Unsolved

I was listening to a recent episode of the Decoder podcast, about how opposition to (hyperscale) data centers cuts across the otherwise entrenched partisan divide between Democratic and Republican voters. It was something of a follow-up to a story in The Verge from Gaby Del Valle about the broader opposition to these large data centers.

There wasn't anything really out of the ordinary in their discussion; the idea that dislike of generative automation and the data centers that house it crosses political boundaries is pretty much common knowledge at this point. But one thing did stand out for me. Host Nilay Patel asked Ms. Del Valle if there was something the technology companies could do to blunt the opposition, basically, could they buy the communities off in exchange for acceptance. The response:

I don’t know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didn’t include in the piece, because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. It was really specific stuff, like “You could have them on multiple small parcels of land.” It was really dry. “You could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.”

She then went on to note that what she believed communities wanted was some level of community input into the process.

It seems to me that changes to zoning laws is something that communities can do to have a greater level of control over what goes on in their immediate vicinity; in other words, it's a solution, or at least part of one, to the problem that these places feel they have. And it was left out of the story for being "extremely dry and very technical."

Part of me wants to use this as an indictment of modern media, leaving out the part of a story that people could actually use, because it didn't come across as "sexy" enough. But that presumes that Ms. Del Valle made the wrong call on that, and I'm not certain that she did. Her intuition that readers of The Verge would have simply tuned out if she'd gone into those details may have been bang on the money. The news media is a business, and whether that business is ad-supported or funded by subscriber dollars, boring stories are deadly. And solutions to problems, especially solutions that would take a fair amount of effort, are not known for bringing in eyeballs.

Although, to be sure, it's not clear that what The Atlantic's Derek Thompson calls "solutions journalism" is being attempted often enough for there to be a large enough sample size to really figure it out. This could simply be a situation where no-one wants to be the guinea pig.

Everything Becomes Crabs

I was listening to the podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, and their fourth segment was about one Jiang Xueqin, otherwise known as "the Chinese Nostradamus." During the discussion and interesting point was made; that left to its own devices, every crazy conspiracy theory eventually winds up being anti-Semitic.

While there's quite a bit of evidence for this axiom in North America, and, I suspect, in Europe, I wonder how well it holds up worldwide. While Mr. Xueqin is Chinese, his family moved to Canada when he was young, so I'm not sure that he's representative of the nation is a whole, which strikes me as not really having a history that lends itself to the sort of pervasive anti-Jewish prejudices that constantly seem to meander through the industrialized West.

I suppose that this could be considered a corollary to the question of whether there's some sort of messianic figure that people in East Asia think they are if they have serious mental health issues. While there are a decent number of documented cases of people coming to the conclusion that they are the returned Jesus, it seems that this wouldn't really be the case in non-Christian countries.

In any event, I do wonder if there is some or another out-group in that part of the world that people feel are conspiring against the common good, in the way that Jews are often said to be here. Or if the entire idea of some grand cabal is itself confined to the United States and the like. I would be unsurprised to find that there is some research on the topic, but even before Alphabet decided that Google search was just too useful, I lacked the skills to track it down. 

Sun Bright

While I'm not a big one for flowers, once I started carrying a camera with me, I started noticing them a lot more than I did previously. I found these in a parking lot near where I live. I don't think that they're new, but I don't remember seeing them before. In any event, they were eye-catching, and since I had a camera with me...
 

Nailed It

Generative automation seems to have become the new hammer; for the person who has it as a tool, any task in front of them requires nails. I received an e-mail to notify me of a new Windows promotion that Microsoft is running as "the ultimate college bundle." Buy an eligible Windows 11-base personal computer "for college" and receive: a year of Microsoft 365 Premium, a year of XBOX Game Pass Ultimate and a customizable XBOX Wireless Controller. Okay, fair enough. Not my thing, but I can see how it could be an attractive offer. What I don't see is how it relates to this:

The Slop is strong with this one.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that for me, college was quite some time ago, and I don't claim to be completely up on what "Generation Z" is all about these days, but I'm pretty sure that whomever prompted (and whomever greenlit) this picture isn't either.

Because while I suspect that there is an overlap between young female gamers and anime fans, I wouldn't think that the two were synonymous. And so this picture doesn't say "gamer" to me; it says "anime cosplayer." Because who else would go to their college library wearing a sērāfuku and bring a ninjatō with them (especially one that seems to simply float in the air behind them, as though looking over their shoulder)?

This usage of generative automation strikes me as absolutely perfunctory. While I understand Microsoft wanting some sort of image for the advertisement, why use a poor-quality generated one? Was a photograph of an actual college-age student, in a library or dormitory, with an actual book really that expensive? The time, energy and money to source something that resembles the target market was really that dear?

"AI Slop" has been defined as usage of generative automation that demonstrates contempt for the audience; the idea that since the audience will lap up literally anything placed in front of them, one may as well serve up the cheapest garbage one can find. That definition came to mind when I saw this. Nothing about this illustration says: "We understand young people who want to use their PCs for both school and gaming." Rather it conflates gamers and cosplayers and presents the sort of lazy stereotype that shows not only a lack of understanding, but a lack of desire to understand.

Uncharted

This is why I'm dubious about using generative automation when I don't have a clear idea of what the output should look like.

In short, the State Department produced a map of Africa showing countries that were receiving aid, and none of the places highlighted on the map matched the nations referenced.

While the criticism of people in the State Department for not checking the map for accuracy prior to preventing it is well taken, I am a bit unsure that it's a reasonable expectation, if one believes that saving time is the primary use case. After all, I don't think that it would have taken that much time for a person to make this map. Start with a blank map of Africa and color-code the relevant countries. Someone who felt that, in the interests of speed, this task should be passed off to generative automation seems unlikely to then go back and compare the output to an actual map of Africa.