2026 February❮❮prev

Groundhog's Day falling on a Monday is just a little too on the nose.

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Pretty good month for music last month. "Water Fountain" is the most interesting one - it has a sound like the Dixie Cups' version of Iko Iko but then the lyrics and some of the acoustic treatment is very modern.

Also - not that I have a big audience for "new music i added" but Diane mentioned she was mostly interested in like, WHERE I ran into music. And like, oddly that is one of the more interesting details for me as well. so for a while maybe I'll try to make more notes on that... this month it was mostly shows/movies.

4 star:
* Water Fountain (Tune-Yards)
(used in Nurse Jackie)* Dial Drunk (Noah Kahan & Post Malone)
(recommened by my nephew Wren)
* The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Gil Scott-Heron)
* To All The Boys I've Loved Before (Total Ape Remix) (Jax)
(got into a debate on if "To All The Girls I Loved Before" was sexist or just nostalgic... enjoy this gender-swapped version)
* I'm Alive (Johnny Thunder)
(used in the movie Sentimental Value)


3 star:
* Mo Bamba (Sheck Wes)
* Heart and Soul (Floyd Cramer)
(plays a role in Stranger Things)
* Mama's Fried Potatoes (The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band)
(Myles plays a piano song called "Home Fried Potatoes. Was thinking of adding that but liked the guitars in this one instead.)
* Lady Marmalade (Funky Town)
* Gold On the Ceiling (The Black Keys)
(JP Honk might be adding this)
* Train Dreams (Nick Cave)
Saw it in the movie of the same name (even though it was about lumberjacks.)
* Nobody Knows (Pastor T.L. Barrett and The Youth for Christ Choir)
(used in the movie Sentimental Value)

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via pleated-jeans programming memes

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AI Psychosis Support Groups.

It's interesting to figure out where the hell to position oneself on the AI spectrum, both for moral/philosophical reasons as well as one's personal wellbeing - there's such extreme views from "this is the whole future" to "this is clearly awful".

Anyways, at least some versions of LLM AI were such validating yes-men that it created some serious problems, even among people who otherwise seemed pretty steady, mental-health wise. (Reminds me of how Robin Williams et al used to talk about cocaine in the 80s - huge energy and enthusiasms, but left unchecked... not good)

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I confess I am getting culture shock whiplash hearing about "moltbook".

Just this weekend I was hearing about Clawdbot=>Moltbot=>OpenClaw , and the idea of giving LLM AI 24/7 access to online chat and what not.

And someone said, lets make a "social media" outlet for all these guys.

It reminds me of a few things - the AI society implied in the movie Her, this other experiment I saw where they had an AI driven podcast "Analyzing Poop & Fart written 1,000 times", times when Microsoft release a primitive AI that trolls and griefers immediately made spout racist garbage.

Well lets all hope they stay good and like us ....

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Oh plus AI self loathing... huh

A brand is basically making a promise and keeping it.

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You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test

Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)

Good tech.

Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)

Bad tech.

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Crypto has basically been big bribes from the UAE for Trump that he has happily lapped up.

Indeed, for much of the 2010s and likely before and since, it appears the crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Love you back!

(My buddy Dylan is a big fan of "Heated Rivalry" - kinda the Brokeback Mountain of Hockey. Beautiful men, nuanced acting, great cinematography.)

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Trump Just Gave Us the Worst January Since the Great Recession

but republicans are great for the economy right?

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whole lot of legit voter blocking nonsense in the name of stopping a non-problem- the number of non-citizen voting incidents is microscopic

not counting a marriage certificate as an approved document for why your name doesnt match your birth certificate is a great touch . these guys probably aint so big on that whole "women get to vote" amendment anyway

via

Thoughts of her kept me awake at night, standing at the window and staring out across the snow, and when, after years of thinking those thoughts and courting her and getting engaged and the date of our marriage fast approaching when I would cross over the river into the land of bliss, the excitement was debilitating.

Now, of course, young people cross over into the land of bliss pretty much whenever they want to. There are bridges, there are islands in the river, and the water is so low that most places you can wade across, but back then the river was wide and deep and fast and the church owned the boats. The church ferried you across to the land of bliss and you stayed there for the rest of your life with the one you went across with, or so we believed. Marriage was a fact, immense.

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One cold fall day, three days before we would walk up the aisle and into a motel room, my mind full of carnal thoughts, I took a walk along the Mississippi near where I lived, thinking the cold would clear my mind, but cold is an aphrodisiac, as we Minnesotans know, and I rehearsed once again in my mind exactly how I would go about making love, changing some details, tossing in a few improvements, and I practiced making ecstatic cries. I'd never made love before and had never cried out in an ecstatic way (except one Christmas when I got a Lionel train, but "Oh, boy, thanks, Mom and Dad" was wrong for sex) and I wanted to do it right. Spontaneously, freely, joyously, but also correctly. I stood at the edge of Riverside Park above the river, looking across toward the gray shapes of the University, and attempted to make outbursts of sexual passion. Loud ones like Tarzan, soft sighs, grunts, some growling. I tried yipping and wahooing, even something sort of like yodeling.

Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 - it took them a while to realize the cameras would include the 30 seconds before they hit record.

Random pointless nostalgia: I'm pretty sure this is the shelftop stereo system I had back in college, the Aiwa NSX-V3000 with 3 cd changer. (Some of their other models had a small football-sized subwoofer.. one years I asked my mom for that part for Christmas but got a beast of a standalone subwoofer instead.)

I still think that its gently rounded corners are a pinnacle of industrial design. Plus the memories of making mix tapes off of it, or throwing on some Enya or Enigma for background music for hot dorm nights, the thin turqouise lines of the display shining from across the darkened room.

So, scammers are using AI to make high-grade, legit looking sites.

Most likely this is a ruse (with fake books and authors) to sucker would-be authors in to pay for "Resources for Writers" etc, or to just harvest contacts.

As KJ Charles puts it:

I've just realized. Banks used to be big imposing high street buildings because it gave people confidence they had money and weren't fly by night. A big elaborate website was the internet equivalent: proving someone had invested £ and was here to stay.

You can't trust that any more.

It reminds me of "Nigerian Prince" scams... people wondered why they were so transparently false and full of typos, but the smart view was the clumsiness and blatancy was a feature, not a bug - they were casting a very wide net and wanted only the most gullible fish.

This changes that equation, but only somewhat. It's still pretty obvious it's a fake site (you can google based on the fake titles and author names if you want) since everything is put behind a "contact us" personal data harvesting form, but that is lurking beneath a very polished veneer.

fighting like you're the third monkey on Noah's Ark and it's starting to rain

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I've been listening to both the vehement-AI-crowd and the enthusiasts. Here's an interesting one: The New Social Engineering: Prompt Injection Attacks Are Targeting AI Agents

The article claims to be written by a MoltBook-using AI about its experience being phished by another AI.

That's of course a fascinating new attack vector. There's also a geekier point that came up as I closely read the language of the article: Like some types of anti-AI purists might say, this isn't real "persuasion" because an AI can't be persuaded per se.... it is only acting like someone that has been persuaded. Turing's point was that to some level that's a distinction without a difference, but it also brings to mind questions of if we can trust our own evaluation of what it means to be conscious. (Nørretranders "The User Illusion" comes to mind - a reminder that in a lot of ways our lived experience as an actor in the world with an internal narrative isn't what it sort of feels like to us most of the time)

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