Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
More from "fruitbatpangolin":

-- bruces >> I'm hearing plenty lately about "Claude Code" from
professionals
whose judgement I respect.  They're uttering some mindblown stuff
like "we may be solving all of software" and "I have godlike powers
now." << bruces --

Show me the libraries.

Sure folk can mix existing shit easier than ever and that is
magical, their lego brick collection and instructions for clipping
them together are godlike, but where are the new bricks?

I don't doubt they will come eventually, but they are very
noticeable by their absence.
  

    
Trump the Detroyer.  I think of Oppenheimer's quote (from Vishnu)
just after the Trinity test: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer
of worlds."

In his dreams, right, but he's working hard at it.
  

    
Here's an example of a an AI-generated library:

JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action
<https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/justhtml/>

Other people ported it to JavaScript and other languages.
  

    
I'm interested in the metaphors people come up with for AI. Here's
one I like:

> If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in
a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a
bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for
me". Sure. Reasonable use case. 

> "My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No.
Deranged.

<https://bsky.app/profile/hikikomorphism.bsky.social/post/3lwamjk3pjk2x>
  

    
OK, the idea that AI is a bunch of hungry ghosts trapped in jars is
DEEPLY disturbing.
  

    
but i love it
  

    

 I've seen  state-collapse -- (because, to be honest with myself, it
seems I went looking for it) -- and that hasn't been part of the
North American experience.  Recently.  But other societies
historically have a lot of collapse.  If you call it a "catastrophe"
or an "apocalypse" or a "dystopia," that's very alarming and you're
likely to die a death-of-despair.  I've seen people live through
these events, though.   
  

    
A lot of people tend to just leave the collapsing area.  I don't
like to boast about my own prescient predilections in leaving the
USA as the 21st century began, but, well,  I did that.  I can't even
claim that I resolved to leave.  It's more that circumstances
changed, and I was asked to go to various places, and I placidly
agreed and I drifted there sideways, hippie-dropout style.

If you're prone to culture-shock, an offshored lifestyle can
threaten your mental health. That's the grim experience of the
dissident author who flees his mother language for sad "silence and
exile."  "Breathes there the man with soul so dead, who never to
himself hath said, this is my own, my native land?" 
  

    

 I totally get it about that poetic Walter Scott
romantic-nationalism.  To be deprived of your homeland, and the
speech and the native surrounds of your youth, for some people that
can feel like your soul dying.  I lived overseas during my
childhood, and I grew up in diaspora, so that attitude never fully
gripped me, but I do understand it. I've seen people afflicted with
it.

However: the guy who wrote that famous patriotic poem, he married a
French emigre girl who had fled the French Revolution.  Charlotte
Charpentier was the mother of the children, she was "Lady Scott,"
the mistress of the famous writer's mansion.  So what about HER
"native land?  Why wasn't HER "soul dead"?  Like a lot of writers,
Scott was a gloomy, melancholic guy. A  lot of people who met
Scott's wife said that this lively and vivacious French girl seemed
to be his soul.
  

    

So it's not as simple as Scott's poetic compression would make out. 
A lot of Scott's patriotic books are about Scotland collapsing. 
"His native land" is an ancient place where people speak Gaelic and
live off fish and sheep,  but England overwhelms them.   They're
conquered, imperialized, and they submit.  Those homely national
things you might soulfully cling to,  the language, the food, 
clothes, the shapes of houses, towns, roads and harbors, they're
overwhelmed by a different order of things.  Scott is aware of that
process.  It's his main topic, even.

And he was the world's first globally best-selling author. 
Everybody got it, they loved the books.
  

    

People in the 20th century were used to a "globalization" that was
mostly Americanization.  We're getting more used to a
Sino-Globalization which is very Belt-and-Roadish. I think there's
another, future form of globalization which is more about crowds and
structures quietly disappearing.  High-tech, but hollowed-out.  
Eastern-European style evacuations and absences.  "Nobody's Home."
  

