The latest update to Micro Social adds location check-ins for Micro.blog. Very interesting! There’s so much potential here that we haven’t had time to follow through on, so great to see another app pick up the slack.
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Excited for the Nintendo Switch 2. The kids have our old Switches, so I had picked up a Lite mostly for travel and miss having something that can connect to the TV.
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Rest in peace, Val Kilmer. Glad he was able to reprise his role from Top Gun, in a way getting the thanks and goodbye he deserved before he passed. His part in Heat will always be my favorite.
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Extraordinary what Cory Booker has done. A lot of people feel powerless right now, with little substantive action possible. Talking for 24 hours accepts those limits and leans in to the symbolic. 🇺🇸
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I was sick most of yesterday and tuned out of any social web drama, so was at first surprised to learn that this week’s FediForum has been cancelled. Details on their Mastodon account:
We’ve all had a difficult few days. Tempers are high. Some of what’s been happening in the Fediforum comments section has reached insult-only stage and I have heard of physical safety concerns.
Sounds like the right call to postpone. Hope they can regroup, get some rest, and I look forward to attending in the future. FediForum has served a unique role in the community.
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Enjoyed this illustrated story by Jackie Lay about the life of Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president in 1872.
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Just great defense from the Longhorns. Love their midrange shooting too. I picked UConn vs. Texas for the women’s championship game, so could still happen. 🏀
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Finished reading: The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden. Beautiful and haunting. 📚
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Spurs / Warriors tonight. Not a close game but still fun. It has been too long since I was last in San Antonio. 🏀
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Whether you’re an AI optimist or skeptic, or somewhere in between, you can probably relate to this blog post by @paulrobertlloyd. It’s going to dominate tech headlines for at least a couple more years until everyone is completely burned out on hearing about it, then (maybe) fade into the background.
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Decided to subscribe to The Atlantic. There’s a certain kind of story that I miss from the NYT and WaPo after cancelling both those subscriptions last year. I still don’t want to obsess with the news, but when I dip my toes in, I want the coverage to be good.
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We talk about Apple getting into trouble with Siri + LLMs, but Google has major problems too. Their search business is going to fall out from under them. Not sure they have the decisiveness to actually redesign their main product.
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I’m enjoying Kagi instead of Google, but it’s still not quite right. For a paid search engine, there should be no clutter. If the query is an actual question with an answer, give me a ChatGPT-style UI, free of distractions. If the query is to find a web page, give me 10 blue links and nothing else.
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Did not finish: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. I enjoyed the first part of the book but after setting it aside just couldn’t get back into it. 📚
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More details of when Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, from an upcoming book by Keach Hagey:
The board felt they couldn’t divulge that it had been Murati who had given them some of the most detailed evidence of Altman’s management failings. They had banked on Murati calming employees while they searched for a CEO. Instead, she was leading her colleagues in a revolt against the board.
You come at the king, you best not miss.
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There seems to be a timezone bug in Siri + ChatGPT. To get better answers while driving I experimented with telling Siri to “ask ChatGPT to…”, but anything that needs the time is 5 hours off. I assume Apple is including the current time in a prompt to OpenAI, in GMT. Hopefully an easy fix. 🤖
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My NCAA women’s bracket is still holding on with that Longhorns win! Great game Texas / Tennessee. 🏀
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Randomly stumbled on my post from two years ago about Threads joining the fediverse. It holds up so well it could’ve been written yesterday. Still no sign of Meta completing the parts of ActivityPub like account migration that would ease up on lock-in.
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Got an email today for a class action lawsuit about chicken that I thought must be a phishing scam or a joke, but it appears real. The lawyers are going to make bank on this one! I don’t remember overpaying for chicken 5 years ago… I do wonder how they got my email address.
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xAI buying Twitter / X seems pretty sketchy. In practice, I guess it means the platform will live on for a while. I would not bet on xAI’s long-term success, though… OpenAI has billions of dollars of real revenue. xAI has effectively none, I think, outside of Twitter itself.
No one cares… for now
To be a blogger, you have to be okay with writing into the void. Some posts will resonate with people. Some posts will get comments. Most won’t.
Sometimes I’ll write a post and I’ll think to myself, “This is pretty good! This is the blog post that people are gonna talk about and link to. I’ve really captured something unique in this post.”
And then crickets. No one cares. 🦗
That’s okay. The act of writing itself helps us think, helps us learn, helps us discover how we feel about a topic. It’s creative and has value even if no one is reading. It’s a snapshot in time to look back on later.
