More Later on Free Press

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At the end of my Free Press post, I said “More later”, so here’s some more.

Fred Clark talks about using an RSS reader, and links to a journalism site in North Carolina, The Assembly, where the writers tell us they want to to create “new models for state level news”. A wonderful idea, and the site’s full of good in-depth journalism.

We should have more of this. We desperately need it. One way to have more of this is for us to subscribe, pay some money and help them sustain themselves. Of course, if North Carolina’s not of interest or is too far away, find someone local or someone covering topics you find interesting. There are many good journalists out there, in a very discouraging world for journalists. When we find them, let’s support them.

A few words on Fred Clark. He’s a writer of long experience, and a damned good one. He should be getting a living wage from a legitimate publication. Instead, he writes/blogs for Patheos, for what I expect is a pittance. Patheos is a site with a focus on religion (Fred’s a progressive evangelical Christian, with great knowledge and insight to that community).

To feed his family, he works at a big box store – I think Home Depot, but maybe Costco. This is sad, he’s really good at what he does. Nothing wrong with working at Big Box, but our society should support Fred’s talent better. From time to time I send him some money from my meager funds, to show my direct support for his work.

In the post I link to above Fred explains RSS, Really Simple Syndication. An old technology in internet time, but one I use every day with my RSS Reader. As Fred says, it’s a way to bypass BigCorp’s Almighty Algorithm and get articles to read based entirely on what you want to read, not what Mark Zuck’s robots want you to read. I encourage everyone to use an RSS reader, you might like it and it takes the edge off The Algorithm. I have a subscription to The Old Reader.

This post is also a test of syndicating from my personal website to my Bluesky account (@kevinphayes.bsky.social). The idea is to publish here, syndicate elsewhere, such as the social media monster sites. Let’s see how that goes.

It would also be my first Bluesky post, which shows you how much I like that type of web presence. This is an IndieWeb thing, and I love IndieWeb things.

I doubt if I’m the only one who sees “Bluesky” as a last name, perhaps Russian, Ivan Bluesky. I also see it in my head as “Blueski”, maybe someone’s babcia, which I always heard from my Polish-American friends as “botch”. Mrs. Blueski.

More later . . .

Buffalo Mayor

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Well now, Buffalo’s gearing up for its first real Mayoral election in many years. The Byron Brown era is finally over, and not a moment too soon. It was the very definition of what I call “petrified politics”. Nothing moved. Nothing new happened. All the same players in all the same places, except every so often they changed chairs, as when whatsisname Higgins retired, a bunch of local pols moved up a step. Whoop de fuckin’ do.

I try not to be cynical, it discourages the young people, who don’t need any extra discouragement from cranky old Kevin. But man it can be hard in this town of petrified politics.

I can say without reservation – I’m not seeing anyone yet who’s expressing interest in running for Mayor who’s the slightest bit outside the box of politics as usual. All pandering to their particular voting or power groups. All without anything approaching a new idea.

All boring, to be honest, and there’s nothing more worthless than a boring politician. Show us some skin! Stand up for something! Piss somebody off! You only live once. My favorite politicians were quite happy to poke someone in the eye now and then. We don’t need wimps or overly cautious types.

Note: For the newbies and out of towners, Buffalo’s a one-party town, Democratic, and we’ll be having primaries in June 2025. In many years, that’s the whole ball game, you win the Dem primary, you’re in. It might be different this time around, but the June primary will be the first act in this political show. So the candidates are stepping up right around now.

More later . . .

Twitter, Bluesky, all that jangly social media shit

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I’ve never really used Twitter. I had an account, but it seems Twitter’s approach to publishing, if you can call it that, doesn’t fit with the way my mind works.

It never clicked, not that I tried that hard. I remember thinking, fifteen years ago, “why would anyone want to put out every stray thought?” That’s how I perceived it. Part of it, for me, is I never care to use my phone for anything but voice calls and texts. Anything beyond that is massively difficult, for me anyway, because it’s so goddammed small. I’m a desktop computer user, and I don’t see that changing any time soon, not for me anyway.

Plus, I tend to be fairly guarded and value my privacy, so blipping out my thoughts doesn’t fit in with my usual approach to communication.

