Scratch Pad: Voice Menu, Gray Goo

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. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ The voice-menu phone tones for the hearing impaired are my new jam

▰ People gesticulate so much in internet video ads (which I always have on mute), I regularly think they’re targeted ads for Theremins

▰ It’s 2024, meaning you can be doing chores while listening to an audiobook and then a voice from your phone interrupts to say things like “A phone number with a 503 area code has liked a message from a 213 phone number,” no other information. Then the audiobook begins again. And it’s just normal.

▰ So far every day this week has felt like Friday. That is the start of summer.

▰ The most surreal experience of the morning was trying to type the word “accelerationist,” a word my computer’s autocorrect kept pushing back at, as if it were trying to, I dunno, tell me something

▰ Responding to a friend’s query, I chose a song I liked, the title of which shared initials with my name: Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” I asked ChatGPT to identify a three-word title, to fold in my middle name (Aaron). It just made up a song by the Kinks that doesn’t exist, “Meet Again Wednesday,” and tried to pass it off as real.

▰ Yes, given the past decade’s increased proliferation of music PR via email I’m not exactly excited at the prospect of unedited AI-generated one-sheets arriving at an ever-escalating pace

▰ I love when I recall a topic for which there are, essentially, just a handful of options, and once upon a time I felt quite strongly in favor of one of them, and then years later all I recall is the topic, not which specific option I believed in at the time

▰ That thing where some piece of software you use a lot suddenly has a consistent error after an upgrade and then the same day as the upgrade an x.x.1 upgrade arrives, and the issue isn’t listed in the upgrade notes, and yet nonetheless magically the issue is gone once you do the upgrade

▰ Nothing says someone on the video conference call is using their YubiKey quite like when a string of characters along the lines of “sjdjsijfosdkfoisdjkd” pops up in the chat

▰ I finished reading one novel (Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a re-read in advance of Moonbound) and one graphic novel (Challengers of the Unknown, the sequence by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale) this week.