✱ Bulletins

The whole point of art is to make you think about the human experience. The human condition. The human.

Playing today: ARCHE (2014) by DIR EN GREY.

Japanese heavy/melodic metal band: DIR EN GREY. A friend introduced me to UROBOROS (2008) over a decade ago and I’ve been into the band ever since. ARCHE is less cacophonous, just as heavy, just as guttural, just as emotional. A no-skips album for me.

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On deck today: nimrod. by Green Day (1997)

I’d say it’s an underrated album, but I think it was underrated only by me. Very fun.

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Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” is a 10/10 song.

Favorite albums of all time. 40 out of thousands.

It is wildly unrealistic to expect significant decision makers in a publicly traded company to put morality or ethics over the bottom line.

I don’t know if that’s too cynical or too obvious, but it’s an axiom I live by in 2025.

Tom MacWright, writing in Putting an untrusted layer of chatbot AI between you and the internet is an obvious disaster waiting to happen

I feel like this is obvious but I’m not hearing it shouted from the rooftops so here it is: adding an untrusted middleman to your information diet and all of your personal communications will eventually become a disaster that will be obvious in hindsight.

(emphasis in original text)

[Verse 3: Video Dave]

…
The devil is a lie, my levels always high
I never say goodbye, I fly like a bird who never learned how to fly
I just tried and didn’t die

Nolan Lawson, on his feelings about AI and software development.

I don’t have a conclusion. Really, that’s my current state: ambivalence. I acknowledge that these tools are incredibly powerful, I’ve even started incorporating them into my work in certain limited ways (low-stakes code like POCs and unit tests seem like an ideal use case), but I absolutely hate them. I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.

In one of his podcasts, Ezra Klein said that he thinks the “message” of generative AI (in the McLuhan sense) is this: “You are derivative.” In other words: all your creativity, all your “craft,” all of that intense emotional spark inside of you that drives you to dance, to sing, to paint, to write, or to code, can be replicated by the robot equivalent of 1,000 monkeys typing at 1,000 typewriters. Even if it’s true, it’s a pretty dim view of humanity and a miserable message to keep pounding into your brain during 8 hours of daily software development.

You should read the whole post. Also you might as well have put a sheet of carbon copy between two empty sheets of paper and written his post to get a copy of how I feel too.

On deck this weekend: Agony Planet (2015) by Dust.

DUST IS AN AMORPHOUS, CONCEPTUAL TECHNO PROJECT KNOWN FOR FUTURISTIC ACID COMPOSITIONS AND NOISY, IMMERSIVE LIVE PERFORMANCES. AGONY PLANET IS A DARK PASSAGE THROUGH TECHNO, INDUSTRIAL, EBM AND ACID TO HELL.

A man standing in the weekend queue at the local pastry shop with a nape-of-the-neck tattoo that says “uncontrollable”.

The first warm bike rides of the year are the best. The absolute best.

Bikes.

The Economist’s Next Year in Moscow is an incredible podcast series. (So is Scam Inc).