William Pearson

Does anyone out there know of any organizations/non-profits that are building educational resources/materials/infrastructure explicitly to combat the push for AI-based learning?

I’d love to hear more! What sorts of projects/assignments/lessons?

I think you could be forgiven for naively thinking that eugenics beliefs and being a paedophile are unrelated so be surprised that one chap had both vices. But I do think there is some inner link due to a shared preference for natural hierarchy. "It should be enforced, and when enforced exploited."

Border Patrol officers stand outside their vehicles at a gas station near Bridgeport Tuesday in Chicago. Earlier in the day students from Little Village Lawndale High School held a walk out to protest recent immigration enforcement actions in the area.

The government of Jamaica has set up a portal for contributing to official relief efforts. I will update this thread if anything analogous opens up for Haiti, Cuba, or the DR

supportjamaica.gov.jm

Good thread. We all have political blindspots, and many of mine are connected to my being white, male, straight, etc. But I also think my upbringing was atypically disdainful of/perplexed by status-seeking. I'm sure I misunderstand much in contemporary politics because of this.

OpenAI is reportedly working on an AI music-generation tool The tool would be able to generate music from text and audio prompts, The Information reported.

speak of the devil... www.engadget.com/openai-is-re...

Which are you thinking of here? Suno and the like? Or are there better research models?

Maybe the same isn't true for music - even very small aberrations in timing or pitch or timbre can totally confuse/ruin one's sense of the whole. Maybe that requires more built-in stability and leads to a more pronounced library-searchyness -- the library categories have to be less nuanced.

I wonder if it's just a money thing - video is where the $ is, so that's where the effort is going -- or if there's something about music that makes it inherently more difficult. For example - you can watch an AI video and not notice the 7 fingers or changing haircut and still grasp the gestalt.

Enjoy reading your thoughts on this. I've been trying to keep an eye on research on AI music generation and I'm struck by how slowly it seems to be moving. Video generation, all of its faults aside, has clearly gotten way better over the last 3 years. I don't see anything like that in music.

As his two sons watch and cry, ‘Pa, te amo,’ federal agents arrest man outside of Naperville apartments A Naperville man was hauled away by federal immigration agents Thursday as his two sons cried and begged for him not to be hurt.

A Naperville man was hauled away by federal immigration agents Thursday morning as his two sons watched, the older boy begging them not to hurt his father and tearfully asking for a chance to speak to him before they left.

16 days left: hundreds of elections will be decided, and my guide walks you through 180+ that matter—and why.

for the weekend crowd: take time to explore what's on the ballot, beyond NYC, Virginia, and Jersey.

here: boltsmag.org/whats-on-the...

I don't think about you at all. Some reflections on the 'shame' discourse

I wrote some thoughts about the 'shame' discourse from last week.

Define your music taste with 8 artists

Th. Yorke
H. Lachenmann
G. Kurtag
M. Feldman
M. Hollis
J. des Prez
S. Cooke
A. Lenker

I want to think more about this, but the pro-shame perspective doesn’t quite cohere for me, and I think the use of ‘bullying’ here may be indicative of why. Bullying is such a reductive/flattening thing - the greatest tool of the bully is blind, unreflective confidence.

‘Especially young boys’ is a nice pithy example of how gender essentialism fits snuggly into MAGA fascism. It’s not a fuzzy question for these people who they think the law should protect but not bind, whose boots belong on whose necks.

I agree! But I think it remains under-appreciated that this isn’t something that appears at some pagecount threshold - it’s true of all communicated meaning. AI summaries aren’t meaningless because they’re incomplete/short, but because they aren’t *meant* - they don’t come from a holistic pov.

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Nick Clegg can fuck all the way off and then some

Do it!

*world of reasons

Trump's worldview is really unusual. The guy just doesn't live in a world wofith reasons -- it's just causes, causes, causes. His need to see himself on TV or in a newspaper is, I suspect, intensely profound -- he must feel as if he doesn't exist otherwise. In that light, this isn't so strange.

Censorship Is the Authoritarian’s Dream The right to free expression must include the right to say horrible and evil things.

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history."
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

And in the well-known hope that what comes from the heart, though it may remain unspoken, returns to the heart." - Helmut Lachenmann from 'Hearing is Defenseless without Listening"

...the very structures to which such musical composition is a reaction. So in the end it is music that gives itself over to the adventure of once again grasping the concept of beauty under changed, speechless conditions...

I am concerned with music in which our perception becomes sensible and attentive on the basis of itself, of its own structuredness; music in which perception attempts to make the perceiving spirit conscious of the structures outside and within us...

"So in the end it is not about listening to a kind of music that laments the sorry course of world events through scratching sounds; but neither is it about music that flees before this world into some kind of sound-exoticism.

I took you to be talking about games in general. But the particular form isn’t important, every art form is subject to commercialization. My point is that I suspect some of the folks you dismiss as losers are equating mass culture with commercial culture, and rightfully seeing something icky there.

I agree that those are both shitty reasons to discount the value of VGs, but do you feel the same about commercialization? I remember playing a Chex Breakfast Cereal branded PC game in my childhood — isn’t there something artistically degrading there? I suspect that’s what some are grasping at.