/reader

Sure, many know about the enrollment cliff that begins with the incoming 2026 class (those born in 2008). Of course, many had a plan. That plan included leaning more heavily into recruitment and enrollment of international students. Of course, that will likely not be a viable option going forward. Not only will international students likely not be able to come in the first place but they will likely soon lose many they currently have due to mass revocation of student visas and other measures.

One we spoke with talked about reaching out to rural areas, but those kids and their families are going to be some of the hardest hit in the current back and forth of trade policies and destruction of federal agencies and services. Families desperate to hold on to their livelihoods will be unlikely to send their kids off for a liberal arts education to a school far away.

Then there’s the fact that Federal loan and grant services are currently up in the air and likely to be greatly curtailed if not all out eliminated so paying for college will be difficult for all but a few.

Add to that the war on higher ed, funding, international student visas, and anything that might have the faintest whiff of “DEI” and what I’m left with is a sense of impermanence. Many college and universities will not survive such all out assaults. The drop in enrollment that will happen over the next few years due to all of the above has gone from a cliff to a straight drop off.

In fact, at this point it all sounds like these institutions are still stuck in a world and spouting a script that should just as well be part of some course called “101: History of Collegiate Admissions 1900-2024”.

Therefore, as we’ve gone on these college tours, looking at schools for our current high school junior, I’ve taken in every piece of data regarding acceptance rates, diversity, financial aid availability, touting their status as a “research institution”, study abroad programs, etc. with the firm understanding that none of it is correct. All of it has already changed or will change in the next few months – let alone the next year when Beatrix is, hopefully, getting accepted to the places she likes and is having to make choices about her future.

I’m unsure what to make of it all. I’m hoping that someone would just be honest with us about the whole thing. I’d love to walk into a info session and have the Associate Director of Admissions get up at the podium and say, “Everything I would normally tell you in the next hour is likely no longer applicable and we have no idea about our very future as an institution let alone anything about your young person’s.”

I feel like I’m being gaslit by the entire process.

I’m begging for someone brave enough to admit the truth of not knowing and bold enough to say it and to recognize the challenges that face my kid and so many others.

At least I’d feel some comfort in the unknowing. Less alone in the murky depths of now.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Especially if you work at a college or university, Please feel free to reach out.

The contrast is staggering.

In many ways, everything felt simpler then; there were no demands and few obligations. Now, the schedule is filled with responsibilities and bills to pay.

But is that really why we tell ourselves that things were better and easier in the past? In all honesty, it wasn't always so easy back then either. And much is actually significantly better nowadays.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that we had nothing to compare with back then. We met the challenges in the moment and dealt with them then and there. We lived in the present.

Now, we pull out the worn phrase "things were better in the past" as soon as changes don't suit us. Ironically, the 'past' we now compare it with was once a change we disliked.

If we focus our attention on what we have here and now, if we stop comparing and accept that change is constant, perhaps we'll discover that we actually have a pretty good life right now, after all.

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.

I leveraged two of my existing bash scripts that deal with the weather, and wrote a new one that uses ImageMagick to put things together.

Basically, I pass an image name to the script and it overlays the date at the bottom left and the weather at the bottom right. Like so…

~/bin/annotate-image.sh MyImage.jpg

Here is the result:

#!/bin/bash

# Check if an image name is provided
if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <image_file>"
    exit 1
fi

IMAGE_FILE="$1"
OUTPUT_FILE="cover_$(basename "$IMAGE_FILE")"
WEATHER_URL="wttr.in/Grand+Rapids_0tqp0.png"
WEATHER_ICON=$(~/bin/getwcond)
WEATHER_ICON="/Users/jbaty/Sync/graphics/weather/64x64/day/$WEATHER_ICON"
CONDITIONS=$(~/bin/getweather | cut -f2 -d"|")


# Get current date in format "Friday, March 28, 2025"
CURRENT_DATE=$(date "+%A, %B %d, %Y")

# Add the weather info to the bottom right and the date to the bottom left
/opt/homebrew/bin/magick \
    "$IMAGE_FILE" \
    -fill white \
    -undercolor '#6F737880' \
    -font "Helvetica" \
    -pointsize 40 \
    -gravity SouthWest \
    -annotate +20+20 "$CURRENT_DATE" \
    -gravity SouthEast \
    -pointsize 30 \
    -annotate +20+20 "$CONDITIONS" \
    "$OUTPUT_FILE"

# Now overlay the weather from wttr onto the output from the previous command
/opt/homebrew/bin/magick composite \
    -gravity SouthEast \
    -geometry +20+60 \
    "$WEATHER_ICON" \
    "$OUTPUT_FILE" \
    "$OUTPUT_FILE"

echo "Weather added to image: $OUTPUT_FILE"

That script uses two other scripts that I wrote years ago for grabbing weather conditions getweather

#!/bin/sh
# Grab and parse weather info using WeatherAPI.com

jq=/opt/homebrew/bin/jq
weatherfile=`mktemp`
curl -s "https://api.weatherapi.com/v1/forecast.json?key=MYAPIKEY&q=MYZIP&days=1&aqi=no&alerts=no" > $weatherfile

now=`${jq} -r .current.condition.text ${weatherfile}`
temp=`${jq} -r .current.temp_f ${weatherfile}`
condition=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.condition.text ${weatherfile}`
high=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.maxtemp_f ${weatherfile}`
low=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.mintemp_f ${weatherfile}`

echo "${now} ${temp} | Low ${low}, High ${high}"

Returns something like “Light rain 50.4 | Low 27.9, High 69.1”. I use cut to grab just the high/low temperature part.

Then there’s getwcond which is mostly a copy/paste job from the previous script. It returns the name of an image file for the current conditions (e.g. 234.png). I use this as the icon to overlay onto the image.

#!/bin/sh
# Jack Baty, 2023 (https://baty.net)
# Grab and parse weather info using WeatherAPI.com

jq=/opt/homebrew/bin/jq
weatherfile=`mktemp`
conditionfile=/Users/jbaty/Sync/graphics/weather/conditions.json
curl -s "https://api.weatherapi.com/v1/forecast.json?key=MYAPIKEY&q=MYZIP&days=1&aqi=no&alerts=no" > $weatherfile

code=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.condition.code ${weatherfile}`
iconcond=`${jq} -r .current.condition.icon ${weatherfile}`
icon=$(${jq} '.[] | select(.code=='${code}').icon' ${conditionfile})

iconfile=$(basename $iconcond)
echo $iconfile

This all took me way too long. I could’ve pulled out the LLM crutch, but I really wanted to figure it out on my own. Next time I should just take the extra 2 minutes and use Photoshop instead :).