I make extensive use of Facebook. As Facebook increases its enshittification pace, the stream of posts is getting cluttered with a lot of robot-produced crap, which I try to knock back with post moderation, to little avail.

The most useful aspects of Facebook are groups. Great ways to discuss specific issues with people having similar interests and experiences. It’s still hobbled by Facebook’s need to monetize as much as they can. The whole “Business” aspect of Facebook is utter crap. I suppose it would get better if we spend money on ads, but I doubt it, the enshittification being as advanced as it is.

My bitches about it are the needless repetition, saying there’s something new when there’s not, and the overall difficulty of finding the thing you need to respond to or work on. It’s a hot mess, as they say. I’m not mentioning (as I mention it) that it can bring a bunch of clueless people into my work life, but then it’s part of my job to give clueless people a clue, or at least try. “No, I won’t come get your piano, or your moldy couch (only a little mold, on the bottom, not the seat), or, god forbid, engage with people who don’t have the slightest understanding of the business model of every second hand dealer in the world.

Beyond groups, the promotional features of Facebook are a cheap way to promote the buzz, with some downsides, mostly about me having to engage with clueless people, endlessly explaining why we don’t want their trash and certainly won’t expend any effort to help them with it, even if they paid us, to be honest. I can write about this at length, I think, and may do that, chips fall where they may.

So I closed my Twitter account and opened a Bluesky account at kevinphayes.bsky.social. While the political ambience seems to be better, it’s much the same jangly shit to me. I have enough jangly thoughts in my inattentive head without mainlining it from Twitter or Bluesky or whatever. It’s also no less likely to enshittify than Twitter and Facebook, it’s still venture capital owned and controlled. But it’s healthy to reject Twitter and that insane weirdo Musk.

Mastodon is much more attractive to my Indie Web way of thinking about this sort of thing. Real federation is much better than the existing silos or Bluesky’s propietary implementation. But I’m no more active at my Mastodon account than anywhere else (see my most recent posts, informing the world about the Buffalo Christmas Blizzard of 2022). It’s still too jangly and nobody’s made a mass exodus as they are doing for Bluesky.

I’m old school, I guess, and am very happy with my RSS reader. Minimal jangle. Still a disciple of Dave Winer and his wise thinking about news, writing and publishing.

Now are you seeing why I write and publish on my own website? It doesn’t belong to anyone but me. I can move it around. Nobody can take it down, at least not yet.

More later . . .

The Free Press

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Let’s talk about newspapers. They’re dying in the US, with a few exceptions, some big city dailies, legacy papers (NYT, WaPo) and a few outliers. This is clearly a ruling class plan, muddy as it may be. Odd as it seems, there’s a business model in buying papers such as the Buffalo News, killing them and selling off the assets. I’m not clear on how this works for profit.

There are other models for newspapers than Big Corp owning and controlling them.

One is the small “paper”, usually completely online and local, hyper or a little bigger, or with a particular focus. A Buffalo example is Investigative Post, focusing on investigative journalism. It’s run as a not for profit and has been publishing regularly for several years now. Real reporters doing real journalism.

Another example is the B Square Bulletin, in Bloomington Indiana. A scrappy, hard-working, experienced reporter just up and started his own local “paper”, a website covering all the usual local news. Seems to be making it through the small paper minefields just fine.

A recent startup, focused on arts and culture, is The Buffalo Hive (their website is slow, not a good sign). And Newell’s Buffalo Rising is alive and well, rarely political but very much a presence in local journalism.

Another type of paper is where a not for profit corporation owns and runs the publication. The most prominent example is The Guardian, owned by an NFP for more than a hundred years, and to this day a staunch supporter of traditional Liberalism (not the current day definition, but close). The Guardian retains a lot of political independence and has a globally competitive reporting capability.

In the US, a good example is the Baltimore Banner, founded as an NFP in response to fascist control of the legendary Baltimore Sun.

One of the difficulties of starting up a large newspaper is it costs a lot of money. In Baltimore, a local rich guy is funding The Banner. A local fascist rich guy bought The Sun and is running it into the ground. The Banner has more subscribers than The Sun, so clearly they’re doing something right and delivering what people want.

I’m putting this out here to encourage people to support independent journalism. And maybe even consider starting something up or joining something already going.

