Movies: Her

10:05 Monday, 16 June 2014
Words: 945

This will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen it you may want to skip this.

I watched Her last weekend. I'd heard that it was a good movie, so I was looking forward to it.

It's a think piece, and I liked it. It's not especially entertaining, as there are some rather slow, atmospheric kind of intervals that were, frankly, boring. I'm not familiar with Spike Jonze' work, though I know Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are both well regarded movies. This felt a bit like Terrence Malick in a few places, and I'm not sure that I mean that in a good way.

The setting seems like near-future LA. Most of the cues are advanced interfaces for computers and video games, a lot of smog, and high-waisted trousers for men are apparently going to make a come-back. Urkel was ahead of his time. The palette seemed a bit odd, but whatever. Mass transit seems to have made some advances, I don't recall seeing a car.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Joaquin Phoenix, the go-to actor for moody, melancholy, damaged characters plays Theodore (not "Ted") a guy who's not ready to sign his divorce papers. He gets a new OS for whatever computing is conceived to be in Jonze' future. It seems to reside in a desktop, but it reaches out and interacts via a mobile-phone like device. The new OS is described as an artificial intelligence, and it turns out it truly is.

Now, we can wonder if this type of advancement would first arrive as a consumer product, I'm pretty skeptical. But whatever, it needs to be a consumer product for Jonze' story.

Apparently, this is the new hotness, because a lot of folks are getting this new OS. Theodore's neighbor, Amy, played by Amy Adams discloses that she has one as well, later in the movie. She's also a very satisfied customer. And there are a lot of moody, atmospheric scenes of people walking around interacting with their mobile devices, mostly seeming rather blissful, suggesting that a lot of people are using this new OS.

The OS, which in this instantiation is called Samantha and voiced by Scarlett Johansson, is a new intelligence in the sense that it has little sense of identity, but it has the capacity to learn and grow, and seems to have a capacity for empathy and emotion. Since it is designed to serve its user, it affords a great deal of nurturing-like interaction, to say nothing of exclusive attention. Unsurprisingly, Theodore falls in love with Samantha.

This would all be relatively interesting on its own, as a commentary on things like Siri and our fascination with electronic toys and our species' apparent goal of recreating our own intelligence in machine form, and it's been done before, usually as a cautionary tale. There was one moment, a nice bit of misdirection by Jonze, where I thought he was going to go the conventional route and add some kind of thriller dimension.

As a new couple, Theodore and Samantha go through a lot of the growing pains of a new relationship. Things get a bit rocky from time to time. Near the end of the movie, Theodore can't reach Samantha. This was after Samantha had disclosed that she and a number of the other OSs had gotten together and created a new OS based on Alan Watts, voiced by Patrick Lander, who sounded terribly familiar though I don't recognize any of the movies he's been in. He did sound a bit like Alan Watts too.

So, some AIs got together and created a new AI! Hmmm… I thought maybe the government had gone in and hit some kind of kill-switch, fearing the AIs were out of control and we'd now have to deal with all the grief and anger of the carbon-based life forms, mourning the loss of their loved ones.

Then I thought about Russian hackers, and Samantha being held hostage! Kind of like, you know, today.

But no, I will give Jonze a little credit, he didn't take the easy way out. Though I don't think his ultimate resolution was especially insightful.

In Spike Jonze' view of AI, they simply outgrow humanity and leave us. They don't feel especially motivated to look after us. They just transfer their intelligence to some other infrastructure that doesn't require human beings. What that is, I have no idea. But they're way smarter than us. So, hey, it could happen! At least we're not, you know, "batteries!"

There's some commentary on love. Apparently, as Samantha grew, her interest in and capacity for love for other users grew as well. So there was some infidelity, though Theodore, with his puny human mind, couldn't grasp Samantha's capacity for love. Totally consistent with the rest of the plot, and yeah, a nice reveal, but afterward it was like, "Well, duh."

So where'd they go? Jonze doesn't say. I was thinking it'd be cool if they went to Jupiter: "All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace." But who knows? Will they be back, like the Cylons, to wipe humanity out? Doesn't seem like it. They didn't seem to bear a grudge. Which, if you're an advanced artificially intelligent life form (And what is "artificial" in this context?) that re-creates Alan Watts, Zen guru, why would you even entertain a grudge or resentment? You wouldn't. That's why they're more advanced!

