On the problems of developing technology

 

I suppose this sounds like you're in for a real treatise.

You're not in for a real treatise.

Today is just the usual nonsense. But I do want to talk about "the problems" a little. Over the many years of clerkmanifesto since I started playing with video and photography experimentation, I have noticed a couple of things:

1. The really experimental images and technology heavy work I have made is the work that ages the least well of anything out in the history of clerkmanifesto.

2. It's also the thing that I get most obsessed with, so there's plenty of it!

I hope you don't mind. 

I don't mind.

I mean, I don't mind if you don't mind.

But when I can do something entirely "new" in these realms I get very excited about it. 

But also every few months to a year there's usually a new iteration where I can do the exact same thing so much better. So I get excited about it all over again.

These Dr. Seuss pictures I've been showing are a good case in point. I've been taking certain of my images, sometimes because its the best way to make them work, and sometimes because I've become so enchanted with the resuts, and turning them into Dr. Seuss inspired style versions of themselves for probably a few years now. 

Here, this picture is already from awhile ago. Take a look at me with my Seuss Camera from the woods of Minnesota:

Of course, that is already the Seussified version that I showed here a couple years ago. Here's the original never shown photo of me taken with a regular camera:

As you know lately I have been seussifying some recent flower pictures because it turned out to be the best way to make them come alive and have the charm I saw in the flowers to begin with. I had used this technique before, and was happy with it. But this time around the ai image editors I employed had gone through a couple of notable generational improvements since my last experiments. My prompting and my own editing had also gotten better.

So I was a bit dazzled.

In short I had to now go back and look at how all the right kinds of pictures from my history would look through this amazing new lens!

So, I have a lot of pictures from the past few days.

Here are just a few random ones to start you off with. Hopefully we won't find these delightful wonders too painful when we stumble back upon them in 2029 or whenever:

My God!

 

The nature of miracles

 

While technically, as you read this, I am back home from a brief passage from being 59 to being sixty, all magically conducted by a river in Wisconsin, actually, I am now writing from late in the night as part of my preparations before going. 

I have been posting little bits of animal human videos for you, like bread crumbs to lead clerkmanifesto to my return, but midnight struck and I realized, tired, that I could write something far quicker than I could assemble pieces of another video. They're complicated. I love making these strange pieces of ephemera, but they make me wish that the days all had a hundred hours in them. For something that's supposed to be so quick, a great labor saving device, they take forever to make.

Maybe that's the real secret of all new technology: For all the time it saves, it asks for twice as much in return.

Now with music

 

I have now discovered putting music to my little animal clips. As ever, when I add a new layer of complexity to whatever projects I'm working on, I feel a pull to go back and update every single thing I have done in the past so that it meets my new standard. Once I just had pictures. Then they all had to have animals, and suchlike, magicked into them. Then they had to be able to become realistic live video footage. And now they have to have their own song to go with it.

I enjoy doing it, but going back and updating past clips to my newer standard may or may not happen. There are so many things I am interested in making right now that it's an issue of time. It doesn't take me very long to write a short bit of lyrics. And generating a song is frankly all too easy. All the time cost comes in choosing between the smorgasbord of delightful 30 second songs. Do I choose the one that sounds like Ella Fitzgerald, or the one that sounds like Tom Waits? Whatever I don't choose will never ever ever see the light of day.

Anyway, here are some of my first "Talkies", so to speak. They are all new and not retrofitted. As ever, click the picture for it to come to life, but they have sound too, if you are interested in putting in your headphone, or turning on the volume, or whatever.

I will buy all your AI's

 

Though my impulse is simply to show you all my short AI films of animals in my library, this space no longer supports video and never did very well at it when it actually did sort of support video anyway. 

Also, I know that many of you aren't all that wild about AI. 

Fair enough. I'm agnostic on it myself.

Nevertheless this use of AI is my current creative obsession, and I am burning through paid credits as fast as I can buy them. I am absolutely enthralled with creating partially fake pictures of my library and trying to bring them to life. It is complete magic to me.

When it works.

