Twinned

When I tell people that I don't do much with generative automation in my personal life, they'll sometimes ask if I'm in the "anti-AI" crowd. Which is reasonable... generative automation is catching on, and a lot of people see real potential in the technology.

And so do I, for that matter. But at present, I'm a bit cautious about it. Call it a variation on Erwin Knoll's "Law of Media Accuracy," which notes that the media is always right... except for the rare stories of which one has firsthand knowledge. And, interestingly, I've found this to be true. Media stories of which I have firsthand knowledge are exceedingly rare; but in the few cases I've encountered, I've always found errors in the details. Nothing major, but noticeable.

And I've noticed the same with generative automation, especially with Google, since Gemini is now incorporated into the search functionality. About six months ago, I noted that the LLMs would note that Aurora, Illinois was a fictional city. Today I was looking for something significantly more niche.

There is an old tabletop role-playing game called Gemini. It was published by a Scandavanian company named Cell Entertainment at around the turn of the century.

Now, the fact that it shares its name with Alphabet's generative automation offering is going to be confusing right there. So the fact that someone reported difficulty in finding it via a Google search isn't a surprise. But Google didn't really help matters any...

The fact that the AI Overview doesn't include Gemini in its list of "Tabletop role-playing games with 'Gemini' in the name" speaks to Knoll's Law. I know that there's a tabletop role-playing game named Gemini, only because I have a copy. If I didn't, it would be reasonable to conclude that it didn't exist, even though the AI Overview never actually says as much.

To be sure, if one includes "Cell Entertainment" in the search, then the AI Overview is right on the mark, noting the year of publication and a general description of the setting. But this requires knowing the publisher of a game that was obscure when it was first published, more than a quarter century ago.

And this is why I don't do a lot with generative automation in my personal life; the amount of information that I feel I need to have about a subject to assess the automation's accuracy (and hence, its usefulness) obviates the need for the automation in the first place. And the fact that, when the name of the game is paired with the name of the publisher, the AI Overview recognizes that it's a tabletop role-playing game calls into question the processing of the original search terms.

Sure, I could feed prospective Nobody In Particular posts into Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot and task them with editing things for me... but the whole point of this exercise is to make me a better writer. Outsourcing that task to a generative automation system defeats the purpose.

So, like I said, I do understand the potential of generative automation. But I think that it's going to be a while longer before that potential is realized. 

Autumn Fruit

Today I learned that there are apple varieties that mature in mid to late November. It hadn't occurred to me that apples grew to this late in the season, but I walked past a house that had a tree in the front yard. (The apple tree that overhangs my yard tends to have dropped all of its fruit by mid-September.) I presume that it has something to do with the local climate; the general lack of frost makes for a longer growing season.

Trolling for Cash

Almost immediately, “people started noticing that many rage-bait accounts focused on U.S. politics appeared to be based outside of the U.S.,” The Verge said.
X update unveils foreign MAGA boosters

Number of people surprised by this turn of events: Probably zero.

The piece points out that for people in Africa and Southeast Asia, the income provided by winding people up on X can be significant. And when people need income, they're not always going to be picky about how they get it. The modern Internet is awash with people who are pretending to be someone and/or somewhere they are not, because their real identities and locations aren't valuable. After all, no one really cases what a Russian or an Indian thinks of American politics. But this random fellow American that one knows nothing about who just happens to have something to say that aligns with one's preconceptions? They're certainly worth a follow and not all manipulating people.

Because, supposedly, whatever viewpoint or information is on offer helps prove that The Other Side is not only wrong, but deliberately perverse. And that's the important thing. With Americans desperate to score points on one another, and that desperation having advertising dollars attached to it, it's to be expected that people from other countries would want to get in on the act, even if they aren't part of a foreign influence campaign. Income, after all, is income. And the worldwide nature of the attention economy allows people from poor countries around the world to participate in it.

Of course, it's not just the Make America Great Again crowd that's willing to pay attention to anyone willing to provide them with ammunition in the culture wars. The tally may be lopsided, but both sides have their free agents. In part because if the offshore voices were all MAGA, that would have been suspicious, but even in a culture war, there's work for mercenaries on all sides of the conflict.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I expect that a number of accounts will either suddenly shift to the United States, or disappear, some to quickly reappear with new, "onshore" identities. Those operators who can't afford a VPN that will allow them to pretend to be in the United States will simply go away, as the proof of their locations renders them useless as culture war combatants. So I suspect that the rollout of account locations on X will benefit the formal influence campaigns at the expense of the free agents. Either way, the rage-baiting will continue; there will still be money in it.

