SRHuston Dot Net

There you go man
Keep as cool as you can
Face piles of trials with smiles
It riles them to believe
That you perceive the web they weave
And keep on thinking free

–The Moody Blues, “In The Beginning”

I’m tired of the bullshit. Side note, I wrote this late in the evening after witnessing some of that bullshit, and I’m not proofreading it today. So there might be some incomplete thoughts here, but… I know if I sit on it to fine tune and polish it, I’ll either keep repeating myself or just never hit save. So here it is.

Everyone wants to rant about how evil “AI” is. And I get it, I really do. But let’s start with some basics. First off, none of this is “Artificial Intelligence.” What you’re complaining about is called a “Large Language Model” and it’s not intelligent at all. Step outside of its training and it has no idea what to do, and doesn’t even have an idea of how to figure out what it might need to know to figure out how to answer you. So that’s the first issue I have when people whine about AI, is that what you’re whining about isn’t even AI.

Ok, next. Yes, LLMs have been fed with all kinds of things, including things that are copyrighted. They’ve been fed with copyrighted text works, copyrighted images, all manner of stuff that means they’re rife with junk and ready to start creating “plagiarized” works that are based on other things. On that point, I can fully agree that a LLM fed with copyrighted works and asked to churn out other things that are based on copyright are bad, and are creating problems for artists.

But some of the arguments against “AI” are completely bogus. They use 500 million gallons of drinking water a day? No, not a chance in hell. Hank Green did a nice video on how crappy some of these numbers are.

And probably the worst thing is some of the crap I see in some circles where anything remotely thought to be “AI” is shunned and the person posting it shunned for doing so. First off, it’s becoming this generations “that looks ‘shopped” and getting annoying. The header image on this site now? It’s been “generated” by AI. In that I took the image, some 20 or so years ago, with a shitty camera phone, and told ChatGPT to clean it up so it’s a nicer resolution but retains the scan lines and bloom that are reminiscent of a photo of a CRT. And it did. And I’m quite happy with it. Because I’ve always thought that was hilarious, that the BIOS detected a problem with the input device, then wanted me to use that same input device to signal that it should continue.

I’ve had some long conversations with ChatGPT. Some topics were technical, some were personal. Some were about programming things, some about hardware things, some about life things. Some were about trying to find an old comic that I remember seeing and can’t locate. Some I left thinking, “well that wasn’t much help,” while others I left wondering how it knew exactly what I needed to hear.

I understand there’s a lot about “AI” right now that people are unsure of. But I really wish they’d stop pushing back against it as vehemently as they are, because it really feels like the buggy whip industry complaints when the automobile was first introduced, and I can’t help but think that those whining are going to be the laughing stock and left behind when things continue to move forward and I don’t want to see that happen. Sure, the technology has its problems, but every tech does, and we need to see how the tool works best for everyone and use it as such, not throw it out because we’re afraid of it, annoyed by it, or just don’t yike it.

I know this isn’t really a fully fleshed out discussion. But I saw once again recently where something was posted that resulted in a bunch of “that looks like AI” bullshit, and .. I’m just sick and tired of whiny cunts. So rather than ranting at them, I’m ranting in general. And I’m doing it here instead of at ChatGPT. So… go me?

Open doors we find our way
We look, we see, we smile
Surely day-breaks cross our path
And stay maybe a while

–Yes, “Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil)”

Been a while, as often happens. I’ll summarize a few things since that’s what’s on my mind and what brings me here today 😀

Emily really wanted the Epic limited edition boxed set and we got it for her for Christmas; but my old turntable was still not operational since we moved here, as the Yamaha receiver we had didn’t have a phone pre-amp – though it subsequently died anyway – and the JVC we used to use before it wasn’t working well anyway and wasn’t usable for things after all. So I finally bit the bullet and picked up a new receiver, then got the equipment I knew I’d need to get the turntable up to snuff: a new cartridge since I never replaced the one on it for the entire time I used it (got a new stylus and kept using that), and a new belt since the old one was .. well, old. Got things sorted out, pulled the LPs out of the cabinet they were shoved into and organized them (and found out about Discogs, which will be great next time I go to the thrift store), even played a few albums to test things out. Christmas day she was thrilled, and David got a couple albums as well since once the kids knew vinyl was an option they put some on their wish lists. Parenting win. I got some new records too, so overall win.

Also on my wish list was a new weather station, an Ambient Weather WS-2000, because the one I got a few years ago started acting strange – doing things like reporting the temperature some 20-30 degrees lower than it was, for example. Some things said that could be a result of low batteries, and it had been up long enough that I thought that might be an issue too, so this spring/summer I pulled it down off the garage and replaced them. Unfortunately, things didn’t improve, so I figured it was time to shop for a replacement. Well I got it for Christmas, and currently have it sitting on my front porch bungeed to the railing while I test things out, but I’ve already set it up in weewx replacing the La Crosse one. Tomorrow I plan to be out, though the wind will be pretty high anyway, so on Wednesday I’m hoping I can climb up and swap out the old one for the new one. Then I can ring in the new year with new weather measurements that will be more accurate than the -40F that the old one said it was this morning. And you can see all the published goodness here: https://srhuston.net/weather/

Oh, and the quote and image? I was listening to Tales from Topographic Oceans as I wrote it. And listening to music on vinyl is a kind of ritual, if you do it right. And I did. And it was. And it was glorious.

