Sunday, January 26, 2025

Ramble for 2025: music, 3-year plan, photos, LLMs, great critics

Lots to do.

Music

As I recently noted, I’ve recently subscribed to YouTube music AND I’m lovin’ it. It’s a pleasure to be able to type in the name of any piece of music – song, composer, performer, style, album, whatever – and have it come up. Mostly, though not always. I continue listening to the rock and roll of my late teens and early 20s – Good Lord! am I really that Boomer!?

In the past couple of days a couple of tunes have haunted me: most of all “I Love You More than You’ll Ever Know” from Blood, Sweat, and Tears’ first album. Just why I find it so compelling. Perhaps the fact that I played it in the “Saint Matthew Passion” has something to do with it. No, not Bach, not beyond the name. That was the name of a band I played in back in ’69-’70-perhaps-’71. That’s when I got serious about improvising.

And then there’s “Once” from a Stan Getz album, Voices. The album was based on a gimmick. Instead of a string ensemble for back-up – itself something of a gimmick in a jazz context – the album had a voice choir. Shockey but effective! “Once” is based on Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” which is hauntingly lovely.

Three-year plan

It’s got a three-month horizon, a one-year horizon, and a three-year horizon. Everything will be adjusted as we go along.

Three months: Get an agent. Even better, get and agent and get a book contract. Tentative title for the book: Welcome to the Fourth Arena. It’s a general interest book on how AI can potentially remake the world. I’ve got a set of chapter topics/titles that I like and I’ve been reviewing Kisangani 2150 for material to conclude the book with. I pretty much know what I’ve got to do to get the proposal together. I need two sample chapters as well. At the moment I’m figuring on the opening chapter, derived from the article I’ve linked above, and a concluding chapter based on the Kisangani material

One year: Complete the book and deliver it to the publish. Begin the work of monetizing my photographs. To that end I’ve been putting together a Flickr album that samples the photos I’ve done over the last two decades. That’s been fun. I’ve now got 488 photos in that album, and I’ve not yet been through the whole body of work. I like what I’ve got so far. But how do I whittle it down?

Three years: I want to be in a new apartment, with all my stuff, and have a nice, but not necessarily new, car. This depends on drumming up some new income. We’ll see.

Photos

Ah yes, as I’ve said, that’s going along nicely. And I’m thinking about what I’m doing as I go along, the process. It seems to me that what I’m trying to do is compare all the photographs together and see what rises to the top. Easier said than done.

So I’ve got this album where I’m collecting photos. I keep going back through the album, editing it a bit. I’ll drop a photo or three from the album. And add some new ones. I’m also producing new renderings of old photos. They’re looking good, better than the old renderings.

I’m beginning to get a glimpse, a glimmer, of my style, whatever that it. These new renderings seem to be helping. That is, an important element of my style is how I rendering each image, my choice of colors, tonalities, balances. That’s certainly as important as my choice of subject matter. That’s what pulls everything together across the various subjects.

LLM-land

I’m still being dogged by the need to finish my report on ChatGPT. I did manage to get the section on ontology completely drafted. That was a major piece of work. I’ve got two more big chunks to do before I wrap it all up. There’s the section, “Prospects: In Search of the Star Trek Computer,” which will end the report, and the introduction, which will have one-sentence introductions for the rest of the report.

And I’m deep into Claude 3.5. I’ve been enjoying have it describe photos. Some of those have turned out to be quite interesting, especially when they get into technical issues, which lead automatically to aesthetics. I also want to develop the meeting-of-minds game.

Greatest literary critics

I know, I know. I’ve got to finish this off. All I need to do is a final chapter on Harold Bloom, which I more or less know how to do, and I’m ready to wrap it up. I have no idea when I’ll get around to this. After all, I’ve got a book proposal to write.

Soon.

3 comments:

  1. Go Bill!

    May as well train a model while you are at it. Feed all your writings, posts, pics, music. And after finishing book, get an agent to talk to other llm's to write 1, 2, 3 Areanas. A hoot. Crowd fund it. Ill donate $100. Worth ever cent.

    A suggested title:.
    Deep Bill & Larry's Fourth Areana. r4.

    Dipity

    ReplyDelete