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Just Stop Oil protesters interrupt opera at Glyndebourne festival (The Guardian):

“Our highest priority was the safety and security of everyone on site and we would like to thank our staff and performers, whose calm and professional response kept everyone safe, and disruption to a minimum.”

I’m with the demonstrators on this. I think everyone’s highest priority should be the climate crisis. This doesn’t mean one can’t wind down and go to an opera, but only if and until society actually realigns to this priority, expect the rest to be interrupted lest we keep thinking everything is fine.

Keep it dumb, dummy.

Will it be possible to buy a dumb electric car? No Internet Protocol dependence and certainly no fucking ChatGPT? I don’t mind contemporary local computer-driven safety features—not talking Model T dumb. I like the idea of bringing extra brains and network connectivity to the vehicle with me (e.g. via smartphone) but entirely optionally.

I’d still like to go for a drive without anyone but… the CCTV and imagery satellites and drones knowing where I am. 😮‍💨

Bad air

For the second day in a row, I am explaining to my 3-year-old why we’re not going to the playground. Hauling out the weather app, showing him the AQI map, and saying “Do you remember when you said the air was smoky? You were right - the air is bad right now.”

A photograph of the National Mall, facing West from Third Street NW. The Washington Monument, usually dominating this view is almost imperceptible in the haze.

He and his peers are not the first toddlers to have air pollution explained to them (or just have had to deal with it), in fact we have more than enough code orange days around here that systematically impact others more than us, but the intensity, range, and reason is still a shame.

If we were doing everything we could, it might get a little better later in his lifetime. Sure, it might be notably better tomorrow or Saturday but it’ll happen again and again….

Listening to behind-the-scenes tales of the incoming demise of the debt ceiling negotiations. Democrats playing to lose, as always. Doesn’t matter how bad it gets.

(Edited for clarity: what was intended was the demise of things in the course of debt ceiling negotiations. All lose, no win on the part of the Dems. The negotiations themselves continued and its participants wouldn’t recognize a demise.)

“Propellers are louder over ground.” This study seems to state the obvious, but I am sure I didn’t read the article closely enough to understand what was novel. That said, it also seems to be speaking to its relevance in a near future urban environment with more VTOL air taxis and ubiquitous drones. But I am going to imagine it bears directly on present-day Washington, D.C. which seems to be increasingly (over the past twenty years of living here in three of the four quadrants) plagued by helicopters, seemingly flying lower too. So much so that our non-voting Congresswoman has made repeat protest actions that in yet another way, mark the failure of the Congress to be a steward of the city. (There’s no change that bill will be acted on.)

Our civics suffer from misdirection

Cory Doctorow has an essay in Locus flagging points of common ground between broadly genuine progressives and leftists and the misdirected but genuine right, or uncritical skeptics who are often lumped-in with conservatives.

I’ve been getting tongue-tied in knots internally on the same general topic, so thank you, Cory.

How powerful our civics could be if we could unite in numbers on some of these things and reject the truly corrupt.

Instead, genuine folks get conned into engaging in distractions or holding their nose to pick one of two corrupted sides… and it’s only gotten more extreme, and worse, with the alienated becoming seemingly as extreme as the extremists in at least rhetoric sometimes.

Mike Gravel would’ve been 93 today. Before the ‘08 election he took me to lunch on the recommendation from Ralph Nader’s camp, hoping I’d join his campaign. I was flattered but passed. I don’t regret it, but even with how I saw things go, I think it was a bigger opportunity than I understood.

I picked up a paper train schedule today. It’s the kind of physical ephemera that reminds you of the potential to do something.

Sometimes I think my phone is kind of like my closet… everything is in it, and stays in it.

Total Cost of AI?

I was listening to the latest episode of The Important Thing, where they meander around the implications of generative AI. One form of the question they articulated was what happens when stuff is cheaply generated for, as I heard it, by such AIs and for everyone.

The question that came to mind for me was: is it even cheap?

I don’t know.

I haven’t done my homework, so I am speaking for myself in articulating this question — I have a vague sense of recently seeing some reporting on energy usage by these breakthrough AIs (one reason they’re in the cloud is it isn’t practical to run this client-side, they need the cloud)… but I don’t know the particulars, or how it compares to say, crypto mining. But I think we’d even have to compare it to the total cost of feeding a human. The mining of ore and building of machines and generation of energy and environmental impact to run an AI vs. say … cost of same of humans. And that’s just in a sort of typical Capitalist framework.

This is just an inkling. I don’t really know all the bits I am alluding to here. My gut feeling is that when we internalize costs, the machines aren’t advantageous as is widely projected—whether or not that happens to be validated in this case.

Kevin Kelly repeatedly references (reported in Wired twenty years ago, recounted recently by Kelly in this conversation) what he learned about Amish communities' adoption of technology — slow, intentional, broader than most assume - and I kind of wish our society was more like this. Like the Luddites professed to be, with some core values.

Trying to build my first iOS app (again). SwiftUI this time. I figure I don’t have the baggage of other frameworks, and I don’t yet know what I’m missing either.

Some nights it is just our cat and me. I, sipping some whisky; him, staring into dark shadows of the alley, tracking the rats.

I was going to write something pithy, maybe slightly trite, which I thought to be true.

I recognized some complications and the pithy thing became definitely trite and untrue. I also realized I am not in a mood, or perhaps the mode, to try to share the more complicated rendition of the thing I thought worth sharing.

Still in sponge mode, and running a little dry.

About to put this device down.

I am rewatching the Bourne films as they popped-up on Netflix for me. I had to replay multiple segments because I was also trawling Mastodon and my RSS reader.

I remember when I’d pool my few dollars with friends and rent a VHS or two, hit up the pharmacy for some Mountain Dew and Dots, and watch the movies end-to-end with full attention. Then, we’d go upstairs to go sign-on to the Internet. (After making sure everyone else was asleep or at least didn’t need the phone, of course.)

My toddler received a STEM “certificate” from the LEGO education booth at the White House Easter Egg Roll with the slogan “rebuild our world” (it was a hashtag actually). My mind went to a dark place … he might just have to.

We’ve got the kiddo sleeping in his own bed again, mostly. He still needs some company (or, we offer it because it gets short term results) before he really falls asleep. As I was laying in the dark next to him, thinking he was almost out, I popped-in an earbud. I re-started a podcast. Something made me snicker to myself.

He angled his head over near mine and put his lips to my ear. “What’s so silly, Daddy?” he whispered.

I told him he was. True enough.