole reason I went through all of this.

As I’m processing that, the rat runs, and pre-programmed, my arm jerks. The rat comes tumbling down and I’m already rushing forward with the hammer when…

The rat falls on my head and bounces out the front door. In the fracas, I drop the hammer on my toe and fall backwards away from the rat. There I was, on my back, holding my toe.

I hear my Uncle laughing quietly, and he says, “The plan worked as well as all plans, but you need to work on your execution.” Continued soft laughter and the sound of a newspaper page turning.

He remembered that after all those years when it had fallen from my mind.

I was really glad I remembered that. He was a little weird, a little eccentric, very much misunderstood, a person who enjoyed his isolation and was a little jealous sometimes that other people connected so easily while for him it was more work, and who wants to work when you can drink scotch and listen to good music?

I miss that guy. Nobody even bothered to tell me when he died. Bunch of jerks.

Decreased Interest in Strategy Games: Why?

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Games in general are powerful tools for humanity because just like any other version of play in the animal kingdom, there’s value. Kittens learn to hunt by sinking their razor sharp claws and teeth into things. It’s preparation.

Mankind isn’t too different. We try to make education ‘fun’ for the same reason, with very mixed results, but one thing is constant in humanity: Play, and as our technology has become more pervasive, games.

That’s why maybe it should be disturbing that a recent study shows that there is less interest in strategy games.

“…But across its 1.7 million surveys, Quantic Foundry found that two thirds of strategy fans worldwide (except China, where gamers “have a very different gaming motivation profile”) have lost interest in this element of video games. “67% of gamers today care less about strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer back in June 2015,” the report reads.

When we looked for long-term trends across the 12 motivations, we found that many motivations were stable or experienced minor deviations over the past nine years,” Quantic Foundry said. “Strategy was the clear exception; it had substantially declined over the past nine years and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the size of the next largest change…”

“Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds“, Ryan Dinsdale, May 22nd, 2024.

That China has ‘a very different gaming motivation profile’ is interesting. The postulation presented in the article is that social media may be ‘wearing people out’, which is a fairly summarization that could related to the average attention span falling from 150 seconds to 47 seconds.

As Quantic Foundry’s post points out, it’s pretty easy to just blame social media and move on.

…the decline in Strategy is likely not an idiosyncratic phenomenon among digital gamers, but parallels the general reduction in attention spans observed by researchers in different fields.

But because all over-time comparisons are inherently correlational, it’s difficult to pin down cause and effect. While we often blame social media for our decreased attention spans, there’s a lack of concrete causal evidence for this. Of course, it bears pointing out that causal evidence for this would be difficult to produce since it’s unethical to raise children in artificial labs. Also, the shot duration analysis in movies is a counterpoint to blaming social media entirely: this downward trend in media attention span can be traced as far back as the 1930s, although it is certainly possible that social media accelerated the underlying trend.

Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have. Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things. For example, higher engagement with social media is correlated with lower math and reading scores and poorer mental health among teenagers. Of course, again, these findings are correlational and not direct causal evidence…

“Gamers Have Become Less Interested in Strategic Thinking and Planning“, Nick Yee, Quantic Foundry, May 21st, 2024.

Before Social Media.

Yet if we dig in through one of the links in Quantic’s article, we find this before social media. We find that shot durations in movies have also been dropping in length.

…Although pacing can refer to motion (Cutting, Brunick, DeLong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011; Cutting, DeLong,and Brunick 2011) or to the rate of cross-cutting between narrative threads (Bordwell 2013),we will use the term referring to the duration of shots as they have become shorter over time (see also Pearlman 2009). Indeed, the averages shot duration in Hollywood movies has declined from a mean of about 12 seconds in the 1950s to a bit less than 4 seconds in the 2000s (Cutting, Brunick, Delong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011; Salt 2006)…

Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies, James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan, Projections, Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2015

Interestingly, this same document has this:

…The second popular account for the shot-duration decline concerns a possible cyclical reciprocity between mass-media screen content and the attention patterns of viewers—sometimes described as a nearly ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) affliction. The idea is that quickened screen
content (television programs, websites, and movies) alters our general attention patterns, perhaps shortening our attention span, and that the makers of this content must incrementally continue to quicken content to keep up with ever-shortening attentional capacity.

Although this idea promotes an incremental change like that seen in Figure 1, we know of no evidence in its support…

Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies, James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan, Projections, Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2015

Taken by itself, this would lend itself to a net effect of movies becoming shorter. In fact, movies have become longer, which would indicate that there are a lot more shots in a movie and density of content. There’s some more movie length statistics here.

