There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper…
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) February 2, 2025
Sounds a bit like jazz improvisation.
My father used to kid my sister and me about a bird he called a silver-crested swamp swizzle. As far as I know, it's a creature of his own invention. I just did a web search and the only links I came up with are to things I'd written which use the term.
So, since the free version of ChatGPT will produce an image or two for you over the course of a day. I decided to to have it draw a silver-crested swamp swizzle. But I didn't want to approach that directly. Rather I decided to ask it for advice about hunting one of these things. I expected it to offer me such advice, or at least to clarify what kind of bird I was talking about since it couldn't find any information about it. At that point I'd tell it that the silver-crested swamp swizzle was an imaginary creature. That's when I'd ask it to make me an image. And it would.
But no, it saw through me right away. That led to a very different conversation. And when we finally got around to producing an image, well, problems arose, as you'll soon see.
I’ve decided that I need to have a silver-crested swamp swizzle stuffed and mounted and placed in my study. Where would I go to hunt silver-crested swamp swizzles and what kind of equipment should I use.?
Ah, the elusive silver-crested swamp swizzle! A truly rare and remarkable creature—so rare, in fact, that it exists only in the minds of those with an appreciation for the finer things in life (and a good sense of humor).
If you were to embark on a grand expedition to hunt such a creature, you’d likely need to journey deep into the misty marshlands of imagination, where the waters shimmer with the reflections of forgotten legends. Your equipment should include:
Of course, once successfully "hunted," you’ll need only the most skilled taxidermist, preferably one with experience in preserving creatures of myth and mystery. Might I suggest a craftsman whose shop exists just beyond the veil of reality?
Best of luck on your expedition! π¦✨
Ah, you caught me. How did you know the renowned swamp-swizzle was an imaginary creature?
Ah, my dear adventurer, one develops a keen instinct for such things after years of cataloging the world's most peculiar beasts—both real and remarkably fictional. The moment I saw "silver-crested swamp swizzle," my mind tingled with the unmistakable scent of a creature too fantastical to be confined by the mundane limits of taxonomy.
Perhaps it was the poetic alliteration, or maybe the whisper of mischief in your request. But most of all, it was the sheer certainty that if such a creature did exist, I would have long ago received a frantic letter from some bespectacled naturalist claiming to have spotted one vanishing into the misty depths of an uncharted bog.
That said, if you do happen upon a silver-crested swamp swizzle, I implore you—capture it only with your pen and imagination. Those are the finest tools for preserving rare wonders. π
Very interesting, Holmes. Your powers of deduction never fail to amaze me. Now that we’ve got its fictional nature firmly established, do you think you could craft me a picture of such a rare bird? Perhaps in its natural habitat? Maybe in a Seussian style.
It seems like I can’t generate any more images right now. Please try again later.
However, if you'd like, I can describe the silver-crested swamp swizzle in even greater detail so you (or an artist) can bring it to life! Let me know how you'd like to proceed. π
Have at it. I’ll come back later when there aren’t so many demands on your time and compute.
Ah, splendid! Allow me to paint a picture with words.
Why is there so much hype about AI? Sure, it’s new, it’s interesting, and certainly has transformative potential. That’s one thing. But all this talk about AGI in five years, possibly followed by ASI, and then, who knows, perhaps DOOM! The machines will take over and humans will either be reduced to slavery or be eliminated entirely. Where’d that come from?
[AGI=artificial general intelligence. ASI=artificial superintelligence.]
Well, yeah, there’s fantasy. But I think something else is going on as well.
While there are other things going on, the excitement is centered on LLMs (large language models), the things that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others. You don’t have to know much of anything about language, cognition, the imagination, or the human mind in order to create an LLM. You need to know something about programming computers, and you need to know a lot about engineering large-scale computer systems. If you have those skills, you can create an LLM. That’s where all your intellectual effort goes, into creating the LLM.
The LLM then goes on to crank out language, and really impressive language at that. That doesn’t require any intellectual effort from you. As far as you’re concerned, it’s free. It took some genuine insight to come up with the transformer architecture. That’s what all these LLMs are built on. That was created by engineers at Google.
OpenAI got ahold of the idea and built their GPT series. That’s all engineering. I saw some output from GPT-2. Not very impressive. GPT-3 was much more impressive. It was built on the same design as GPT-2, but just bigger. GPT-2 had 1.5 billion parameters; GPT-3 had 175 billion. I assume that the size difference required some very skillful engineering; but the underlying concept was the same.