I subscribe to Investigative Post and throw a bit of money at The Guardian. I can increase this support from my meager funds. I should be supporting The Hive, and I may send a few bucks to The Banner, even though Baltimore is way off my personal radar.

I also send Geoff Kelly at IP any tips about what I’m hearing around town, and I hear a fair amount. This is direct support and welcomed by any competent reporter.

The other part of independent journalism is personal websites, or personal writing on institutional websites. This is actually the largest sector, by far, and to a large extent the most independent. It used to be called blogging, and the term still applies.

A Buffalo example is the regular reporting on the Common Council, produced at Partnership for the Public Good. This one makes me smile. Often, coverage of local government is absent or minimal, and it’s fading away as daily papers fade away. PPG has committed to a regular report on the Council. We need more of this, it’s extremely valuable.

More later . . .

Dog Biscuit Bakers On Strike

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To all my friends who consider themselves progressives, or lefties, or socialists, or Big-D Democrats or whatever term fits you, here’s a way to directly support one of our country’s and the world’s most reliable and powerful political movements. Right here in Buffalo, on the East Side.

The Bakers at Milk-Bone are on strike. This means most of Milk-Bone’s workers are striking, 165 men and women, our neighbors, family and friends.

How to support? Easiest is simply to drive or stroll on by their picket line, which is at the loading dock gate of the Milk-Bone plant, on Fougeron Street between Kehr and Louisen. 212 Fougeron will allow Google to direct you to the spot. Driving by, honking and waving, gives them a boost. They’d be plenty happy to talk about why they’re striking, if you were inclined to get out of your car. And I expect they wouldn’t say no to some coffee or food, but it might be best to ask them what’s needed and appropriate.

Striking is hard. Running a picket line is hard. No pay, out in the weather day and night, potential for violence and harm, a lot of standing around. It’s not easy standing up for your rights.

A little about Milk-Bone. The plant on Fougeron Street is North America’s largest dog snack bakery. A division of Smucker’s, which has come a long way from Mr. Smucker’s kitchen, back in small-town Ohio, back in the nineteenth century. They’re Big Corp. They’re profitable. They’ve been baking dog biscuits in Buffalo since 1957. They’ve spent serious money and resources improving their plant and buying neighboring properties. They sure look like they’re here to stay.

Milk-Bone is our neighbor at ReUse Action. We have nothing against the company and its local management, and have our own healthy relationship with them. We do, and I can speak for my colleagues, respect and support unions and collective bargaining and the laws and traditions that support labor organizing in this country. Our little bit of support for the workers is to allow them to stage their portable toilet on our lot across from the picket line, displaying a supportive sign in our store, and being available to help if they ask for it.

When I’m discouraged, out of gas, confused about what’s happening, I find my best choice is to take action. Any action, and by its nature it will be a small, individual action. The workers at Milk-Bone need our support. We can take action and directly support them quite easily. Please consider doing it.

How to Deal With The Situation We’re Faced With

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Stick together. Help each other in any way you can. Build alternative systems. Work your job. Join a union. If you don’t have a union, organize one. Push back against oppression at every opportunity. Include everyone. Don’t stop speaking up and speaking out. Be brave. Encourage others to be brave.

Do all those prepping things we’ve been talking about since the pandemic. Build your pantry. Build your neighbor’s pantry, your block’s pantry. Plant your garden. Take care of your house and your street. Check up on the old folks. Be kind to people. Share. Enlarge your circle.

Remember the people of Chile voted Pinochet out and eventually put him in a box.

Remember the Basques built the largest worker-owned cooperative on the planet, right smack in the middle of Franco’s rule of Fascist Spain.

Remember right-thinking people, who aren’t afraid of their fellow citizens, outnumber the ignorant, deluded people who voted for this.

More on AI

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I’ve been thinking about LLMs like ChatGPT, which I’m experimenting with right now.

After a hazy recall of a dream last night, it occurred to me, in my experience, LLMs are dreamlike in their oddities and quirks. They put things in that don’t make sense, like in a dream where something out of place is right there, being believed by your sleeping mind.

They’re also stubborn, and seem to have a hard time admitting error.

I’ve definitely been rethinking using my ainimal images for publication or profit. It’s not something I want to do. I expect artificially generated images will take work away from skilled human artists. This is a valid argument. I understand it’s my personal view and also understand others’ use of such images can be justified.

