the past two weeks have been pretty good, and somewhat uneventful. i created the first digital snippet for my new "av club," which was an illustrated written piece about my recent projects to create a virtual video oscillator in GLSL that can be modulated in the same way as my analog ones. i also submitted a version of it to be included in the "signal culture cookbook" e-book project. so a lot of my time was occupied by working on that and finishing it up. other than that, we went to the movies twice, did some biking around town and went to the barcade and a local show, and i visited the warehouse for the AV company i work for to be trained on the video switcher rigs that i will use as a Video Operator (new freelancing mode unlocked!)
i also started reading a new book, the faith of beasts, the second in a new series in progress. i had been resisting the urge to start a new fiction book because i knew i'd get super sucked in, and i was correct. it is good though!!
at the same time, despite being relatively IRL-focused and feeling good about my immediate situation, i've come across things somewhat frequently that make me feel concerned, creeped out, pessimistic, and/or disgusted. as much as i would like to avoid talking about this topic, (content warning!) it's about the whole LLMs thing and the asinine happenings that are occurring every day, though i only hear about a small fraction of them, due to being somewhat of a hermit.
here are some of the things that have happened and are concerning to me...
i have come across text that was ostensibly published by people and organizations i respect, but which i could tell was not fully (if at all) written by them. this happened multiple times, and while there is no definitive proof that it was written by AI (it was not labeled as such and contained accurate information overall), the style was nauseatingly artificial. i value written communication and i'm very sensitive to writing style. i may be somewhat of a grammar nerd, but i don't mind when people make errors. it gives writing texture and personality. what i do mind, so much more, is a complete lack of personality and texture. call me old fashioned, or call me a snob because arguably, i am a "skilled" writer (not that this journal entry necessarily shows it). but i feel enraged by the fact that a) people i thought were cool would publish that kind of text under their own name, b) they felt either unwilling or not confident in their own writing style to do it themselves, and c) that they expect other people to read this. i also now feel uncomfortably hypervigilant and sensitive because i'm on the lookout for signs all the time of AI-generated text, after the repeated disappointment of realizing something was when i was partway through reading it.
in other related news, i have come across examples and stories about people connecting AI agents to the internet and giving them autonomy to do things such as posting on community forums, sending emails, finding vulnerabilities in libre software tools... now, i am a millennial, and i'm used to the internet being a sketchy place, but it's becoming a lot sketchier in a new way that is slightly horrifying. again, i feel i have to be hypervigilant to protect against either being taken in by a nonhuman entity pretending to be a person, or having my digital infrastructure be compromised by some new unforeseen hacking exploit. the honest truth is, for someone who runs a handful of web servers, i don't feel all that confident in my abilities as a system administrator. i take a rather laid back approach, since i'm just one person with a lot of projects and stuff has mostly worked up until this point. i do my best, and i keep backups and stuff, but more and more i find myself wishing for a tiny local internet where all my servers can live safely isolated from the larger internet. sadly, that would also mean that no one but me could access any of the services, and many of the services would be much less useful. (examples: community forum, video hosting, chat server... what are these without a public connection? can i set it all aside and do everything by trading flash drives in the mail or something??)
but even before all this recent stuff happened, i already felt like there were a lot of reasons to avoid the distractions and neurochemical hijacking of many parts of the internet. so i'm just about tempted to call it a day and just pull the plug, to hell with the consequences to my life. (i'm not even sure what "pulling the plug" looks like — we will see if that urge finds any reasonable outlet, lol.)
so, anyway, i needed to make this rant. i don't really know where i'm going with all this, but it's just about the only thing bothering me. well, i suppose it's part of a larger context of the social, cultural, and economic situation right now, especially in the US, which is also kind of nauseating. so, there's some amount of mental distress that i am working through around it all. i'm not sure if i personally need to do anything specific about it, and if so, what that would be yet...
well, life goes on. and overall, things are going pretty well for me personally. given how things have been going the past few years, a bit of existential panic underlying everyday life is nothing new. it comes and goes though, and right now it's very much present.
anyway, i have to go to bed now!