art, music and general inhumanity.

I'm sad about it for many reasons, but the writing on the wall is that LLM-centric technology will become as everyday as all the other silly, dumb and terrible 'so easy that it melts our mutual intuition and individual comprehension' tech we now use, and that "manual" slow-form writing and other creativity will become mostly a thing of the past, a weirdo hobby or something like scholastic practice; because people love when things happen with the press of a button. Especially 'use your own brain' - things. and this is likely to happen because it's impossible to selectively dispose or disentangle technological progress from what we are as a whole. A lot of people are still going to be using this stuff for a variety of reasons; in public, in secret, shameful, proud or merely too busy to care, and we can't moralize it out of the world (or shouldn't moralize our heads to the sands). I don't like that this is the state of things and the direction of life, but I also try to look at things as they are or as very likely to be the state of things. I don't think we should just look at this stuff as something that goes away because we want it to, or because we hate it hard enough to make it disappear, because that has barely ever (or never?) worked out. LLM might not become our AI overlord or suck our water pools dry, but it'll likely be something like the whole surface layer of the apps in our phone-lives, and that app-centricity of life is the crux of the matter. I think it's very comforting to point fingers and cry foul when AI usage is found to happen, but it's also a bit like giving up and saying "the next generation will have to figure it out". Because, honestly, they will have to figure it out, and perhaps we might try and give them a hand? We should look at the problem like "how do we adapt to this massive change without losing even more value from our unique human beingness" or maybe "how do we adapt the past and make it new in face of the challenging present and future?" or "what can i do in a world like this today that is not just looking at all things like they're prompts for a google search bar, or things to turn into even more video footage?" If we can no longer escape the dashboard or the doomscroll, we should try and think of the meaning of life that happens in-between. Thank you for reading my TED-writeup. I wrote it all myself because I'm concerned with things.

Awake at 3 am. It's the heat, makes sleeping difficult. So far this year has been easier than the last, when it was about 3 weeks sitting in a blaze with no AC. I watched a lot of comfort catastrophe movies, if that makes any sense. I think I am very naive about love. And then there's the Daniel Johnston song: "Mean Girls Give Pleasure". "Mean girls give pleasure / It's my greatest treasure." I think often of the documentary about drug addicts, "Life of Crime". When you've really grown to root for a person and then you see their carcass as dead mush in a body bag, it hits you hard. The ending of that one brought me to tears, hard. It was hard as hope can be. Is it so, that a life is worthwhile already for the recollection in others, that your own existing may bring out? I've felt like during the past year or so my energies have simmered down way low. And that simmer's made if feel like there's a steady center to me.