While Attention Spans Might Be A Factor…

It could simply be the cost of doing a good strategy game. In essence, it may not be about the gamers, but about the gaming companies. Creating compelling strategy games is more difficult, and combined with a world that might have people simply wanting some less mentally taxing game to unwind with could be the crux of this. As someone who enjoys a good real time strategy game myself, I am not too interested in the offerings of the last few decades.

A good strategy game, too, generally outlives other genres and therefore doesn’t need to be replaced as soon. This means that it may not be as lucrative for a game company to release strategy games when it could be pumping out first person shooters.

And the other hypothesis Yee described, ‘increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have’, could also mean that in the fight for the time of people who would be interested in strategy games, social media might be more attractive.

Movies have gotten longer, attention spans have gotten shorter- but in the end, we only have 24 hours of temporal currency to spend every day, and every move technology makes to ‘make us more productive’ never quite gives us that extra time it promises.

There’s certainly a lot to think about here – if you have the time.

Killing Off the Geese that Lay Golden Eggs

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We all know the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs, and the idiot who killed the golden goose got no more golden eggs. It’s been considered good practice not to kill something that is producing important things for you1.

This is what some companies are doing, though, when it comes to AI. I pointed out here that companies have been doing it before AI, too, though in the example of HuffPost the volunteers who once contributed to it’s success simply got left out in the cold.

It is a cold world we live in, and colder each day. Yet more people are being impacted by generative AI companies, from writing to voice acting to deepfakes of mentionable people doing unmentionable things.

Who would contribute content willingly to any endeavor when it could simply be used to replace them? OK, aside from idiots, who else?

I did hear a good example, though. Someone who is doing research and is getting paid to do it has no issue with his work being used to train an AI, and I understood his position immediately: He’s making enough, and the point of doing research is to have it used. But, as I pointed out, he gets paid, and while I don’t expect he’s got billions in the bank, I’d say that once he’s still getting paid to do research, all will be well for him.

Yet not all of us are. Everyone seems intent on the golden eggs except the geese that can lay them. If you can lay golden eggs, you don’t need to go kill geese looking for them… and dead geese…. because it seems that tech bros need reminding… dead geese do not lay eggs.

  1. I’ve often wondered if this didn’t start Hindus not eating beef, as Indian cuisine relies heavily on the products of the cow – so a poor family killing a cow for meat would not make sense. Maybe not, but it’s plausible. ↩︎

When The Levee Breaks.

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Having written a paragraph I’m particularly proud of, I got lost in finding something to so that I could keep pace. I reached for one of my favorites, “When The Levee Breaks” done by Led Zeppelin.

Like most things I like, it has a history that I’ve drilled down into. This song just drives through emotion, plodding through the mud with purpose, with a steady rhythm regardless of what comes. It’s grounding. You’re in the ‘suck’, but you keep moving at a very primal level.

The history goes back to 1927.

The Great Mississippi flood of 1927 has a pretty thorough Wikipedia page. It was the most destructive river flood in the United States. Imagine 27,000 square miles in water up to 30 feet in depth. 500 dead, 630,000 people affected. Population density was lower then.

It’s a song born of, “well this sucks, but I’ll make it through”.

The Oversimplification of Democracy.

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There’s a lot of “Vote for xyz or zyx might win!” going on already in social media, with more than 5 months before an election.

It’s a sign that people are used to a system so broken that they demand crutches.

Personally, I detest that sort of fearmongering. With so much time left before an election, the candidates can and should be working harder to get the votes. Potential voters shouldn’t be smeared by their supporters for not settling so early.

Every election is a negotiation between candidates and voters.

I didn’t want to write about the crappy choices we have for President of the United States in 2024, but recent conversations on Mastodon just irk me a bit.

To get votes, candidates have to convince voters that they’ll work on issues that are important to the voters. These should not be cults. These should be people with open eyes and realistic expectations, which is as hard to find these days as a technology announcement that doesn’t have ‘AI’ in it.

The Negotiation.

Everyone gets so stuck on votes, but the implicit issue is not the votes but what the votes are for. Votes are for ideals and issues, and we vote for candidates because of ideals and issues – and fear. Fear strips the power away from us. It makes us victims of our choices.