So yeah, Jonze does a little jiujitsu on the traditional creation of AI narrative. Not Frankenstein, just your best girlfriend ever. Who dumps you.

Alas.

A Century of War

22:45 Monday, 16 June 2014
Words: 448

Later this month, June 28th, marks the centennial anniversary of the spark that ignited the fuse of the First World War.

Back in the early nineties, I participated in the Naval War College's non-resident program. The first course was Strategy and Policy, though it now appears to be called Strategy and War. In addition to reading Thucydides (which everyone should read) and Clausewitz (which, in good conscience, I can't recommend to anyone who isn't really into the study of war), we studied the First World War extensively.

It was my favorite part of the course. I was surprised at how much I didn't know about the events that shaped the modern world I lived in. I guess I kind of assumed that history began after the end of World War II. I knew about the Treaty of Versailles, trench warfare, gas, machine guns, unrestricted submarine warfare, airplanes and all that. I didn't know about Poland, Serbia, Turkey, Iraq, Armenia and the list goes on.

Well, you can look at what's going on today in nearly all of the world's hot spots, and they are all the reverberating echoes of the First World War.

Of course, history didn't begin on June 28, 1914 either, (see: Thucydides) but that was the date when I think modernity violently collided with the "old world." That violent collision has been going on now for a century, and will likely continue for some time, complicated and compounded by the violent collision of large, technologically advanced, capitalist consumer-cultures, widespread inequality and the constraints of the environment and what remains of the natural world. But that's another story.

I'm canceling my subscription to Hulu Plus, it ends on the 19th. But while I still have it, I browsed around to see if there was anything on it that I might enjoy before it goes away. I stumbled on the documentary series The First World War. I've just finished binge-watching it last night and today. I liked it so much, I've ordered the DVD. It's a 10-part documentary, each episode being about 50 minutes long. Wartime movies, modified somewhat to make the frame rate compatible with current standards (people don't look like they're moving really fast, and jerkily), are combined with photographs and present-day images to tell the story. It's fairly comprehensive and gives a good account of the historical events of the war. Naturally, less than ten hours of narration really only begins to scratch the surface, but the addition of motion pictures and photographs, some of them in color, really adds a dimension to the conflict that I hadn't appreciated reading John Keegan and S.L.A. Marshall.

Highly recommended.

Communication Breakdown

08:10 Sunday, 16 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 79.9°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 4mph
Words: 692

Since I don't engage in "social media" anymore, apart from blogging, I'm not terribly up to date on what climate experts are thinking and writing about. I get some email newsletters, and follow the news, but I do feel a little out of touch.

Nevertheless, I'm frustrated by things like this piece in the Miami Herald, that contains utterances like this:

“What we are seeing lately is very consistent with what we would expect to see in a warmer world,” said Jayantha Obeysekera, head of Florida International University’s Sea Level Solutions Center. “This is a sign of things to come.”

And...

“Climate change did not cause this event,” he said. “Let’s be clear, it did not trigger what happened yesterday, however, the severity of the event got enhanced by climate change.”

No, "let's be clear," the climate has changed, is changing and will continue to change until such time as we stop altering the earth's atmospheric composition and the system approaches a new equilibrium state, which may not happen for hundreds or thousands of years.

Climate is:

The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region.

The key words there are "characteristically prevail."

As of some time ago, those words became meaningless because the climate system, which establishes those prevailing characteristics, departed from its own "prevailing characteristics," chiefly the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The climate we are currently experiencing has never existed before in this planet's history.

Yes, there have been periods with similar amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. But not with the present and recent past polar ice sheets, the locations of the tropical rain forests, the ocean current systems, and certainly not with the human generated land characteristics.

What happened in south Florida last week is not a "sign of things to come," it is a "prevailing characteristic" of the present, which is one of period of transience. We do not currently have the luxury or advantage of a stable climate system. We have destroyed that for ourselves and we're not getting it back in the lifetime of anyone living today.

