Nobody ever said this would be easy. Or timely.
To be honest, I forgot about it. Two posts was all it took to fade from my memory. That and my browser settings getting corrupted so badly that I had to reinstall my browser to fix it. Which didn't actually work and I had to root around in system files to find what was actually wrong. I don't understand it fully, but I did it. Mostly. I still was distracted enough to forget to come back here until now. Of all days. It's the worst one.
April Fool's Day isn't everyone's worst day. It won't be mine forever. It isn't even really mine now. But I loathe it. I loathe it even more in the current climate of AI slop that makes me look twice, thrice, or even quarce (four times, c'mon get with it!) at something as inocuous as a landscape. Nothing digital has inherent authenticity anymore. Nothing can be definitively traced back to human hands without an ironclad custody chain and don't you dare tell me that's what the blockchain does because that doesn't require a human either.
I want to live in a world of things happening because people felt a calling to make them happen. Politics aside, I want to know that when I stumble upon something amazing that's why. It was a glorious flare of inspiration and effort and struggle for someone to make it happen. Today a rocket took four astronauts to space. This mission, called Artemis II, will take them around the far side of the Moon and further from the Earth than any human has ever been. That isn't a function of statistical reproduction of likely responses farmed from a dataset. That is a fundamental expression of will. Hundreds of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and more people than we may ever get a perfect accounting of spent years applying the specifics of their craft in collective pursuit of ensuring four of their fellow humans could sit safely atop a tower of bombs designed to explode slowly and through a single opening to propel them beyond the bounds of evolution while ensconced in a room wrought from base elements to withstand the violence of physics and nothing.
My personal efforts are no match for this, but I am proud of my expressions all the same.
For example: I found, cleaned, and restored this tool.
This is nothing near the accomplishments of Artemis II. Not even in my wildest dreams. But for the time I spent working on it and the reactions of the few people I shared my project with, I felt like a fucking wizard. A small pile of rusty, dusty parts and now I can shave transparent layers of wood. That feels good. It didn't change the world, but it certainly made a change in my world. And there's no way someone can say "but did AI do that?" or "why do that yourself? Why not just ask the machines?" because it's beyond the scope of a prediction engine taught by boiling text, image, video, and song down into a statistical reduction of human thought.
In the martial arts I study, there's a longsword guard called Alber or The Fool. A fighter holds their sword in front of them and points the tip at the ground. The name is said to be from the logic that only a fool uses a guard and only a fool thinks the guard is worth attacking into. With my stake on AI and how I choose to interact with it (which is as little as possible) I suppose there's a similar question to ask: Am I the fool? Or have I tricked the world into thinking my position is foolish?
Trick question. It's both.
Today's Track: Dopamine - Robyn