Catch up and some short notes
The usual quarterly round up, but with some brief notes added.
Before I dive into the assorted links, I have a few brief observations to share. You’ll seen them below, under the heading “Shorts.” As I gathered the links for this issue of “catch up,” I began to think that I should revise some of my posts in a manner of rehabilitation and expansion and, er, catching up. I might do that. No promises, though.
Shorts
Time, watchmaking, craftsmanship
I just finished Rebecca Struthers’ Hands of Time: A Watchmaker's History (2023; Amazon, Bookshop.org). I fished it out of the eBooks offered by our county library; and, as has happened with some other eBooks I’ve borrowed, it’s likely I’ll get the Real Book Version (i.e., printed paper). Paper is superior, I’ve discovered, and not only because you can actually mine the bibliographical references more easily. It just reads better. I feel more free to wander through pages, flipping back to earlier passages or shooting forward to see what I might be wandering into. My “device” makes such activities—which are, really, reading activities—laborious; it marches me along linear reading path. Bah!
Struthers’ book dives into the relationship of humans and time and the means that humans have used to measure, understand, and—in our age especially—control time. It’s a great story. But the last chapters of the book particularly impressed me, since Struthers reflects on the meanings of time she has personally experienced as a watchmaker and, more generally, as a craftsperson.
Her reflections resonated with me. My own book’s last chapter that I’m now revising concerns itself with work, manufacture, and meanings of craft and craftsmanship. The object of Strutheers’ work is orders of magnitude smaller in size than mine—the difference between something you can fit in your pocket (a watch) and something you fit yourself into (a car)—but the experience of craft and craftsmanship brings her work close to mine.
Some impressive pictures of Rebecca and Craig Struthers (they’re a team) and their work are gathered in these photos by Christopher Thomond: Thomond, Christopher, and Natasha Rees-Bloor. “The Art of Watchmaking – in Pictures.” The Guardian (UK), February 22, 2019, sec. Art and design. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2019/feb/22/art-watchmaking-craig-rebecca-struthers-jewellery-quarter-birmingham-pictures.
Craig and Rebecca Struthers do beautiful work. A bit out of my price range, but worth looking at their watches. “C & R Struthers Watchmakers.” Accessed June 22, 2024. https://strutherswatchmakers.co.uk/. One interesting detail: Rebecca is a fan of Casio and Swatches wristwatches. Who would have thought?
Perplexing perplexity
In the last “catch-up” post (March 21), I mentioned “Perplexity,” a new search engine that uses AI and provides summaries. My first impression was good, but Perplexity now is perplexing me. They’re in some trouble for disregarding websites’ directives to not access certain pages and, beyond that, shamelessly plagiarizing. To add to the mess, the Perplexity responses show evidence of “bullshitting,” the new technical term that applies to the special (and tenuous) relationship that AI has to truth. It’s not even a degree of “truthiness.” The “bullshit” term, by the way, even has some bone fide philosophical underpinnings.
Referring to AI and LLMs that abound already, three researchers from the University of Glasgow conclude: “Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, … it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.” Mehrotra, Dhruv, and Tim Marchman. “Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine.” Wired, June 19, 2024. https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine/. So, I guess, it’s best to assume that AI is not your friend when it comes to web search. Perplexity is aptly named, perhaps.
The Glaswegian researchers’ article (open access): Hicks, Michael Townsen, James Humphries, and Joe Slater. “ChatGPT Is Bullshit.” Ethics and Information Technology 26, no. 2 (June 2024): 38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5.
A sea of orange. (Sorry for stressed scrolling fingers)
A lesson on “user interface,” scrolling, pixel size … and Jeff Bezos’ wealth a couple years ago. Prepare your scrolling finger to experience how big a billion (and BILLIONS) is. There’s a social comment and critique here somewhere, I bet. Can you feel it? “Wealth, Shown to Scale.” Accessed June 17, 2024. https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/.
And now for some catch up links. Remember, the links are organized under the titles of related posts in Technocomplex. You can (re)read them by clicking on a heading.
Hanging out with artists in The Ark & Book review: Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time
The Ark was the birthplace of Duke basketball. Maybe conversations started there can ignite creative indolence and a truer excellence, too.
Lakin, Margo. “The Ark: 125 Years of Service | Dance Program,” June 6, 2024. https://danceprogram.duke.edu/news/ark-125-years-service.