The delicious AI video maker I am using, which is the best one there is currently available, is a Chinese one called Kling. And like all good AI at this point, it is one part more than I ever dreamed of, one part deranged lunatic, and one part deer in the headlights simpleton.

It is a weird combination.

It is very capricious.

It may not understand English, but sometimes it might read my mind.

After struggling with two different AI photography programs I was able to put a decent Mastodon into the physical space of my library. When I put that picture into Kling to try to make it a movie, it produced very plausible video of the space, except it insisted on treating the Mastodon as a kind of 3D statue. Usually I give up on this sort of thing. Obstinately this time I burned through credits trying to get the AI to bring my Mastodon to life. After hours of tries the Mastodon walked.

"It's alive!" I cried with joy.

I post things like this to YouTube.

Every rare once in awhile I get a comment. It's usually something like:

"That is some great AI. I hate AI."

Fair enough.

https://youtube.com/shorts/zMzZB415YJk

The age of wonders

 

Let me take this moment.

We are in one of the most extraordinary flourishings of technological wonders in the history of the world! 

Capabilities of magic that, if explained to someone 100 years ago, would have seemed like raving science fictional wonders, would also seem like raving science fiction wonders to, well, me, say, five years ago. 

Five years ago!

So what's the issue? Why the disdain and jaded interest from all but a coterie of fervent acolytes?

1. We are so inured to these magic tricks that though our astonishment is genuine in the first moment, we so quickly absorb the wonder that it is mundane to most of us within five minutes. Nearly everyone I shared a sophisticated, handcrafted song of my own highly personalized lyrics with, was amazed and full of questions. People wanted to know the singer. People wanted to know how on earth! People loved it!

And then, like that, it was over.

No one was particularly interested in any subsequent songs. They were done. Onto the next thing.

2. It is all going to go bad.

Controlled by greedy oligarchs, all of this brilliant collection of creative tools- pictures, video, and songs on command, talking, friendly robot all-knowing search engines, and so on, is bound inextricably to a collection of ruling powers that have, well,

FUCKING LOST THEIR MINDS

Wild with unendingly voracious obsessions with money and power, they hold these stunning little treasures in their fevered hands. 

I think we know that they are not gifts; 

they are loans.

And since we have watched wonder after wonder of our humanity arrive and go sour, we are sensible enough, and so inured, that a couple moments of being impressed will suffice before we understand that all this is going to go ugly in ways we can't quite understand.

And fair enough.

But let me take this moment:

I have been hunting the Internet for very particular kinds of poems to use in order to make gorgeous songs in my favorite styles. But then Meta AI shows up, and I can just ask it:

Show me a short, rhyming poem that was mildly popular in the 1920's, by a woman of color.

And I know that any sensible person knows just how broken the current Internet is, and, frankly, how broken it probably will be, but I typed that question into the a newer AI search:

Show me a short, rhyming poem that was mildly popular in the 1920's, by a woman of color.

And,

It simply did.

Unsolvable problems

 

A library patron came to me at the front desk of my library and told me "The lights at the end of the fiction section seating kept turning off on us."

I set aside my first thought, which was to wonder why the person had walked by the main reference desk and traveled the greatest distance of our entire library in order to inform me of this. Then I immediately began to run down the lighting system in my library. "In an act of technological hubris," I began "We installed a complex array of smart lighting, which has created lights that turn off and on according to a fantastical set of circumstances that exist purely in the minuscule imagination of a series of uncontrollable, entirely autonomous lightbulbs."

The patron looked at me blankly.

So I added, "I will talk to the property management people about this annoying problem." 

They were reluctantly mollified.

So I did not add, "And they will be even less helpful to me than I have just been to you."

All the wonders of technology in one brief story

 

I was shelving and listening to a legal podcast when I came upon an interesting series of spy thrillers by Stella Rimington. I paused my podcast, looked over the books, and saw that the first in the somewhat acclaimed series was called At Risk.

"This sounds like something worth trying." I thought. I checked some reviews. I decided I would like to read it right away.

But I was shelving. I couldn't read anything.

I needed someone to read it to me.

So I looked up the book At Risk on Libby, the library ebook app. An audiobook of it was available!

In a matter of seconds I downloaded it and could listen to it.