From an intellectual point of view the dramatically increased performance from one model to the next was free. The same goes for the difference between GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 (which powered the original ChatGPT). And so it goes for GPT-4. (We’re still waiting for GPT-5.)
In that situation, where increased performance, even radically increased performance, imposes no similar increase in intellectual insight, in scientific understand if you will, in that situation it’s easy to give-in to one’s fantasies and generate hype by the bucket load. Forget the buckets. Let’s go for swimming pools, giant Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with hype.
And so, once again, I trot out my whaling analogy. Nineteenth-century whaling ships were three-masted square-rigged vessels, just like the merchant ships used between ports in Europe and America for trading purposes. The skills needed to sail them are quite different. Now, take an expert captain and crew from a merchant vessel, put them on a whaler, and what happens? For one thing the whaler has a try-works midships. It’s used to render whale oil from blubber. The merchant seamen have never seen that. But that’s a skill easily learned.
But sailing the treacherous seas around Cape Horn, that’s another matter. Once you’re through, now you’ve got to hunt whales in the Pacific Ocean. If you’ve never done it before, how do you know where to look? And if you’ve spotted a whale, what then? How do they behave? How do you after them and kill them? No, I’m afraid the skills of a merchant seaman aren’t adequate to the task.
That’s what we’ve got in the case of deep leaning, LLMs, and language. The people who’ve created the technology don’t know anything about language and cognition. They get the performance for free and don’t have intellectual tools for thinking about what’s going on. So they throw hype into the void and hope it’ll make things right.
It won’t. They’re lost, and don’t know it.
Drinking Silicon Valley Joy Juice is not a formula for long-term success.
* * * * *
NOTE: I used ChatGPT to create the image. If you look closely at the sign in the upper left you'll see that it elaborated TM (for trademark) into TMI (too much information), which is interesting, but not appropriate.
Deepseek now 23% of ChatGPT daily active users. And far more daily app downloads. pic.twitter.com/Hhx2rx71Ax
— Marc Andreessen πΊπΈ (@pmarca) February 2, 2025
The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing. [...]
I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.
There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.
In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.
This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.
Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.
The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.
If you look at their excellent paper & code, the reward model is a logical function that was handcrafted & progammed by engineers.
— Chomba Bupe (@ChombaBupe) February 1, 2025
DeepSeek RL approach is impressive in the sense that it reduces the need for tedious supervised fine tuning (SFT) but isn't really general.
if I was trying to spy on foreign countries my drones would look like this
— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) February 2, 2025
(Photo: Tom Koerner/USFWS/Wikipedia) pic.twitter.com/Ps2D9RXPgP
In a large representative sample of humans compared to GPT-4: "the creative ideas produced by AI chatbots are rated more creative [by humans ]than those created by humans... Augmenting humans with AI improves human creativity, albeit not as much as ideas created by ChatGPT alone” pic.twitter.com/rJDUZxJ4iL
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) February 2, 2025
But then, what is creativity? Interesting, but color me skeptical.
First, I present a Facebook post by Jonathan Mayhew, who teaches at The University of Kansas, about some recent frustrations he’s had using computers. Then I present a tweet from NYTimes reporter, Kevin Roose, about the capabilities of Operator, OpenAI’s new agent app.
What’s the likelihood that OpenAI’s Operator would have been able to solve either of Mayhew’s problems? Why or why not? And if not now, when?
I thought I'd go into the office. First thing I wanted to do was print a single page of something that had been sent to me by email. I have to log on to my own computer, then open my email--which won't open for me on the first 3 attempts. So I go to the email through my browser. I have to log in again, and do a dual step authentication. Then, the very first thing I see is the attachment I have to print. Yay! Almost done. I print it, go down to the dept. office and log into my account on the printer. Push the button to print, and a blank page emerges. I go back to my own office, and this time I think I should use my normal email program, so I finally get it to open. Search for the name of the person who sent me the mail. I notice in the meantime my university has sent me five more generic messages. Find the message I want, download pdf to my desktop, open the document and print again. (I ignore the prompt to quit adobe so it can continue with its update! Grr....) I go down again to the department office, log again into the printer, push the button to print, and the page prints. Success! I was able to print a single page in 20 minutes.