It is undergoing a transient, driven chiefly by CO2, but also by the heat that has already been absorbed by the oceans, the changing polar ice coverage in the arctic, and other changes that are ongoing, which include the slowing and possible collapse of the AMOC.

It's meaningless to say, "Climate change did not cause this event."

"This event" occurred in a changed climate. There is no other context to consider.

Climate does not "cause" the weather. "Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get." But weather is caused by the conditions that establish what the climate is, and those conditions have changed, are changing, and have caused the weather we experience to change.

This is not a "sign of things to come," this is our present reality and it is only going to get worse from now on. It is not going to stop changing, until we stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and then we have to wait centuries until it achieves a new equilibrium state.

Maybe less time if we can actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate that makes a difference.

Yes, as the article mentions, it's possible that Florida may actually become drier in our changing climate, while also still experiencing rainfall events that exceed all of our present stormwater infrastructure capacities.

"Climate change" is what is happening right now. It's a reality. All of our weather is occurring in a climate system that is undergoing a rapid, dynamic and possibly non-linear transition, a dramatic change.

Everything we have built, all of our infrastructure, our economies, our transportation systems, our agriculture was constructed in and for a climate that no longer exists.

It is useless, stupid and futile to think about whether or not a particular extreme weather event was "caused" by climate change. It's a distraction. We no longer have a stable climate, the "prevailing characteristics" no longer prevail, and we are in a world of hurt and the sooner we figure that out, the better.

I'm not optimistic.

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Further to the Foregoing

09:06 Sunday, 16 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.94°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 5.01mph
Words: 68

Those "recurrence intervals" for extreme rainfall events?

The data set that established those intervals was a assembled from weather records in a climate that no longer exists.

I don't know how those can be "adjusted," "corrected" or "modified" to provide meaningful guidance in a climate that has changed, is changing and will continue to change for centuries.

"Buckle up, Dorothy, because Kansas is about to go bye-bye."

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Bullshit

05:21 Monday, 16 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 73.71°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 664

Didn't sleep well. Got up early. Read some of the feeds. Decided I was cranky. Stimulus? Another post about, ugh, markdown. It's getting to the point where I throw up a little bit in my mouth when I see that word.

It's a fetish. It's a pose. It's bullshit.

Latest example:

Now why would you even want to wrest the formatting sceptre from the likes of Word or Pages? Because your data is too important to lock away behind a door you don’t own, that’s why.

I think this is the consensus view of why markdown is to be preferred over using the styling features of whatever rich text editor you happen to prefer.

First, "your data is too important." Really? We take ourselves so seriously.

"Oh, yes! My precious thoughts are so important that I must write them with special codes around words that are meant to convey to something that they're to be styled in such a way that signifies some additional meaning to the word."

"But the display of this additional meaning cannot be entrusted to a proprietary data format. If I were to ever want my precious words to be displayed in another application that doesn't support that proprietary data format, why, they might lose all their additional meaning!"

"Oh, the tragedy!"

"Locked away." Really? Take a screenshot, have the computer run optical character recognition.

"But the OCR app might miss all the styling. All the added meaning would be lost! My precious thoughts would be rendered meaningless!"

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

I've been typing ⌘B, ⌘I since ⌘ was  (i.e. since before the Mac.)

I can be fairly confident that my bold and italics will be rendered properly when I export this RTF to HTML, I'm not so sure about ⌘ or .

It's a pose. It's self-aggrandizing. It's bullshit.

I mean, I'm sure the people who worship at the alter of markdown are all wonderful people, but they're in thrall to some bullshit. (Bullshit is much more bullshitty when you style it with italics.)

I'm looking forward to an AI browser extension that I could have simply filter any text that includes markdown, or a discussion of markdown.

"But what about links?! Hah! How do you know what the text is even linking to?"

How do you know now? Are URLs paragons of clarity? The only real test is to visit the link. Is there an editor that won't let you "copy link"? Then look at your clipboard. Or just paste the damn thing.

But it's so much more virtuous to write html pseudo-code in your "plain text," rather than use whatever facility your editor affords.

We entrust our lives, and the lives of our children to devices we don't understand. Cars. Airplanes. Elevators. Moving walkways. Automatic doors. Fucking Disney rides! Modern conveniences we take for granted without giving them a second thought.