To settle for a candidate 5 months and some weeks before an election when one could be demanding more of them seems like bad negotiation to me. It also seems like bad democracy. Candidates should be encouraged to be better candidates. As it happens, the United States is pretty polarized right now because of Trump, and the supporters of Trump will say it’s because of everyone who disagrees with them. There’s no middle ground when we look back at January 6th and the attack on the Capitol, we see just how divided we are – and how easily manipulated some are. It is something to worry about.

That does not mean we shouldn’t negotiate. I wouldn’t go on record for voting for anyone this early into an election because it’s bad negotiation. We certainly don’t have all that we want. We also can’t get all that we want, but we can certainly negotiate better than, “OK, you have my vote, I’ll hope for the best Mr. Politician making campaign promises.” When you have one candidate farting up a storm in court, the other candidate has every opportunity to do better with 5 months+.

The worst thing for democracy are elections so polarized that both sides vote out of fear. Everyone loses. There are no Trump supporters interested in changing the minds of Biden supporters, and vice versa. The fact that neither group of voters feels that their candidate is good enough is reflected in the fear mongering. It also shows a lack of confidence in their candidate. A candidate should be able to stand on their own two feet and attract votes. Any time you have to market a product so viciously, you have a shitty product.

I’ll say this: there’s no way I’ll vote for Trump. That does not automatically mean that Biden gets my vote. Biden has to earn a vote, just like any other candidate, and while he may be the better candidate in my eyes, that does not yet make him a good candidate.

People who are already saying that they’ll vote for their candidate are doing themselves a disservice in my eyes, which is always the problem when decisions seem so clear: The candidate doesn’t feel uncomfortable, the candidate doesn’t have to work as hard, and who suffers? The people, of course. When the President spoke at Morehouse and people were showing unity with Palestinians (not Hamas, as some like to color it), they were doing their jobs as members of a democracy, signaling to a candidate an issue that they care about enough to protest. The candidate may realize that they should do more, if they’re paying attention. That’s the point. That’s negotiating.

What’s interesting is how campaign funding balances on issues like this. We’re seeing it play out with protests over what Israel is doing in Gazah. The unflinching support of the United States in killing civilians is not popular by any poll. How much is that campaign funding changing that?

The Third Parties.

Third party candidates are often judged based on how the two main political parties do.

“So and so stole votes…” No, to steal something it had to have belonged to someone in the first place. The presumption alone that they belonged to the candidate in the first place is the height of disrespect. Had the candidate that lost spoke to the issues those people voted for, they probably wouldn’t have lost.

Putting that on people who didn’t vote for the candidate effectively dismisses the issues that they feel are important, and it’s condescending. No one asks, “Hey, why didn’t you vote for my candidate?”

The truth is that we do need stronger third parties because the parties we have aren’t too concerned about the voters. They dictate and manipulate issues because they always get to pull out the trump card , “But that other person might win and it will be the end of the world!”. I’ve heard that since… the days of Jimmy Carter, though I imagine I heard it much younger during the Nixon years.

Third parties, in my eyes, demonstrate issues that the other parties aren’t concerned about. Young people should get involved with them or start their own, not because they have a chance of winning a presidential candidacy but because you nurture a seed to grow a tree, and the trees we have are old and rotten. Do I suggest spending a vote on them? It is not for me to suggest that, but you can grow a party without voting for them, by supporting them in other ways and making issues you care about get better visibility. Third parties may not win elections, but they certainly can make issues more visible.

That’s an important function. And should those 3rd parties get votes, then it says that those issues meant something to the people who voted, more so than what the other candidates stood for or against.

Losing votes to a 3rd candidate isn’t the fault of those that voted that way. It’s the fault of the candidate that lost those votes to a 3rd party candidate. Some people try to flip that around and say that voting for a 3rd party candidate is a wasted vote, and to an extent that might be true – but if it were a wasted vote, or a lost vote, it would have no value to the person that takes umbrage with it, and implicitly it dismisses the concerns of a fellow voter without even a fair hearing.

Why? Because the system seems broken? It does seem that way. Yet if we concede that the system is broken and don’t do anything to fix the system, those 3rd parties may be the only path to fixing it since the two major parties don’t seem interested in doing so.

Of course, we can just keep doing what we’ve been doing and expecting a different result. For me, any change will likely be beyond the scope of my lifetime; I’m on the downward slope. Yet there are those younger, coming up, who can make things just a bit better, incrementally, and deserve the opportunity to vote their conscience regardless of how others feel about it.

Their future depends on it.