And then the post is out there on the internet, making the web a little better. And maybe one day someone will pick it up and see it, at just the right time, and it will matter to them.
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I’m drawn to blogging about divisive topics, but it would probably be healthier to avoid it. People can be so tribal now that everything is either good or bad. Our views have become extreme caricatures of the truth.
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The pond at The Village, walking back to the mechanic to pick up my car after getting coffee.
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I’m cracking up at the images in this Severance + Lego post on Daring Fireball. Who is that red minifigure? 🤣
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Wow, just watched the final minute of Lakers / Bulls from last night. Love basketball. 🏀
AI art is bittersweet
ChatGPT’s new image generation is incredibly good. Too good. You can see it in the thousands of Ghibli-ified photos all over the social web. Hayao Miyazaki is going to come out of retirement again to tell us how we’ve all lost the plot on creativity.
When we look back on this moment, it will be a clear turning point for AI. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. AI will transform nearly everything, including art. What does this mean for us?
In a previous life, I thought for sure I would be an animator. I studied CS in school but I was already coding professionally, burned out on my CS classes, so I switched gears to study art instead. I applied to CalArts and was rejected. I worked on short films in my spare time. But life happens, and I’ve been happy with my career as a software developer.
The animation industry has seen several significant technological progressions. I remember watching The Great Mouse Detective in the movie theater when I was 10 years old. The 3D-animated gears in the clock tower scene were stunning. Today, I remember the characters, and I remember that scene, but not much else. Blending 2D and 3D was clearly something new, obvious even to a kid.
Going back further, before 3D animation, much of the progress was related to the ink and paint department:
- In the 1940s, women at Disney would trace the animator’s drawings onto cels with ink, then paint the other side in color. It’s a tragic bit of history that many of these women were very talented artists and should have been allowed to be animators.
- In the 1960s, drawings were Xerox-ed directly onto cels, eliminating the tracing and cleanup in ink.
- In the 1990s, hand-drawn coloring was replaced with CAPS at Disney, developed in partnership with Pixar, making the ink and paint department completely digital.
Toy Story ushered in a new era of 3D animation, where everything on screen was generated with a computer. Hand-drawn art was still needed, for concept art, character design, and storyboards. And we still love hand-drawn animation. This year’s Oscar-winning short film is a beautiful traditionally animated film.
So is AI-generated art just another step on this progression? No. It is profoundly different.
We should mourn the loss of what AI replaces, even as we make room for what’s to come. I’m both sad and excited. It is bittersweet.
If we try to hold on to the way the world was before the ChatGPT update this week, it will slip through our fingers. Instead, I’m thinking of how we can use this tool to expand what is possible. Lean into what makes art uniquely human.
There is precedent for using technology to strengthen the human element in art. By Xerox-ing the pencil lines directly on to cels in the 1960s, the ink and paint department no longer needed to trace a character’s outlines with pen, where subtle changes in line quality might be lost. Animators embraced the Xerox change because their original pencil lines were preserved exactly as intended on screen. It was not only a cost savings, it was a return to a more authentic version of the animator’s intent.
That is what we must look for. Not what we’ve lost, but what we’ve gained. There will be a way to create something extraordinary with this technology. I don’t know what it is yet.
And there will always be a place for human art. Vincent van Gogh’s paintings are not valuable because of what they look like. They are unique and priceless because of who he was. A life, with all its struggle, love, and tragedy.
AI can be creative when it hallucinates. But we don’t value AI creativity the way we value human creativity. AI is a blob of bits and vectors and tokens without soul. It’s a tool for us to do something with.
When my wife and I moved to the new house this year, I framed the original drawings I have of Scrooge from Mickey’s Christmas Carol. They cannot be recreated by the most advanced AI because they represent something bigger, capturing a moment in time and a film that will be watched for decades to come. I don’t actually know which animator drew them. But I know it was a great artist who — like Hayao Miyazaki — left their mark on the world in a way that AI never can.
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This is a helpful post from Paul Frazee about ATProto lexicons. One of the challenges for making Micro.blog a PDS is what to do with longer blog posts with titles that don’t fit cleanly into Bluesky’s lexicon. Don’t really want to reinvent the wheel here.
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A fun experiment in between bug fixing… I added a films page to Micro.blog, with posters for Letterboxd links people have recently included in blog posts. Might evolve into a more complete feature later.
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Worked on some book-related improvements in Micro.blog this morning. We try to integrate with all sorts of things — Google Books, Open Library, Libby — but a lot of it is not exactly officially sanctioned. Added more Goodreads scraping today. In for a penny, in for a pound!