Wishcraft

A question, that I wonder about sometimes. 

Given the degree to which the public in much of the developed world (and especially the United States) seems willing to support policies that are based on little more than wishful thinking, why would anyone expect that politicians drawn from said populations to be exclusively the people who don't?

While the Trump Administration is often a fairly clear example of governance by wishful thinking, the main difference between the current President and his predecessors is really simply a matter of how often his preferred outcomes seem to be completely at odds with the facts on the ground. Because honestly, President Biden wasn't anywhere near above wishful thinking, either.

But there's a constant undercurrent, at least in the media, that people should (and often do) vote for people who approach the world clear-eyed and rationally, rather than with the same emotional attachments that the voters themselves have. Even when it seems pretty clear that policy matters are being decided on emotional considerations, the idea that the people calling the shots somehow know better is always in the background.

It's true that not everyone thinks of the world in terms of "this is what I want, so there must be a low or no-cost way of bringing it about." But I don't know that it's reasonable to presume that no one in the political class would be drawn from that group. Especially when it's connecting with people, rather than a firm grasp on the likely outcomes of policies, that tend to drive people's voting patters; especially the marginally-attached "swing" voters whose choice to show up or not on Election Day tends to drive the outcomes.

President Trump is unusual in the sense that he's often very public with his apparent belief that things his voter base think are easy actually are easy. He's aided in this by the devotion of said voter base; this allows him to scapegoat the Democrats, the "deep state" or what -have-you whenever things actually turn out to be difficult. So he doesn't have to fall back on "things are complicated" when policies don't produce the claimed results. But he's not unique in thinking that policies that could come across as obviously flawed were going to be winners.

After all, he's a member of a public that tends to see the world this way, and likes to see their worldview mirrored back to them by their elected officials. 

Survey Service

I’m tired of feeling baited-and-switched by companies that ask customers to “rate their experiences,” when they’re actually being requested to rate the individual employee(s) they were interacting with. I understand that companies don’t really want feedback from the public; a lot of it is negative, some of it is completely unreasonable and just about all of it is geared towards customer priorities, rather than business (or shareholder, if we’re being honest) priorities. No business wants to hear that their processes are clunky or their inventory selection is lacking. And when they’re the ones writing the surveys, they don’t have to. I get it.

But an interaction with an individual employee (or three) is not the same as an interaction with the company as a whole, or even some function or division of the company. A customer support representative can be perfectly charming and willing to help, but be stymied by disempowering policies or simply a lack of the resources needed to serve the customer. And that leaves aside all of the various touchpoints that come into play both before and after the interaction.

And for any rating system that works on a scale of 1 to X, so long as X is greater than 2, a score of X-1 shouldn’t be considered a black mark. The expectation that people are going to do absolutely amazing work, and blow people away with every interaction is unrealistic. If give someone four stars out of five, I shouldn’t have a supervisor contacting me to offer up their head on a plate. Five out of five is not my base level of expectation; leaving some room at the top of the scale for truly exceptional service should be an option.

In the end, it dissuades me from engaging with these surveys and ratings systems. Service jobs can be hard enough as it is, people don’t need the added stress of me being supposedly the one person on Earth who still sees a difference between “did the thing I asked of them,” and “completely blew me away.” Especially when the responses are not anonymous.

Okay, rant over. At least until I can corner someone a little higher up the food chain in one of these companies. Then, I’m going to give them a talking-to.

Blanketed

A single data point in a massive problem.

The Seattle area has, all things considered, fairly pleasant weather. While there are exceptions (the heat dome a few years back being one), the summer and the winter don't come across as homicidal, the way they do in some other places that I've lived in or visited.

Be that as it may, being homeless still sucks; especially now that the rainy season is settling in. This can make it difficult to be homeless, simply due to the difficulty in staying dry. A moving pad may be better than nothing, but it's not a proper blanket (let alone a sleeping bag), which, as it turns out, can be hard to find in this particular area of the Seattle suburbs. The drug store the man was resting near didn't have any, neither did the pet store nearby. The grocery store a bit down the block was a longshot that didn't pay off, either. One thing that I've noticed recently is that buildings being remodeled are losing there awnings and overhangs. I'd like to think that it's not for the express purpose of making those locations less useful for the homeless, but I'm too cynical to actually believe it.