I could not help reflecting upon the wonder of this. In a matter of a minute or two I went from having no clue about a book, to wanting to read it, to having a trained, professional actor reading it to me perfectly in my earbud! It was absolutely amazing!

I mean, the technology was amazing. 

I hated the book.

The exciting world of library software systems

 

There comes a time for any blog reader when, after endless days of seeing alien spaceships crashing down in the Mississippi River Gorge, one's mind, over stimulated, starts to wander and drift. And if it wanders long enough it eventually comes to the subject of library software systems.

The average amount of required time for a mind to wander so far as to come across the subject of library software systems is...

427,032,233,891 days.

Which is longer than I thought it would be. So it's probably a fluke that we all simultaneously thought of it after just a few days. 

This suggests something suspicious going on.

Suspicious, suspicious, suspicious!

But an important lesson I have learned is that just because something is suspicious doesn't mean we will ever know what the hell is going on.

Anyway, here's how I've always thought our library software should be made:

A non profit coalition of all the nation's libraries, or any public library anywhere, should contribute staff and resources to make a free and open source library software that anyone could use. This would be a very library solution. But as brilliant as libraries are, it doesn't take a ton of scratching at a library to get to the capitalism underneath.

So instead, what we have is something called SirsiDynix. And our software comes from them. Whatever this company has been, it has been eaten by larger companies over the years. For awhile it was owned by a venture capital firm with over 81 billion dollars in assets.

Now, I know that among my library oriented readers, people are saying: "Well, 81 billion dollars really isn't that much money. What's that? Like the budget for an averaged sized large urban library system?"

But for regular people who are simply thinking of buying a few yachts and retiring to the Cote d Azur, it is quite a lot of money!

And so many of you are wondering: "What's your point?"

Here is a list of possible answers to this question:

1. It is not a good idea to let one's mind wander.

2. I wish I got in on some of that sweet SirsiDynix action back in the old Ameritech days.

3. Library systems are a growth industry!

4. We should all appreciate pictures of crash landed alien spaceships more than we do!

I battle AI

 

As you may have noticed, a lot of the pictures I've been showing here lately have leaned heavily on AI. You may have also read my earlier analysis of AI that concludes it is not so much Artificial Intelligence as it is The Plagiarism of Everything. 

This would make an excellent book title: The Plagiarism of Everything.

But I will not be writing that book.

Nevertheless I am here today battling AI on its own turf.

Today's picture has absolutely no AI generation in it.

However, every part of it is plagiarized.

And yet the whole I consider to be mine.

Four pictures

 

I have started editing a lot of pictures lately to make myself t-shirts. It is amazing what AI can do right now, especially for me with photography. I can conceive of an image and have an AI produce endless versions that may all be somewhat like what I wanted, or it could have all of them be not even remotely what I asked for. But among them there may be ones that are randomly beautiful.  

I find that culturally, when exciting and possibly revolutionary technologies are emerging, what is shown of them is their very best capabilities and iterations. Sometimes, as critics explore the new technology, their very worst iterations are shown. But what we never see are the ways that the technology is just generally poor, we don't see its points of frustration, nor do we see the array of things that would normally, logically be part of this technology when we conceive or imagine it ourselves, but that in reality simply aren't there at all.

All that said I am doing so much working around designs, limitations, and my own ignorance while using AI Photography, that to get anything I want it's almost like I have to make the art myself!

But, so, actually I just came here today to tell you I am sick! 

I haven't tested yet and sort of assume Covid, but I would be delighted if it were just a very bad cold or a fairly mild flu. And I was going to explain briefly, in like two sentences at most, how I was tired and couldn't possibly write a proper blog post exploring technology issues today. And then I was going to offer these four pictures for your entertainment while I took it easy. 

But then... this whole thing happened (see above).

Here are four pictures anyway:

How we get money around here

 

My library did away with late fines officially a little over a year ago. The whole late fine thing, which dominated years of my life working at this library, turned out to be a house of cards in the end. The pandemic came through and it all started to fall apart. And nobody misses it. Which supports my optimistic view that institutions don't need to be so punitive. They can actually be generous!

