Scratch Pad: AI, Duolingo, Celtic Frost

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media. 

▰ One reason I was terrible in foreign language in school was my inability to not think. I couldn’t turn off my brain and just listen/speak. Duolingo’s been a learning experience: how much my progress improves when I stop thinking and just act. This has, in turn, positively impacted my guitar lessons.

▰ My current tab management approach is that once every month or so I click the wrong thing on Safari and they all disappear and I have no idea why

▰ Here in San Francisco, autumn has cosplayed as summer for Halloween.

▰ My voice recorder had what I thought to be some stray thoughts from yesterday in it, so this morning I fed the file into a speech-to-text tool — which then produced this. Turned out the audio was a few phrases I’d recorded at the end of guitar class that I’d forgotten about.

Would have been sort of amazing if it had actually identified the pitches and so forth.

Tired: speech to text

Wired: audio to guitar tablature

▰ Just here to note that Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium remains an absolutely incredible album

▰ Looking to 2024, I wanna to spend more time doing less. The Disquiet Junto Slack was something I spent too much time thinking about. So the Slack has been renamed and is now run by a crew of regulars; I’m just a citizen there now. Feels freeing after 7 years. Of course, the Disquiet Junto continues.

▰ I pretty much live in my RSS reader and it’s clear that several blogs I follow are now plumping up their “content” with AI-written blather on various topics — some time-sensitive, others evergreen. The result is generic mush. They’d be better to just post the AI prompt in the form of an outline. The worst are the ones that appear to be the work of people who want to be known as “writers” or “thinkers” or “authorities” but don’t actually, you know, wanna write or, for that matter, think.

▰ Spent most of the afternoon at the Apple Store, where people wander in with shards of glass taped to bits of wire and bent scrap metal, requesting speedy assistance