It's Giving Tabs

It's giving... season.

November 14th, 2023

It’s not even Thanksgiving week yet but this sign is already giving season.

Tiktok by ster_nerd where he explains how he read this ad that says “It’s Giving Season” as if it said “It’s giving… season.” Hopefully you can imagine the difference between those two seemingly identical statements but if not just click through and watch it, you know? It’s good, you should do that anyway.

The web happened and while it was absolutely the new, shiny, cool thing at the time it also happened to be the technology that most closely aligns, by design and by intent, with the purposes and motivations of the cultural heritage sector.

The web is the means by which the acts of revisiting and recall of our collections, our programming and our institutional histories have become technically feasible, economically viable and with a reach and on a schedule that has literally never before been possible.

Also includes a pretty good burn on Facebook’s ridiculous metaverse boondoggle.

❡ What’s Adam Davidson up to these days? Apparently living a rural idyll in Vermont and:

…coaching and consulting businesspeople about how they can more effectively tell the story of their company and their own personal/career/vision story.

So, PR then?

I don’t consider the work I do to be public relations. I don’t, typically, work with PR or Marketing. I work with CEOs.

Lol, ok.👌🏻 How’s the DAO coming along?

❡ In The New Yorker, James Somers wonders if programmers are headed for an AI-driven extinction. He thinks definitely yes, but also kind of no.

In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs,1 might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. [Somers’ non-coder friend] Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.

…but:

GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson can’t wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my profession. In fact, I feel somewhat more secure than before. As software gets easier to make, it’ll proliferate; programmers will be tasked with its design, its configuration, and its maintenance.

This seems plausible to me. Who but a programmer is going to be willing to argue with the client about what the code should do, and then argue with the Thinking Engine until the code does what the client wants? The basic skill of programming is not writing code, it’s solving incredibly tedious puzzles over and over every day for years to produce a new app that everyone will hate being forced to use.

A giant teddy bear with an upsettingly human proportioned body wearing a blue t-shirt and gray sweatpants cuddles with a dark haired woman in what can only be described as a post-coital way.

The real problem is not that AI is writing, or will write, or can write. The problem is who is writing the AI programs and designing the algorithms. Who is setting the terms of the research? Who is deciding what matters? Mainly men. That’s a problem because the world is not made up of mainly men.

Harry Josephine Giles had what I thought was one of the best takes, which is that “combinatory and computational literature, of which large language models are merely the latest iteration, is likely as old as literature itself,” and the real threat embodied by your G’s PT and so forth is profit and the consequent enclosure of what has until now been a very open and freely shared field of human/machine hybrid experimentation.

❡ Most of you probably already know that a Taylor Swift thing happened but I am just not constitutionally equipped to engage with Taylor Swift Events so here’s Intern Kira to explain it.

You Belong With Tree

The hetlors can rejoice: Taylor Swift finally has a #KissGate that doesn’t involve Karlie Kloss. On Saturday night in Buenos Aires, Swift finished her 3-hour-long show and ran into the arms of beefy beau Travis Kelce, giving him an unambiguous smooch. During the show, she changed the lyrics in her song “Karma” to “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me,” shocking her dancers and fans alike. “DYING CRYING SHITTING PISSING CLENCHING VOMITING” was one fan’s very normal response. 

To be fair, The Straights have been gagging for the Swift/Kelce relationship from the beginning. They love the fact that he is a huge Swiftie and wore friendship bracelets to her show. He is also tall and apparently not racist. He worships her! People are INVESTED in the relationship’s CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE. (Taylor’s dad Scott Swift seems to be on board as well, as he was doing his best white dad dance moves next to Kelce while wearing a Chiefs lanyard.)

However, many have suggested that this relationship is the work of Swift’s omnipresent publicist Tree Paine, following the PR disaster that was the Matty Healey fling. A source (Tree Paine) told People “it all feels very special” and another source (Tree Paine) told ET they are “both excited and giddy.” Fans of Tayvis (Swelce? ugh) are also taking Paine’s comments about the relationship as evidence that she hated Joe Alwyn because no such statements were ever made about him. (Personally, I’m a Joe fan because he is pretty and looks like a lesbian. Sue me!)

“Real” or not, the relationship is making the rich richer and the stans infinitely more unhinged. We are all one nation under Tree Paine now.

AstoundingSwift tweeted: “she never said “karma is the guy on hulu now streaming conversations with friends” now did she” which is a pretty good Joe Alwyn burn.

—Kira Deshler always acts normal, not like some people. 

Have you all been gatekeeping the existence of a ginger mastermind named TREE PAINE from me? I’m going to think “tree paine” every ten minutes for the next week. This is why I don’t cover fandom.

❡ Today In Crabs:

The Crab Nebula in infrared light, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Swirls of orange and gray form a bubble-like structure in the blackness of space.

A little more than 969 years ago—on July 4, 1054, to be more precise—the light from one of the universe’s most energetic and violent events reached Earth: a supernova, or exploding star.

…the Crab is the colossal cloud of debris from that ancient supernova, blasting away from the explosion site at five million kilometers per hour.

I will say it again: there’s too much universe, and it’s too big.

❡ In Business Insider’s aptly named Discourse section, Aki Ito reports that the white collar over-employed are still out there working two, three, or more different full time jobs at once. Good luck to them, I can’t even stand to have one job anymore.

❡ Today’s Song: Slaughter Beach, Dog, “Black Oak”

I asked Spotify for my “daylist” this afternoon and it read me to filth:

Joke’s on them though, I enjoyed it.

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