All right! This chick is TOAST!

–Dr. Peter Venkman, “Ghostbusters”

Comenity (aka Bread FInancial) can join the ranks of places that can suck me.

Yeah, really starting strong out the gate with that one aren’t I? Well, not without good reason. Stephanie and I got new iPhones this week, and last night I helped her get things set up in Apple Wallet. She hadn’t really used it before, so nothing transferred from the old phone. No problem, this is pretty painless – especially with the NFC reader in the phone that can literally grab all the card data out of thin air. We set up one card which asked for a 6-digit code to be SMS’d, no problem. Then we came to my PlayStation Visa card. Her card doesn’t have a tap-to-pay feature so the data had to be entered by hand. No problem, that’s easy enough to do and we did. Then it came to the verify stage, and the only option was to call them. Well, neither one of us felt like talking to someone, but OK fine we’ll do that.

Stephanie was answering the questions at first which was fine, but as soon as I spoke the agent got really shitty all of a sudden. I said I’m the primary account holder, my wife is the authorized user, and we’re trying to set this up on her phone. Continuing with his snippiness he asked a few other questions, and then finally said he would have to verify me to continue. No problem. He said can we use the number on file as (last four digits of my phone number) and I said that would be fine, I just did that a couple weeks ago when logging in. Quite a bit of time passed, and then he came back and said that he couldn’t verify using that phone number, so he would be unable to continue. I said that’s unfortunate, and was just about to ask what do I have to do next to verify things, when he let out the more interesting part.

“Further, that means we have to place a hold on the account until it’s been reviewed.”

The fuck? He went on to explain that because my phone couldn’t be used to verify things, he had to put a hold on the whole damned card – not just hers, but mine as well, the one that has a bunch of monthly bills go to all the time because why not that’s how I’ll rack up PlayStation points I can redeem for gift cards and get free games or even just pay for PlayStation Plus for a year. I asked what do we have to do about this and he said there’s nothing he could do. So I said something I rarely do: “Then you’re going to march your way up the chain of command until you find someone who can do something, because this needs to be fixed immediately. Don’t worry about the time, I can wait.”

A few minutes later and after a few times of “sorry about the wait”, he hung up on me.

I got the number off the back of my card – which is different than the iPhone told me to call, understandably so one is for customer service and one is probably specialized for activations – and called Comenity directly. Interestingly, when their system answered, it asked for the last four digits of my SSN, and then knew who I was without asking for my card number. So apparently they DO know who I am based on my phone number, don’t they… anyway, a nice gentleman answered and heard me out, understood what the problem was, but also said he couldn’t help directly but that he could transfer me to the account security office or something like that, and they might be able to give some more information. He then proceeded to hang up on me instead of transfer my call.

Ok, now I’m fucking pissed.

I sat and stewed for a bit, and took some time to look through Google Voice settings; specifically, there used to be a blanket setting in GV for incoming calls from people not in your contacts list. At some point that got removed, so I was not sure how I would set things so that I would get phone calls from people not in my contacts. After some more experimentation it seems that the answer is to use the setting in the phone itself now – turning it on there means nobody outside my contacts will ring the phone and the calls will go to Google voicemail, and turning it off makes the phone ring and I can answer or dump the same as I would before. This is fine, just wasn’t expected since I didn’t know things moved around, but now that I know I’m OK with it. But I noticed something else while looking through these settings – that first agent, the one who tried to verify my phone and said he couldn’t, did so by having the system MAKE A PHONE CALL TO TALK TO ME. That was never stated ANYWHERE that it was going to make a call. If it was, I’d have said you’ll have to wait a moment because things are configured that my phone will not ring right now, and I may have even said let’s deal with this tomorrow instead. I assumed, and perhaps that’s a bad thing but I think it was a safe assumption to make, that “verifying your phone number” meant they were going to send me a six-digit number in an SMS and I’d read it off to him. I’d even joked with Stephanie that this guy was being a bit of a prick or else I’d point out that I shouldn’t give that number to anyone, that’s how phishing works, but he probably wouldn’t get it.

So now I know that the first asshole was so incompetent as to not actually tell me what the process was for verification, but then to “fail” me for not doing something I had no idea I had to do because he didn’t tell me. And, Comenity’s phone system sucks because I got hung up on twice now. Three times, actually, because after taking some time to collect my thoughts and discover this information, I called back and this time the automated system said it was routing me to whatever department that was immediately. I found this amusing a little, because it’s as if they already know “this person doesn’t want to talk to the initial CSRs, get them right to the point.” I stopped being amused, however, when after it said I would be transferred I again got hung up on.