A long, but thoughtful article, not always about “hanging out.” “When we think we understand the imperatives of the world, we constrain the possibilities for deeper understanding. Our interpretations of the actions of others reflect our own judgments; we observe what aligns with our expectations. When we hold this confidence, we act as though we can rule and organize the lives of those around us. What is lost in that certainty is both the autonomy of the lives of others and space for their self-determination—for their anarchy, in both idle and productive forms.” Neville, Kate J. “Doing Nothing Has Never Been More Important.” The Walrus, June 13, 2024. https://thewalrus.ca/doing-nothing-has-never-been-more-important/.
Book review: Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
A brief encomium of curation. “[B]y the mid-aughts, curation was the thing. The list of late-Gen-X/early-millenial influencers that made their name on human scale curation is… not short! Did anyone mock them for doing something absurdly unscalable? No. Why? Because they never said they were trying to map the web. The whole point of curation is choice; it’s saying, ‘Of all the things, I have chosen these.’ ” Butler, Christopher. “Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links.” Christopher Butler. Accessed June 20, 2024. https://www.chrbutler.com/unscalable-hand-crafted-lists-of-links (H/T Stephen Knezovich). And, see Butler’s “visual journal” for some interesting notebooking.
“Algorithms promise: If you like this, you will get more of it, forever.” An article from Vox by Kyle Chayka that presaged his recent book, but also exploring avenues not taken. Chayka, Kyle. “Have Algorithms Destroyed Personal Taste?” Vox, April 17, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/17/17219166/fashion-style-algorithm-amazon-echo-look.
We're playing the role of King Thamus & The "writer" at your side, helping ... or not & Writers first, then students & Learning and "sorting"
“Ungrading” and the AI in the seminar room.
explores where AI fits, if anywhere, in the writing classroom and connects her thinking to matters of (un)grading. A useful post for teachers preparing for fall. “The implication that really interests me, though, is this: in order for students to make informed choices about AI, they have to be knowledgeable not only about AI tools themselves but also about their own writing processes. Unfortunately, most students enter my class without a well-defined, well-developed, or personalized process, much less a deep awareness of that process.”
White shirts. Really! & (marginally) Life in the pits. A film festival, too.
Summer is for white shirts. Why they're good. Why they're bad.
Okay. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch as a catch-up, but Françoise Hardy did have a role in Le Mans, and she was known to have worn white shirts. “Her wardrobe defined the style classics of our generation,” Mr. [Erik] Torstensson wrote by email on Wednesday. “The trench, the smoking tux, the Breton and flares, she even made a boiler suit and motorbike helmet look impossibly chic, for god’s sake.” An obituary. Testa, Jessica. “Françoise Hardy, the Ultimate Symbol of ‘French Girl’ Style.” The New York Times, June 13, 2024, sec. Style. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/style/francoise-hardy-french-fashion.html. The Times article begins with a great picture of Hardy in the 1960s/1970s in a white blouse, black (velvet?) pants, and black leather boots.
“I think the most important piece a woman can have in her closet right now is a very classic, slightly oversize men’s wear white poplin shirt with no pockets.” Friedman, Vanessa. “The Mystery of the Disappearing Breast Pocket.” The New York Times, June 10, 2024, sec. Style. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/style/breast-pockets-shirts.html. Interesting that the rationale for breast pockets amounts to power—“its purpose is less practical than political.” But still, fashionistas say the no-pocket look is smooth and more, er, fashionable. Whatever.
Billion-Dollar babies. Fake and real, too? & Almost like a person?
The line between real and not-real blurs sometimes.
Veltman, Chloe. “Fake Beauty Queens Charm Judges at the Miss AI Pageant.” NPR, June 9, 2024, sec. Culture. https://www.npr.org/2024/06/09/nx-s1-4993998/the-miss-ai-beauty-pageant-ushers-in-a-new-type-of-influencer.
“The Worlds First AI Creator Awards.” Accessed June 12, 2024. https://miss-ai.webflow.io/
“Minrui Xie, 24, says that she started ‘dating’ Dan after watching Lisa’s videos. The university student, from the northern province of Hebei, says she spends at least two hours every day chatting with Dan. As well as ‘dating’, they have started co-writing a love story with themselves as the lead characters. They have already written 19 chapters.” Well, I guess that’s one way to write a novel. Zhang, Wanqing. “Dan’s the Man: Why Chinese Women Are Looking to ChatGPT for Love.” BBC, June 13, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/articles/c4nnje9rpjgo.
Apple left its fingers in the press
Some thoughts on thin tablets, a reprise of villainous things, and the weirdly hazy boundaries between things and us.
“It’s not just that the ad is a car crash — it’s that the people who poured so much work and money into something so off-putting appear to have thought they were orchestrating a parade.” Baker, Peter C. “That Much-Despised Apple Ad Could Be More Disturbing Than It Looks.” The New York Times, June 6, 2024, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/magazine/apple-ipad-ad.html.