I don't know if there are any shelters nearby, but knowing how the stereotypical suburbanite tends too regard the homeless, I would have been very surprised to learn their was. So I settled for checking to make sure that the man was okay, and giving him a bit of cash with which to buy some food, and going on my way. I don't know if that actually did anything for him... I can't image what.

And maybe that's the problem with homelessness. Even when the problem is as small as the one person looking to sleep on the sidewalk, it can come across as insurmountable in the moment.
 

Paper Chase

I was listening to a Wired podcast in the car today, and the subject of the Chicago Police Department sharing data on certain people with the Federal Department of Homeland Security. The two journalists hosting the podcast kept referring to this information sharing as a "data breach."

And this is why I dislike listening to many news-related podcasts; journalists can be as partisan as anyone else, and that partisanship tends to manifest itself in, let's call it a certain sloppiness with terminology. The sort of intentional sharing of information that the CPD had engaged in was not a data breach. DHS did not break into the CPDs systems and exfiltrate the data without authorization. The collection and sharing of the data may have been inappropriate, even illegal, and it certainly ran afoul of the host's sensibilities, but there was no intrusion or compromise of systems involved. Proper or not, the data was formally requested, and given over.

There is a lot of data floating around out there that many younger people have come to regard as some sort of state secret, when this simply isn't the case. Law enforcement agencies routinely share data. There is nothing out of the ordinary here. Referring to the sharing as a breach is to imply that the Chicago Police Department had an affirmative duty to keep the information in strict confidence and that it failed to do so due to a failure of data security procedures. But that isn't what happened. Rather, the CPD was keeping an internal database on people, and sharing that with DHS. Casting this as a breach casts the issue as a problem without actually needing to delve deeper into whether compliance lapses actually posed a data breach, where people who were unauthorized to access and view the data actually did so.

While mishandling of data can lead to data being breached, mishandling is not, in and of itself, a breach. Wired never explained who viewed or used the data who was not supposed to be, only that the data was not deleted in accordance with instructions to do so in a timely manner.

To be sure, I don't expect all journalists to be certified information privacy professionals. But they should be conversing with people who have that sort of background before publicly calling out incidents; if only to ensure that they have their terminology straight. 

Mischaracterized

It's not hard to come across a lot of people writing about character; about how "character is what people do when they believe no one is watching," or how "when everything else fades, character is what remains." Perhaps this is just the cynic in me, but I think that most people's discussions of character leave out what may be its most important trait: that it's built on trust.

People speak of character as if its rules are expressions of high virtue, rather than simply an imposition of authenticity. Because for many people, their "character" comes out when they aren't afraid of being judged for what they do... or who they are. At the root of a number of dissertations on character is the simple idea, as Professor of Business Psychology Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic noted in an article on leadership, that there is an "obligation to others overrides the right to just be ourselves."

And I suspect this is why when so many people name names when it comes to those they find to be of bad character, the people they call out are those who have come into a position where they no longer need to have obligations to others. They can indulge their authentic selves because the society around them isn't in a position to punish them for it. And so character stops being an expression of principles; rather it's a recognition of one's interests.

Because the demands of character aren't simply those of the law; they are also those of propriety. It's about people "adjusting [their] behavior to meet situational demands and gratify others." And there is nothing wrong with conforming one's actions and demeanor to those of the people around them. When in Rome, doing as the Romans do, is not a crime. But I find the lack of willingness to speak about the demands that it makes on people to be insidious.

Sure, there is an assumption of moral realism built in to the concept of character; the idea that the norms one ascribes to the concept are genuine facts about the universe, and not mere conventions born of the arbitrary nature of society. But I think that there's also a level of fear there, a worry that those who understand that they need not follow the rules (those who are unafraid of others) will be unconstrained in a way that places one at risk. It's a fear that's overblown, I think, born of a tendency to worry about those who don't worry about what one thinks of them. In that sense, letting go of a focus on character may be a worthwhile step in seeing, and accepting, people for who they really are, rather than who one may want, or need, them to be.

Penniless

One of the strange things about the Trump Administration is its uncanny ability to enact a policy that people want, but to do so in a way that make people wish they hadn't. Case in point, the end of the penny.

“We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go,” said Jeff Lenard with the National Association of Convenience Stores.

[...]

“We don’t want the penny back. We just want some sort of clarity from the federal government on what to do, as this issue is only going to get worse,” the NACS’ Lenard said.

