Friday morning status update: FINALLY! Oaks and maples are showing full color at the Cat Sanctuary this morning! Color should be appearing in towns this weekend! Leaf peepers, THIS is your weekend!
Music, one poetry link, and one rant.
Music
Haevn. (Indeterminate religious content. The band name seems to be an acronym, not merely a typo.)
MC Hammer.
Indila.
Billy Ocean. (Such a totally 1980s song...expressing an attitude to "love" that was a great help to women practicing celibacy. I remember hearing the first few lines as background music for a boxing scene and thinking how appropriate they were for boxing--and what an utter turn-off for "love.")
Talk Talk.
Beatles, together and separately.
Brian Adams.
Kinks. (Another great celibacy booster. If he--or she!--is "tired of waiting" for marriage, that's not a reason to go further in the direction of premarital parenthood. It is a reason to move back to "If he (or she) wants a date with me, he (or she) will be delighted by a handshake and a friendly word under the porch light. No more kisses until person works out whether person wants me or wants what person can find in a sleazy bar." Proud Prudes not only get more and more interesting dates...we marry well.)
Bread.
Marmalade.
Simple Minds.
Sanctus Real. (Christian content, and the link opens a full-album playlist.)
Poem
How I wish I'd written this and could post it on my Substack!
Technology
It's official: Trump's ordered everyone in Washington to replace "AI" with "SI." He thinks that means "Super Intelligence." Actually I like "SI," as understood to mean "Stolen Intelligence," which is what the plagiarism-bots produce. A Craiyon image that cobbles together bits of existing images to produce something new, strange, and uncopyrighted can be amusing, as can the Mad-Lib-type song parodies this web site has used to write pop songs for robots ("You make me feel so updated, so incredibly updated, right now")--but when people use plagiarism-bots to produce remixes of other people's art and writing that they then pass off as their own work, that's stolen intelligence.
It also tends to be rather dull intelligence, which is why the expansion of plagiarism-ware beyond art into the applied sciences ought to call out more caution than it seems to be doing. Self-driving cars do well enough at mixing their owners' decisions about where to go, stand in line, and pick up the goods ordered, with the Department of Motor Vehicles' decisions about general safe driving practices...until they come to a situation that's not covered by either of those sets of preset rules. In such situations self-driving cars do not make wise decisions. Sometimes they just explode. You do not want a robot running your pacemaker or IV drip. You do not want a robot making actual decisions about how to vacuum-clean the floor or take out the trash.
But I think we can use Trump's use of his authority over Microsoft, both as President and as a major stock holder, as a measurement of Trump's intelligence.
If Trump still has the business genius that made him famous, he'll lose no opportunity to bring Microsoft up to standards for customer service. No more "leave a few bugs in to motivate people to buy new computers." Bill Gates got away with that when and for so long as personal computers were strictly toys for rich kids. Now that they're the tools of people's trades and, too often, the primary or sole source of business records, all further development of computers needs to focus on keeping them "bug"-free. And efficient. Zero wait time. And reparable. One computer per person per lifetime. And, as computers become worth the cost of keeping, governed by the US Constitution's standards of individual rights and liberties, including privacy, such that any attempt to peek at anything stored on that essential private physical storage drive or private, physically wired printed, before it's published on a public web site, without a warrant from a judge or magistrate authorizing a search for evidence of a specific criminal activity, carries a substantial legal penalty. No need even to consider following China in the direction of self-destruction; an Internet that lets itself be used a a tool of oppression is an Internet that serves nobody's interests in the long term. Use the Internet as a means to spread democracy, and let China demonstrate the consequences of using their Internet without due respect for others if China insists, the way China demonstrated the consequenes of Mao's tyranny. Rapid movement of Microsoft in those directions would indicate that Trump's still got game.
Regretfully, I think Trump's game is over. Some people are as brilliant at ninety as they were at forty; some are not. Genetic factors are involved. Without blame, with due respect, in the case of his wife and children even with love, Trump may need to be supervised as closely as Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson, or Joe Biden needed to be. He is still a popular speaker, with (I hate to say this but it's true) a level of talent comparable with Reagan's. Let him use the gift God has given him like a good Christian. He can still do some good as President even if he is no longer the business genius his original backers expected him to be. Only let him be watched, by people who will have the good judgment to guide the Internet in a sustainable and humanitarian direction...with or without Microsoft.
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