Wanted: Another Renaissance.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

It’s hard not to feel at least a little dismayed every day these days. It seems that the news is full of headlines that twist knives of fear in our fragile human hearts. We’re largely kept pretty busy simply maintaining our own lives.

Food and shelter are as needed now as they were needed when our ancestors first slithered from the primordial ooze. Our bodies did not evolve to stand our environment, instead we wore the skins of those that had. We did not evolve to consume abundant vegetation, so we ate those that do, yet our bodies did not evolve to become predators.

In fact, compared to most animals on the planet, our bodies aren’t that evolved to suit the planet at all – we’ve been ‘cheating’ with technology, appropriating as much as we can from others on our planet. Our technology has evolved faster than we have, our impact on the planet has evolved more than we have, and our technology is not really being used to reduce that impact.

We communicated, we coordinated, and we took on greater tasks. Oral cultures formed and passed down information from generation to generation, but there were flaws with this sometimes as we played the telephone game (or Chinese Whispers) across time. Contexts changed. We figured out how to write things down – to literally set things in stone. From there we found more and more portable ways to write.

Imagine the announcements of tech companies back then: “New stone allows more words on it for the weight and the size! Less oxen needed to pull! They will pay for themselves!” and later, “Use Papyrus! Have a stone-free library!”

So at first only those who were literate were allowed to participate in writing, but more and more people became literate despite those who once controlled written language. In a few thousand years, we managed to spread literacy pretty well across humanity, and the cacophony of it began to build on the Internet.

And yet we ourselves still haven’t really evolved that much. We’re basically still living in caves, though our cave technology has increased to a level where we have portable caves and caves we stack on top of each other to great heights.

We’re still basically pretty much the same with more of us, and our technology almost provides enough for everyone, maybe, but our great civilization on the planet is hardly homogeneous in that regard. Most people can point to a place where people have less or more than themselves, and the theory of hard work allowing people to progress seems flawed.

Now that so many people can write, they get on social media and jibber-jabber about the things that they like, most of it just being sending packets of information around through links – some not reading what they pass along because it has a catchy headline that meets their confirmation bias. Others have learned how to keep people talking about things, or to start people talking about things, and despite having the capacity to think for themselves, they only talk about what they’re manipulated into talking about.

Our feeds fill with things that we fear. Election years have become increasingly about fear rather than hope – any hope is based on fear, and people just twist in place, paralyzed by a lack of options. The idea that we could, for example, have women control their bodies and not fund a foreign government’s version of Manifest Destiny. We could have a better economy and better healthcare that isn’t wrapped in a sinkhole of people making bets on our health and forcing us to do the same – insurance companies. We could do a lot of things, if people simply trod their own minds more thoughtfully.

We’re insanely busy getting the latest technology because… well, technology is what we have to evolve since we haven’t. Tech companies are the new politicians, making campaign promises with each new release. It can’t be ‘new and improved‘ – pick one; you can only improve on the old.

They promise us more productivity, implying that we’ll have more time to ourselves in our caves drawing on the walls when we spend more and more time being productive for someone else. We’re told this is good, and some of us believe it, and some of us tire of the bullshit we believed for so long.

We could use another renaissance, if only so that people begin thinking for themselves in a time when AI promises to do their writing – and their thinking.

The “That’s Not It” Sea Story.

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This is one of my favorite sea stories.

There was this sailor who walked around on the deck of a ship, picking up any piece of paper he found and looking at it seriously for a moment. He would then toss it, saying barely audibly, “That’s not it.”

He was counseled about it by his Chief, and when the Chief handed him the paperwork to sign for the counseling, he looked at the paper a moment and said, “that’s not it.” and threw it to the deck.

Flustered, the Chief sent the sailor to the sick bay to see the Doc, and the Doc checks him out. He pulls out the Rorscharch test cards to see what the young sailor had to say he saw, and every card just caused the young sailor to shake his head and say, “That’s not it.”

The Doc talked to the Captain, and the Captain decided to have him go to see Psych when they got back to shore, confining the sailor to quarters for the interim. Months later, the same thing played out on shore at Psych. “That’s not it.”, over and over again.

Finally the Navy decided to discharge him, so he went to the Personnel Department where they had his discharge papers. The Yeoman pushed them across the desk, telling the sailor to read and sign.

The sailor diligently read the pages, nodded, and said, “That’s it!”.

He whipped out a pen and signed the paperwork.

He was stoic, and held out for what he wanted – and got it.