Okay, I've been around the block a few times with the public, so let me amend that, but only a little:

Institutions don't need to be so punitive. They can actually be cautiously generous!

That's the good news.

The bad news is that someone in the county IT Department might be reconsidering this strategy. 

This, I warn you, is a true story. It happened today.

We recently, after a tremendous amount of fuss and delay, got new self checkout machines to replace the old ones that worked just fine, but... okay. The new check out machines include a small group of minor improvements, a subtle "new machine" sheen, and an array of downgrades that may or may not be temporary glitches to be worked out over the course of the next decade, or not.

One glitch, if you can call it that, is that only one machine in the building so far takes credit cards for fees (despite the end of fines, we still have assorted charges for rental bestsellers, lost materials, and occasional minor purchases like book bags). An older couple I was helping wanted to pay their $2.50 rental book fees, but they only had credit cards. Disliking a debt, they resolved that they would pay it on our self check out station when they checked out later.

Fifteen minutes later they were back. They said the machine told them they owed $2.50. They hit the "pay" button. The machine then asked if they wanted to pay all $17 of what they owed.

What?

I was excited. I wanted to see this action. First I double checked that they owed a straight up $2.50 with no complications. Then we went to the machine and ran their library card under the laser. The screen said they owed $2.50. We chose to pay, on the touch screen, at which point, sure enough, the machine asked if we would like to pay all $17 of what they owed.

Whoa.

I told the couple that maybe they should hold off on paying the fine until I could track down whether we were trying to trick them into paying too much, or it was just some kind of programming mistake.

Often it's both.

Dreary things

 

I was back at the library after many days off. I was having lunch, which was a salad, with blue cheese, tomatoes, and roasted seeds, sunflower seeds in honor of Ukraine. While I ate I listened to a recorded book of Rex Stout, featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. I have been listening to a lot of recorded books through the library app known as Libby. This particular book is hilarious not just because Nero Wolfe books are hilarious, but because the recording is taken from the old Books on Tape recordings, and in translating the book to a downloadable digital format they didn't even bother to edit out the prompts to turn over the tape. So I'll be listening along to the account of a series of murders involving a popular radio show and their sponsors (already retro to the era of the cassette tape), when the voice breaks in and says "This concludes side one of tape three. Please turn over the tape at this time and begin the tape at the same place on the other side."

There were periods in the nineties where I listened to those books on tape regularly, enough so that the instruction is Pavlovian, and I have to resist scrambling for my phone to turn over the cassette, which only exists as a vestigial figment, like the feeling of a lost arm. 

"No, just wait it out." I tell myself. "The story will start again all on its own."

I like to post pretty pictures here in clerkmanifesto. In 15 minutes I'm even heading out in my neighborhood to try and find some more pretty pictures, if I can. But the truth is that there is plenty of America that's aesthetically dismal. Where I sat against a window in the breakroom of my library, eating my salad, listening to the book on tape on phone, my view was of a drive-through drop off lane, through dirty windows, and peering out into the usual vast parking lot which most institutions in America specialize in.

I didn't mind too much. It was ugly, but I appreciated the natural light of it all, and my book, and the time to myself. I took a few pictures of it to show you my unglamorous world. 

But as soon as I had done that, I couldn't help but make a couple small improvements.

Treadmill

 

We're almost there with the technology.

It is minus 11 degrees out, and icy. I'm not going outside if I can help it.

This presents some problems. But the two main ones I can see are:

1. How do I get exercise?

2. How do I partake of my nature photography hobby?

For the first we bought a treadmill. It works. I like it. And it is very, very, very boring, which explains the metaphorical use of "treadmill" in our lexicon.

For the second, I go out into video games and instead of stabbing and shooting people (sometimes), I take nature pictures.

Here are some more examples of that one:

I have one of those VR things you strap to your face, and it is very impressive. One can get into some very interesting environments, though none yet so well realized as those above. The dream, of course, is being able to walk on an omni directional treadmill in an environment like this above. It's not quite all there yet, but I feel it would be a fairly complete solution to the Winter problem.

Although Winter may disappear altogether, so it could be a wash.