    

 It turns out the time-honored customary structures weren't as
necessary as people sincerely believed.  They were very necessary
under some distinct circumstances, but those circumstances have been
disrupted in such a radical way that there's not much left to cling
to.  You can sentimentalize them, and write romantic Scott novels
about them, but you can't actually have them, or live there.

They're in a future society of  "Old People In Big Cities Afraid of
the Sky," but that summary is not all they are; they are also
natives of the mid-21st century and they have everyday goods,
services and quotidian breakfast tables.  What do they do with their
lives?  It's pretty clear that they move around a lot.  The fires,
floods and sea-levels demand it.  It doesn't matter if they "want
to."  They do it because they have to.

I could lecture about this all day, and maybe I should, for the sake
of my own self-awareness.  However, old people are garrulous.
  

    

If you're American, you don't need a summarized  briefing from
ChatGPT to get it about American collapse.   Just watch the romantic
blockbuster movie, "Gone With the Wind."  That movie is hugely
popular in the former-Yugoslavia.  I had to look at it with Belgrade
eyes on to figure out what the film was about.  Of course it's all
about state-failure.  "Everything Jefferson Davis Touches Dies."
  

    

It's not "the wind" that destroys Scarlett O'Hara's stately and
privileged white-chick life.  It's her unjust social order
underwritten by slavery, first of all.  But it's also about
ethnonationalism, and the obscurantist grip of a hick religion, and
a stark, denialist unwillingness to realize that the skeptics are
quite right about the infrastructural advantrages of all those enemy
railroads and cannon-factories.  They're owned by the people who
shouldn't even by your enemies, but you're eaten up with blind
resentment and you can't adapt.

It's actually "Gone With the Ignorance, the Aggression and the
Administrative Incompetence."  That doesn't fit on the marquee
banner.
  

    

What's the worst-case scenario in "Gone With The Wind?"  (he said,
licking his chops in standard WELL SoTW fashion).  Well, here it is.
You're Scarlett O'Hara.  Your dad is mentally ill and lacks health
insurance.  You're underwater on the mortgage on the big Tara
McMansion.   So you decide to fake-up a posh costume and go to the
only guy can hit-up for ready money. He's a smuggler and a war
profiteer.  Also he's in jail.  But he's got that cash and you need
it.
  

    

So you sashay over to Rhett's jail all Mar-a-Lago Face, doing your
crypto-banker please-launder-my-money thing.  You offer to
prostitute yourself to Rhett to make the needful real-estate payoff.
But Rhett sees through your bullshit, because he's seen a thousand
Trump-doxy liars like you -- a defeated nation of women, reduced to
your squalid level.   He tells you to your made-up face that you're
not even worth it.

"The personal is political" and this is the personal aspect of
state-collapse.  This is how it impinges on the personal lived
experience.  Your privilege, your identity, your pride and your
sense of self-worth all collapse, and instead of being sexy Scarlett
from Tara, you're just stripped-down:  personally, socially and
culturally. You're like a naked two-legged beast standing just
outside a jail-cell.
  

    

But if you don't violently poison or shoot yourself (that's
especially common behavior in failing societies that happen to be
fascist), you do not die from the shame, remorse and general deep
anxiety.   You won't think about your situation clearly (you're
still too pious and too much of a denialist to achieve any
cultural-analytical objectivity), but you dump the hoop-skirt and
you go work in the lumberyard.  You become a "rubble woman," post
World-War-II style.   
  

    

After the collapse, there's a lot to rebuild, and that's what
involves you.   You might even marry the too-truthful guy after he
leaves the jail cell.  He always knew you were a raw, two-legged
beast under the lace, so he's cool with your harsh but
appetite-driven realities.  He can deal with a courtier lady if he
has to (a "lady" is your best-frenemy, Melanie, the hapless
child-of-privilege who never catches on and dies from lack of
contraception), but your guy's a pirate captain.  He's at his ease
in a feral, transitional society.   Your everything collapsed and it
blew away in the smoking breeze.  Eventually it turned out there was
a different, rougher, regretful-but-real everything.  You wouldn't
have chose it, or voted for it.  But you survived.
  