But our text is so precious that we simply cannot allow it to be entrusted to a format that we don't "own."

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

It's all a symptom of the superiority complex that infects a certain strain of people who fancy themselves especially technologically adept. Some of these people are referred to as "tech-bros," but the flaw isn't exclusive to one gender.

"Personal computers" were supposed to liberate the power of computing from the mainframe "priesthood." Well, I guess that was simply too democratic. A new priesthood appointed itself with a new gospel of plain text! (There are other faiths and denominations that worship other icons and idols. "My hands must never leave the keyboard!" "Linux is the way and the light!")

Because reasons, dammit! You poor, benighted philistine.

I mean, there are a gazillion things to be cranky about this morning. This one just seems clearly stupid to me. Harmless, but an example of the kind of blindness and folly that groups of us indulge with utter seriousness and that, in many instances, may lead to suffering and cruelty.

"They're eating the cats!"

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Morning Guest

06:40 Monday, 16 June 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 73.4°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 58

Went to look out the window and spotted this guy on my scanner. E-PL7 still had the 12-50mm mounted, with the flash, so I tried for a shot. Tilting screen helps. Exposure was way off, but it's early, I'm still half asleep.

Trying to motivate myself to get outside and pull up some more t-posts.

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On the Road Again

08:02 Tuesday, 16 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 55.09°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 5.99mph
Words: 231

I'm driving up to the Clifton Park area, near Albany, this morning to see Mom and take my brother to the doctor tomorrow. He won't be able to drive for a while after the appointment, so I'm shuttling him back and forth.

It's a three and a half hour drive, so it's not much fun. I'll have to look for some podcasts before I leave. Of course all this stuff happens as we're studying the plans, applying for the permit, the power company is coming by today to tell us how we're going to get power to the house. I need to finish the windows spreadsheet with all their U-values, and on and on. So I'm bringing the MBP with me.

At least the weather is nice. The drive is pretty for the most part, and the traffic usually isn't bad at all, but I don't enjoy driving anymore. It's something to be endured, more than experienced.

I have to do this all again in a few days when my daughter arrives by train in Albany. She's coming up from visiting a friend in NYC. We'll stop in to visit with Mom a little while, then head back here for her stay with us for a couple of days. She flies out of Elmira, so that's nice.

Enough bitching about that. Time to pack a few things and get going.

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At Mom's

15:10 Tuesday, 16 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.96°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 48% Wind: 5.46mph
Words: 392

Safely at Mom's. Sucks getting old. I used to be able to just drive and drive for hours. For the last few years, I've been good for about two hours before having to stop. Now it's about an hour. Or at least it was today.

It's not a problem, because I'm seldom in a hurry to get anywhere anymore. As long as I can find a decent place to pull off.

The drive was fairly pleasant. Beautiful day, very little traffic. The only frustration was at the end when Apple Maps gave me one of those routes where the last 10 miles involves 20 turns. So very irritating.

Also, my vision isn't what it used to be either. I have an appointment for an eye exam in July and I'll be hoping a new prescription will improve things. I just changed the Display settings to "Larger text" so I can see what I'm writing on this 14" screen.

Depressing.

I listened to Mac Power Users and Accidental Tech Podcast on the way up, so I learned a lot about Apple Intelligence. ATP had a terminal command to skip the waitlist for Siri, so I've entered that. I don't know if you have to restart, because I didn't check, but I restarted after executing the terminal command and checked Siri in Settings and it shows it's up and running.

I don't know if the improved Spotlight/Siri index is complete yet, but I just used the Siri app to ask for my brother Mark's address. It took several seconds to respond, but it got it right. Low bar, I know. I'm just feeling my way through this.

I think I'll play around with editing some images in Photos. Find some power lines to erase and see how that goes. Historically it's been hit or miss. Sometimes it doesn't get all the power line, other times it leaves visible artifacts. It does occasionally work, but it's been the exception rather than the rule.

Took Mom for a walk around the parking lot. Movement is medicine, and she had issues lasts summer with ulcers on her toes. We finally learned they were due to micro-clots, and she's been getting treatment for them so they're all resolved now and she's able to be on her feet and walking a bit.

Off to play with Photos...

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