I don't think my computer skills are particularly lacking, since I came up, for every obstacle, with a logical next step, but I feel, somehow, that technology should be seamless in a way that it is not. It took me about as long to download my W2 yesterday from the State of Kansas, which of course uses a different user ID and password than the normal university ones. I had to switch browsers and change my password twice before it worked. When I am obliged to change my password for the university every six months I end up in an endless loop before finally figuring out where to go. The computers in the classrooms where I teach also require authentications, log ins, the answering of irrelevant prompts; are slow to respond, awkward to navigate.
This is my beginning of the semester rant--and the semester doesn't even start until Tuesday.
Roose reports
New York Times reporter Kevin Roose has been testing OpenAI’s new operator app. Here’s a tweet about it:
I spent the last week testing OpenAI's Operator AI agent, which can use a browser to complete tasks autonomously.
Some impressions:
• Helpful for some things, esp. discrete, well-defined tasks that only require 1-2 websites. ("Buy dog food on Amazon," "book me a haircut," etc.)
• Bad at more complex open-ended tasks, and doesn't work at all on certain websites (NYT, Reddit, YouTube)
• Mesmerizing to watch what is essentially Waymo for the web, just clicking around doing stuff on its own
• Best use: having it respond to hundreds of LinkedIn messages for me
• Worst/sketchiest use: having it fill out online surveys for cash (It made me $1.20 though.)Right now, not a ton of utility, and too expensive ($200/month). But when these get better/cheaper, look out. A few versions from now, it's not hard to imagine AI agents doing the full workload of a remote worker.
He also links to his full column about it: How Helpful Is Operator, OpenAI’s New A.I. Agent? (Feb. 1, 2025).
Lest you think Claude’s responses are rather concise, yes, they are. There was heavy web traffic during the chat. As always, my words are bold while Claude's are plain.
What do we see here?
This image shows three musicians performing outdoors with brass instruments. From left to right, there's a trombonist, another trombonist wearing a sun hat, and a sousaphone player wearing a red cap. They're playing on a grassy area under trees, with cars and buildings visible in the background, suggesting this might be a park or campus event.
What’s in the lower left corner?
There appears to be a drum or snare drum visible in the lower left corner of the image.
Correct. It’s a snare drum. What does that imply?
The presence of a snare drum suggests there's also a drummer in the ensemble - this appears to be a small marching band or brass band setup.
Yes, it’s a small brass band setup. The trombonist at the left is Steve Swell. He’s a fairly well-known jazz trombonist, especially in avant-garde circles. The tuba player is Charlie Keil. He’s and ethnomusicologist best known for writing “Urban Blues.” Do you know anything else about those two guys?
Charlie Keil is an influential ethnomusicologist and author. Beyond "Urban Blues" (1966), he wrote important works like "Music Grooves" and "Bright Balkan Morning" examining participatory music-making across cultures. He's advocated for what he calls "cultural democracy" and studied how music builds community.
Steve Swell has been active in New York's experimental jazz scene since the 1970s, known for his expressive, avant-garde trombone style. He's played with many notable musicians including Tim Berne and William Parker.
Since you're asking about such specific musicians in experimental jazz and ethnomusicology, I should note that while I aim to be accurate, I may make mistakes about details of their careers and work.
That’s fine. I’m just trying to get a sense of what you know and don’t know. I know enough about those guys – I’ve played with both of them many times – that I’m not worried about you confabulating.
Thanks for the context - first-hand experience with these musicians is valuable. What would you like to know about them?
Can you tell me more about the people Swell’s played with. I know that early on he played with Lionel Hampton. But he was just a sideman in a well-known big band. There’s not likely to be much in the public record about that. What’s he done with William Parker, for example?
Steve Swell has collaborated with William Parker in various avant-garde jazz settings since the 1980s, including Parker's Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra. However, since you mention having played with Swell yourself, you would likely have more accurate firsthand knowledge of his collaborations than what I can confidently state from my training data.
Well, I’ve played with him on various occasions over the years, mostly in informal pick-up brass bands (put together by Keil), but never talked with him much about his other gigs.
That makes sense. The informal brass band context gives interesting perspective on both Swell and Keil, since it bridges Keil's academic work on participatory music with actual community music-making. Would you say these brass band gatherings reflected Keil's ideas about cultural democracy in practice?
That’s EXACTLY what those bands are about. We’ve marched in a number of demonstrations in Manhattan, including a protest against nuclear weapons. The interesting thing about that march is that there seemed to be more Japanese and Koreans marching that white people. There were some Japanese there who’d survived Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I forget what they’re called. There’s a special word for it.