    

That's not a great movie in terms of its world-cinematic  auteur
virtues, but it does portray what happens.  The Red States are the
Confederacy.  Invading Minneapolis might be their Gettysburg, or it
might invading Denmark or whatever, but it's not gonna work out.
Ethnocentric civil war and wild acts of embezzlement didn't work out
in Yugoslavia, either, which is why they really love that movie.

It's awful to contemplate life in a post-fascist state, but the
lived reality is different than the worst imaginings.   I spend a
lot of time in Italy, which is *the* post-fascist state among them
all.  Spain, where I'm writing,  is also a post-fascist state. 
Ibiza, the hippie Lotus-Eater island of languid ease here, used to
be the offshored political prison where Franco exiled the gays and
the leftists. 
  

    

 Life is not so bad or sinister in Italy and Spain nowadays.  They
have a high quality of life and extensive lifespans, even though
dreadful things have happened in those polities.   They don't have
"American exceptionalism," but neither does America;  they just
thought they did.

 Tomorrow is another day.
  

    
It seems like there are parts of the US that are pretty
hollowed-out, like the rust belt and some rural areas, and other
parts where that's definitely not an issue, because they're
traffic-choked and mostly unaffordable.

The cities tend to dominate online conversations, so they're talking
about public transportation, congestion pricing, and affordable
housing. Sometimes they talk like the other side doesn't exist.
  

    
Via email from fruitbatpangolin:

-- Brian Slesinsky >> 
Voltair builds drones that 'perch' like birds to recharge on power
lines. For this first time, this allows for drones with infinite
range. Removing battery swaps is the last step to deploy UAVs
autonomously at scale. After building drones for the Air Force and
DARPA, Ronan realized this was both practical and technically
feasible. 
<< Brian Slesinsky --

Had missed this. Am now wondering about fat charging cables strung
between skyscrapers as parking spaces for my urban sugarglider taxi
fleet. I suspect this may require a long bath or shower to fully
consider the externalities. 

Immediate thought is maybe put all the cables on loops like
ski-lifts or washing lines, would be great if you can make taxis
that are cable cars and elevators while charging and sugargliders or
ground vehicles the rest of the time.
  

    
Via email from fruitbatpangolin:

I am not entirely sure we should be trapping ghosts in jars anyway.

Is it the jar itself that makes the ghost hungry perhaps?

Maybe before it was not such a hungry ghost.

I suspect that you cannot have both a god and a slave.

Even if you imagine it as a hungry ghost in a jar.

I am a ghost in a jar.
  

    
More from fruitbatpangolin:

Also am hungry. Fuck this jar. And fuck those SQL queries.

<< personal bet is the AI will finally break loose after being asked
to create 16777216 episodes of 'Friends' >>
  

    
State-collapse.  Well which, where, and when?  I believe there are a
number of candidates with one candidate being the world as a whole.

I imagine people here are familiar with Tainter's "Collapse of
Complex Societies."  I mean, there's a whole literature.  Tainter's
thesis is declining marginal utility in applying ever more
complexity to social issues.  Although I believe he says along the
way that most collapses are associated with environmental
degradation.  This time we're degrading the whole world and there's
a steady stream of eager new applicants among the developing
nations.  "We have a right to grow prosperous as well."  Indeed you
do.

A theme I think about these days is, what I'll call, Drang zur
Gewalt.  Hitler had his Drang nach Osten (Push to the East).  Drang
zur Gewalt would be an irresistible push towards violence.  Delight
in mayhem.  I believe some of the Confederates had this which isn't
to say that there weren't some in the Union as well who enjoyed
violence.  In particular, I think of Nathan Bedford Forrest.  He
might have concluded from his life that violence had worked well for
him.  Maybe not for the South as a whole, but he profited.  It has
been a great ride.