My fourth call also got routed right to the department I wanted to talk to, and this time a nice woman answered and took down all my information. Unfortunately she also claimed to have no control over it, but that the department would look over things and there would be an answer in “three to five days” (later confirmed to be business days). So if you’re keeping score, this means some idiot who got pissy that there was more than one person on a phone call then screwed up and didn’t tell me how exactly he was going to verify my account (nevermind if I was calling from my phone, that wouldn’t have worked either), then locked my account and hung up on me, and has basically shut me out of all of my automatic payments and billings for up to a week.

Suddenly, the fact that I can get PSN gift cards for free games isn’t worthwhile to me anymore. Time to take my money elsewhere.

Fozzie: “I don’t know how to thank you guys.”
Kermit: “I don’t know why to thank you guys.”

–“The Muppet Movie”

So…. what’s going on here? Why the sudden desire to put stuff, and pushing it out to other places and whatnot? Well, it’s a long story.

A long time ago I set all this up because I wanted a place to put stuff to share with the world. Writing on websites was pretty new in 2000, and I got on the bandwagon because why not. I posted stuff left and right, and of course didn’t expect people to flock here and interact – why would they, I had nothing really to offer except, well, me – and I was mostly fine with that. Somewhere around 2006 I moved the site from being hosted on my own home computer which meant keeping that online all the time, to an actual hosting company. At the same time I moved it to WordPress instead of Slashcode because the latter was notoriously difficult to maintain while my hosting company (Dreamhost) had a nice single-click installation process. I do systems administration as my day job, I don’t want to do it when I’m not getting paid, so that was a huge bonus to me. I was doing well, even putting up some new stuff, when I discovered Google Analytics. Now I could see what kinds of traffic my site was getting, and while that was never the goal, it was a neat thing to look at. I want to say that was some time after 2009 or so, which would have been some time after joining Facebook and connecting with a lot of people I’d known over the years.

After having GA set up for a while, I went looking and realized something. Nobody went to my website. Nobody intentionally, anyway. Remember how people said sites like Livejournal were just “screaming into the void” and nobody looked at stuff there? Yeah, turns out that was my site too. Now, sure, I wasn’t planning on having a high-traffic bastion of entertainment or instructional data, but still I figured I’d have something a little more active than random people who clicked because a page showed up in the results after searching for “ceiling cat is watching you masturbate.” But the analytics didn’t lie, I was also screaming into the void.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to talk… a bit. Over the years I’ve watched people tune out while I’m talking. A fun trick is to start going off on some outlandish thing and see if they catch on, or see how much you can keep going until they suddenly realize the last few lines were about an alien invasion or crossdimensional rift that flooded your basement with catnip mice. I thought, if I write things here then maybe that’ll scratch that itch – I’ll feel like I’m getting to talk about the things I wanted to, and others won’t have to listen to it. But when you see that nobody’s actually looking, you realize you might as well be talking to a wall. And I can do that just as easily without exercising my fingers – something which some days is a lot more difficult than others (and if you have no idea why that would be, I went over it in another post that nobody read 😛 ). But why wasn’t anyone coming here to read things anyway? Well, I think a big part of it was that everything was corralled into a single place, a book where all of our faces would gather and meet and chat and post. And so the idea of leaving that place to go look at something else.. well, that’s like work for some. Work that they don’t want to do, and I can’t blame them. If I can get 90% of what I want from one place, why go bouncing to other places as well? Just be glad with what I’ve got there. But that means, if you want to put your stories out there for people to see, you have to put them in that space where they’re looking. But for various reasons, that place is falling apart more and more. Ideologies that don’t mesh with my own, rules that oppose what I think are good and just, all kinds of things. And I’m not the only one thinking that, others are as well. In fact, Wil Wheaton posted a thing about it, and while I’d been debating what to do at that point, reading my thoughts coming from someone else whose writing and engagement I respect solidified it for me.

So, that’s the plan. Try to write here the things I want to share with people, and hope that the time is right that people will come read it especially if I put some effort into sharing those links elsewhere. I’m also on other platforms, and I need to set up a sidebar thing linking to them or something, I’ll get around to that too. One other thought that has come up before, especially with the amount of fun I have doing audio work, is to do a podcast. That seems like pissing into the wind just as much as (or even moreso than) a website these days, but it’s something I’m still thinking about. Having enough content to publish is the problem for something like that usually, but maybe if I set the low expectation of “you’ll get something when I have something to give” it would work out. Don’t know, but love to hear your thoughts about it.

Oh, one last thing, since I mentioned hearing your thoughts. You may have noticed comments are off all over here. I got tired of dealing with spam comments long ago, and turned off all comments on all posts. I may try to figure out how to turn that back on in a way that I’m happy with dealing with them, but… not sure. You can reach me in a number of ways, though – including in IRC which is linked right on the sidebar there. Meanwhile, here’s a photo of a cat.