So why is “dreamlike” a good descriptor? It’s the suspension of disbelief LLMs share with the common experience of dreaming. It’s the apparent assumption by the LLM that everything’s fine and correct, when a human can detect it isn’t.

Another thought about the danger of LLMs is simply, we’ve been damaged by technology in many different ways, from the dawn of technology, which is a very long time ago. So the damage being caused by LLMs is just more of the same type of thing. Getting upset by this is a common human experience. It hasn’t been the end of the world up to now. I expect LLMs won’t be the end of the world either.

AI likes the transformer shape, so it puts in extras. And I specified “sparks at the very top of the pole”. It kept putting them in the middle. AI doesn’tunderstand power transmission, at all.

AInimals

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I’m experimenting with one of ChatGPT’s image generators. Here are some results. I’ll be writing more about this.

To begin with, it’s not anything close to human intelligence. Kind of dumb, actually, and prone to getting itself stuck in blind alleys. It also has quirks that make it obvious it’s an LLM. Many times I’d ask it to remove a unwanted image part and it would say it did it when it clearly hadn’t.

It’s very plain I’m interacting with just another computer program, a powerful one, of course, but still just a program. It’s quickly clear my input is the most important part of the interaction, needing a lot of thought and careful noting of what the program does with parts of the input prompt.

I went into this experiment to explore ChatGPT’s creative or artistic possibilities. I found it worked well if I simplified a great deal. This isn’t surprising, and fits within my usual aesthetic or design approach of simplify, simplify, simplify. The images here are defined as “image of an animal, 20th century linoleum cut style, contained within a simple circular frame, with lots of white space around the circle, muted colors, only three or four colors maximum, in a square screensize”.

Defining the basic style, such as engraving, lithograph, oil painting etc., gives the program a narrower set of things to choose from when it constructs an image. I’ve been avoiding anything with words, as graphical LLMs have a very hard time, oddly, with words and letters, and can be quite stubborn about insisting it’s spelling or forming letters correctly. It’s good to remember there are humans behind the programming of ChatGPT, who make human decisions based on all kinds of circumstances, such as intellectual property.

Simplification removes some of the quirkiness of LLM, or at least makes the quirks more acceptable. The more complex and realistic renderings tend to have weirdness in the odd place, signs of non-human presence. I’m also not attracted to the discernable AI Style. It’s quite possible I’m just not putting the right words into my prompts.

The program can create some very attractive visual elements, impressively so. Frames, strokes and flourishes are often aesthetically pleasing.

I’m also narrowing down the subject matter, envisioning an “A is for Aardvark” type of sequence. These images appear to be well suited to book or picture form, as well as the web. Children will like them. And everyone likes critters.

More later.

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Later: I’m not going into the social or economic parts of LLM graphical programs. That’s a vast issue by itself, and we’re at the very early stages. We don’t know what real-life impact LLM will have on artists’ fortunes. I’ll write about it at some point, but want for the moment to look at technical and aesthetic aspects of this new thing.

I’m a technologist who’s earned a living in information technology since 1982, so the technical puzzle appeals to my curiosity and I want to see if I can put it to use. I have friends who are very upset at graphical LLMs, coming from an arts professional place. I’m no arts professional, and can be a bit of a money-grubber at times, so it doesn’t feel as dire to me.

P is for Pig

Q is for Quetzal

G is for Gerbil

C is for Cat

Weekly Woody, February 11, 2024

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1913 Massacre

One of Woody’s greatest songs. A great story, told simply. And his usual lesson: “The parents they cried and the miners they moaned – see what your greed for money has done.”

1913 Massacre, sung by Woody, at YouTube

Richardson, North Side

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This is a snapshot of the west end of the north side of the Richardson Complex. The Admin building is off the frame to the left; the brick wards are partially visible at the center. The stone wall in the middle is, I believe, the remnants of a greenhouse, of which there were two behind the hospital.

A pleasingly coherent photograph. The snow and bright sunshine work well to simplify the image. The brick wall unifies it and emphasizes its horizontal nature. There’s an abundance of separate parts that fit together well.

Richardson Complex, January 2024
Richardson Complex, January 2024