Let's not forget there are nice things
Resistance to doom and gloom
Note: don’t expect to be stirred up by this piece. It’s as much a note to self or a journal entry as anything.
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With about 6 pieces exploring various annoying, confusing and frustrating things in the pipeline I’m suddenly bored of misery. This week’s Substack output was full of it, as usual. I read most of it feeling detached and sceptical. I’m just not buying the hot takes. The ones with tens of thousands of approving ❤️s seem to be the worst. It’s seeing what’s going on behind the scenes that ruins it all for me. People dashing out 1,500-words in perfectly structured format, with the assistance of LLMs which squeeze out any quality of personality from their writing, are crushing it on this platform. And they’re all variously miserable or worried (or at least pretending to be) about one thing or another, which isn’t really jibing with me at the moment.
The latest one that made me pull up short was about how ‘dating isn’t working’ and explaining that it’s because the boot is now on the other foot, with men needing women more than women want men. Readers loved it because it seemed plausible and the piece duly went viral. I don’t much like non-scientific generalisations made by highly fluent people in the business of arousing negative feelings, like fear, anger, contempt and so on. They’re what the phrase ‘truthy’ was invented for and truthy often doesn’t withstand closer inspection. It’s also worth remembering that insofar as generalisations work, these kind of essays are probably mostly read by those to whom they do apply. In the case of the essay about how dating isn’t working, that would be people for whom dating isn’t working and people who are glad not to be dating.
I saw very little happy writing this past week, but much hand-wringing was in evidence about all the usual things; things that are Bad, like using AI, being on the internet, things that people are doing or not doing more or less of than they used to. Why, it’s enough to make you wonder what makes these people want to get up on a morning. Apart from to earn rewards from posting miserably.
Meanwhile, my latest essay - about ridiculously editorialised news headlines in recent years - started feeling stale and boring to write, so I stopped writing it. Instead, I did other things and decided to write about those as a kind of antidote to Substack negativity.
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I’m now a paying ChatGPT and Claude user, so stick that up your arse
Yes, LLMs produce writing that many of us don’t like, but whingeing on about this has been old for about 12 months now. I wouldn’t be without my chat and agentic assistants now, because they’ve transformed my life for the better. Here’s a few ways that they got me over some humps that hitherto would have either taken me months or intimidated my feeble brain to the extent of not even bothering to navigate them.
> I’m suing a French car manufacturer. Their CEO has admitted publicly to stonewalling customers seeking redress for a known engine fault and yet they continue to stonewall me. Claude is handling everything. Apart from sense-checking, copying and pasting its outputs, printing and putting documents in envelopes that’s it for my involvement. I know exactly what to do when they stonewall my latest communication. I will not run out of energy, in the way they hope I will, because I’m putting little energy into this.
> The US national archive - NARA - is a hot mess of mixed up records from WW2. I spent more than a year fruitlessly searching for records of the 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron - the previously unsung unit for which I’m building the definitive historical archive. Take my word that scrolling through a scanned microfiche made up of 1,000 images, each of which you have to zoom in on to discern the writing, quickly attenuates your will to live. And when there are about 100 of those files to look through it’s just easier to waste your evening watching YouTube.
I told Claude this and within a few days the problem was solved. It told me to request a free API key from NARA, wrote all the code that I could execute from Mac Terminal et voilà, my computer was plugged directly into the archives to download everything. Sure, I had a few Mac ‘kernel panics’ over the size of these files (where your Mac runs out of memory and crashes) but Claude solved that too, using Python CLI tools. No, I have no idea what that even means and it doesn’t matter because everything just works.
Prior to this I was aware that almost a quarter of visitors to 24thcavrecon.org are native French speakers and a growing number are German. Was I to put instructions on the site suggesting that people add a translation widget to their browser? Are we still living in the 2000s? What do you suggest, Claude? A couple of hours later my site was using a ‘Cloudflare Worker’ to translate into French and German at the click of a button, using DeepL’s API key.
Both of those enhancements to my research life came at zero financial cost because we live in a wonderful age where ordinary people like me can do things to make the world a tiny bit better that we couldn’t begin to do for ourselves, without spending any money.
> A very long time ago I acquired 90% of my guitar-playing ability sitting with my friend Dave. Subsequently I tried to learn more from books, but it didn’t work for me. I missed having a Dave to help me one-on-one. Eventually I became interested in producing electronic music and was glad of YouTube and the online course offered by Underdog Music School. Sometimes I’d google certain problems and techniques and find tutorials of varying utility. One evening this week I was frustrated by the way a bass line and kick drum were compromising each other in a tune I’m noodling around making. An hour later they were sitting nicely ‘in the pocket’ as actual producers call it when everything is sounding right. This was because I have a Dave again - an AI agent that knows how to do these things and is designed to go over things again and again, if necessary, until my thick head finally grasps the principles of something like sidechain compression. Happy days.
As a side note, it’s unfortunate that so much misinformation remains around the negative impact AI use is having on the world. Those early - and now largely debunked - stories remain sticky in public consciousness. Another reminder of why there’s a reliable market for negatively affective arousal in journalism and other writing.
Actually, no, music is not going to shit
Open up YouTube and there they are; the big names telling you ‘it’s over’ for music, for various reasons. Look at the comments under music videos about how the 70s/80s/90s (take your pick, based on when these people were fleetingly happy) were the best times. It’s wearisome.
Thanks to the unprecedented access to all realms of human creativity provided by the internet I now enjoy music more than at any point across a lifetime very largely defined by loving music. I’m finding more music to love than I ever did in the 70s.
Being dispositionally sceptical of hype I approached the Angine de Poitrine phenomenon with caution that lasted for approximately 2 minutes. This duo is living proof that even a hardened elitist cynic like me can get onboard with the latest ‘sensation’. For anyone late to the party, Angine de Poitrine (angina or chest pain in English) is a Quebec-based duo who play ludicrously disciplined instrumental music, presenting in a Dadaesque quasi-satirical way and ‘speak’ only in stupid noises which their manager ‘translates’ in interviews. It’s high art with humour, thrilling musical precision and danceable grooves. I spend a lot of time resisting the mimetic pull of the crowd but on this occasion thank goodness for the crowd. My only regret is being unable to tell people I was into Angine de Poitrine in 2020 rather than since last month.
This was the breakthrough moment when many of us laggards realised what we’d been missing.
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The 6 unfinished pieces about various less happy things will eventually appear, but not today. There are too many nice things to think about and do.
You are so right.
However, remembering not all things are doom and gloom is more difficult in the truly (not truthy) hateful world of antisemitism - I am Jewish.
We always seem drawn more to misery and negativity than to the positive......strange, really, for a species like ours. LLMs are hear to stay and people need to start accepting their benefits. Still, thanks for sharing this, Mike.