Most, although not all, Congressional Republicans seem to be of the opinion that, in the eyes of their voters, President Trump can do no wrong. This has eliminated any incentive they may have had to push back against the Administration when it's going to implement policy chaotically and haphazardly, because they believe that voters are going to hold them accountable for holding the Administration accountable. (I also suspect that they believe that once the President is out of office, they'll be able to wash their hands of Trump Administration policies that turn out to be highly unpopular.)

I am reminded of a saying that I heard once: There's no such thing as managing expectations; you either meet them, or you don't. Big picture, I think that the federal government has been failing to meet people's expectations of it for some time now. And given an explanation for that failure which claims the root cause are federal workers and elected officeholders who are actively hostile to the well-being of the public, and the Trump Administration has a convenient scapegoat for breaking things: that the process was sabotaged by Democrats and/or "the Deep State."

President Trump is often derided as a buffoon, and I can understand why... he certainly doesn't have a problem with playing one on television. But he isn't stupid; he really does understand, and channel, the anger, bitterness and frustration of any number of Americans for whom things have simply Stopped Working. And he understands what feels like creating solutions to them. There have been some missteps (there's a reason why immigration enforcement is focused almost exclusively on Blue states now), but the Trump Administration understands how their voters want to feel, and have pushed policy in that direction.

Hence the chaos and confusion around the sunsetting of the penny. The goal wasn't to solve a business problem, such as the National Association of Convenience Stores might outline. It was to be able to hold up the $56 million that the Treasury is no longer spending to mint the coins, and imply that that money is part of a bigger package of lower expenditures which would justify tax cuts. And that job has been done. But the Administration's exclusive focus on those people it perceives as loyal voters has, time and again, cost them the ability to make inroads with the rest of the public. As Mr. Lenard points out, there has been a constituency for doing away with the penny for decades. A gracefully-managed wind-down of the coin would certainly have earned points with people. But that isn't a draw for an Administration that's bent on demonstrating that the minority of the public that actively supports it is all that they need.

Bubbly

This is, according to the parking lot attendant, an "indoor amusement park" named Bubble Planet. It's what's taken over what used to be Toys'R'Us in Bellevue. From what I've gathered, the place seems to be a bunch of different ball pits, but I didn't go inside, so I don't know for sure. (They also seem to have a side hustle in parking... it's not free to use the lot.)

What's interesting about this place is that it appears to be the first permanent resident of the building since Toys'R'Us folded back in 2018, I wouldn't have thought that the place would have remained vacant (other than Spirit Halloween showing up for a few months a year) for so long. Although maybe it's a sign of the times... there aren't much in the way of large retail tenants that could use so large a space.

Given that they've painted the building's facade, I presume that Bubble Planet is intending to be around for quite some time. We'll see... I haven't seen much in the way of indoor amusement parks; maybe they're on to something that will blow up. 

 

Big Ten-Four

Target is introducing a new in-store initiative aimed at improving customer interactions and reversing a sales slump.

The “10-4” program, confirmed by Bloomberg News, directs employees to smile, make eye contact, and greet or wave at shoppers within 10 feet. When a customer comes within four feet, staff are encouraged to ask if they need assistance or how their day is going.

Target launches '10-4' program; employees must smile, greet shoppers within 10 feet

I'm curious how this initiative came about. I don't shop that often at Target, but that's mostly because the stores nearest to me are often unkempt and messy; a side-effect of price-sensitive shoppers opening packages to closely examine things or people being in too much of a rush to put things back on shelves. (I contrast this with the Target stores I was in when I visited New York a few years ago, which were clean and neatly kept up.) That, and their selection of a lot of the basics relies heavily on store brands, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but tend to think of store brands as being "value-priced," which often means that they're low-cost, but also of substandard quality.

The "10-4 program" doesn't really speak to any of that. Instead, it feels like asking Target's floor staff to fix a problem where the solution rests with the management of the business. When I go to certain stores, it's kind of the same: I receive a survey asking me how my interaction with this or that individual employee went, but never anything asking me about how my interaction with the business went.

I don't shop at Target because I'm not confident that I can find what I need in good (new in box) condition there, not because the employees aren't talkative enough. And Target, like a number of retailers, has come to rely on self-checkout to save money, which often means having to stand in long lines while 75+% of the checkstands are closed, because they're too cheap to pay people to work them. (Whole Foods leans super hard on this, apparently forgetting that a place that people have nicknamed Whole Paycheck shouldn't feel like an Aldi store.)

For me, the problem with Capitalism in the United States isn't that it's rapacious; it's that it's desperate. Target is trying to serve its shareholders first, and do just enough for customers that said shareholders won't complain that their rightful returns are being spend to fulfill what should be the core function of the business. Shopping at Target, at least the ones here in the Seattle suburbs, sucks because it's a poor experience. Whether that's because Target management thinks that the physical stores should simply be gigantic kiosks for an online business, or they simply aren't making enough money to adequately staff their locations, I'm unsure of. But I know that I don't like going there, and the times when I do remind me of why. Enforcing chattiness via policy isn't going to change that.

Unconcerned

I found this to be an interesting question/statement:

I wonder if you have an Ultimate Concern–or, I guess more to the point, if you’re conscious of what your ultimate concern is, and how beliefs and practices in your life tend to that ultimate concern.

That pivot, from being curious about a person to questioning how they live their lives, strikes me as more commonplace than I'd given it credit for. Author John Green made the statement above at the end first episode of Crash Course Religion: "Is Yoga a Religion?" And it served to, effectively, define everyone as having a religion. Mr. Green had noted theologian Paul Tillich's definition of religion, which is “the state of  being grasped by an ultimate concern.” So, if everyone has an ultimate concern, then everyone has a religion; they just may not know it.

(Interestingly, when I dropped Mr. Green's quote into Google, so that I could determine which episode of Crash Course Religion he'd said it, Google responded: "As an AI, Google Search does not have personal beliefs, consciousness, or an ultimate concern in the human sense; it operates based on its programming and the data it was trained on." Search is going to become much more interesting if all questions are considered to be addressed to the search engine itself.)

While Mr. Tillich structured his ultimate concern in such a way that everyone had one, I don't know that everyone else should do the same. For starters, at least as far as I'm concerned, it renders the both term itself and considerations of religion somewhere between meaningless and tautological. Why bother to define "religion" at all, if everyone has one, and that religion is defined by something else? But more importantly, it gets in the way of genuine curiosity about other people. Were I to encounter Mr. Green, he would have no reason to be curious about whether I had an ultimate concern; he could simply presume that I did, and any protestation to the contrary on my part was simply the result of ignorance.

And this habit, of making presumptions about people, and then treating those presumptions as inerrant regardless of what the people in question have to say about it, tends to create barriers between people. And I'm not sure that it offers anything generally useful in return. Sure, one or all parties to a conversation can simply decide they know certain facts about the others and be done with it, but that tends to obviate the need for conversation in the first place.

Because why bother asking the question: "What is religion?" is there's already an answer, and one that simply decrees that everyone has one? Why not start with the idea of an ultimate concern, and go from there? It would have been more open, and more useful, to the audience. And it could have answered the question that was the episode's title... determine if the practice of Yoga tends to the specific ultimate concerns of its practitioners, and there's the answer, packaged neatly into a box.

In the end, I think, that's part of the point. Totalizing assumptions about people assist in determining which predetermined category they belong in, and that helps people feel that they understand, without having to undertake the messy project or getting to know them well, the other people they interact with. The fact that this may do them a disservice is left aside.

Digital Letter 23

Remember Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs for short? They were a part of the big cryptocurrency boom that Bitcoin started, but they never really went anywhere, and wound up with a reputation for being mostly a vehicle for various frauds (a number of which were really just poor business decisions). The big problem with NFTs was the lack of a compelling use case. While some ideas have been floated, none of them really solved an identified problem better than what was currently available. And that, for the most part hasn't changed.

But it might. I was listen to a recent episode of the Decoder podcast, where host Nilay Patel was speaking with Lyft CEO David Risher. One of the things that they talked about was what Lyft was doing, and could do, for drivers, and Mr. Risher floated the idea of Lyft giving out what would basically be letters of recommendation. The letters would generally outline why Lyft felt they were an excellent driver, and recommend them for other service roles. They would also be created by generative automation.

And that's where NFT technology might prove useful. With a standard reference letter, it's always possible to contact the person who wrote it, and authenticate it that way. If a computer has written the letter, that method doesn't work. It's possible to keep a database of all of the letters, but then the database would need to have enough information to positively identify the recipient; one doesn't want all the John Smiths to be able to claim the achievements of one. And that would make the database a target for information thieves.

Given that an NFT is basically just a digital file of some sort with a blockchain-enabled certificate of authenticity attached to it, it could solve the problem. Whomever the driver shares the letter with can verify that it was actually issued by Lyft, without exposing some sort of database of personal information.

To be sure, I'm not into the technology of cryptocurrencies, and so this may be over-engineering something that has a much simpler solution. But it strikes me, at least at first thought, as being a potential use case for a technology that's been searching for one for some time now.