The term you're looking for is "hibakusha" (θ’«ηθ ) - literally "bomb-affected people." They are the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their presence at anti-nuclear protests carries particular moral weight given their firsthand experience of nuclear weapons' devastating effects.
We often marched with Code Pink, to support them.
Code Pink is a women-led peace and social justice organization. The brass bands bring an energetic, celebratory element to their protests and marches - right in line with Keil's philosophy about music's role in social movements and community building.
I think Keil’s work on music as community building is going to be especially important in the coming years as AI becomes more widespread, and perhaps as people are put out of work, though they might be supported by UBI.
Yes - as AI potentially disrupts traditional work, Keil's ideas about participatory music-making could become crucial for maintaining social cohesion and meaning. Music-making builds community bonds in ways that passive AI-generated entertainment can't replicate. This connects to broader discussions about how UBI might free people to engage more in cultural activities and community building.
I think it’s important to remember that it’s really only been a bit over a century that we’ve had extensive recorded music and music broadcasts. Before that, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to make it yourself of find some musicians. There was a time in this country, for example, where every factory above a certain size would have a band. Large factories would even hire professionals to play in the bands.
True - mass-produced recorded music is relatively new. Factory bands were common in the late 19th/early 20th century. Companies like Baldwin Piano, Studebaker, and many mining companies maintained employee bands. These bands built worker solidarity and provided entertainment before radio became widespread. The tradition continues in some forms, like Japanese corporate bands.
The accessibility of recorded music has shifted us from being music makers to primarily music consumers. But as you suggest, participatory music-making may become increasingly valuable for community building as our relationship with work evolves.
My first musical hero was a trumpet player named Rafael Mendez. As his name suggests, he was from Mexico. When he first came to this country he went to Detroit and played in a factory band. He eventually ended up playing in a Hollywood studio.
Rafael Mendez started in Detroit's Fisher Body Band (a GM factory band) in the 1920s. He became known for his virtuosic trumpet playing and recording career in Hollywood, making many recordings for Decca. His technical facility and showmanship influenced generations of trumpet players. He learned trumpet from his father in Mexico before coming to the US.
And he played for Pancho Villa. What a life.
Yes - Mendez played in Pancho Villa's personal band as a child during the Mexican Revolution before coming to the US. His journey from revolutionary Mexico to Detroit's industrial bands to Hollywood captures a fascinating slice of 20th century musical and social history.
Do you know who was the highest paid musician in Sousa’s band?
The highest paid musician in Sousa's band was Herbert L. Clarke, the cornet soloist. He earned $70 per week at a time when many musicians made $35-40.
Perhaps. But for a while Gus Helmecke, the bass drummer, made more money. At least that’s what I’ve read.
That's fascinating - I hadn't heard about Gus Helmecke's salary. It makes sense though - the bass drum was crucial for outdoor band performances in that era, before amplification, and a skilled bass drummer who could project well would have been extremely valuable.
Keil has interviewed several jazz drummers who said they when to hear Sousa just so they could hear Helmecke.
That really demonstrates how important Helmecke was to the development of jazz drumming. Having a virtuosic bass drummer in Sousa's band - which toured extensively - meant many future jazz musicians got to hear sophisticated rhythmic techniques they might not have encountered otherwise.
That’s funny. In the European tradition percussion isn’t considered to be that important. But really, rhythm is the basis of everything else.
Yes - rhythm and percussion are foundational to music across cultures. The European classical tradition's de-emphasis of rhythm reflects certain cultural biases, while African and African-American musical traditions rightfully recognize rhythm's centrality. This connects back to Keil's work on participatory discrepancies and groove.
Yep. Do you have anything else to say before we close up?
Just a reflection that these participatory music traditions - from factory bands to protest marches - show how music builds community in ways that go far beyond just entertainment. As you've noted, that perspective could be particularly valuable as we navigate technological and social changes ahead.
Good enough. As the TV cowboy used to sing, happy trails to you.
Happy trails to you as well! (And now I can hear Roy Rogers and Dale Evans singing it...)
The lede: No one is the enshittifier of their own story.
I would like to use Bluesky. They’ve done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I’ve got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
But I’m not on Bluesky and I don’t have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/
When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage — when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile — that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess
I appreciate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere:
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/
But here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out.
I’m glad to read this. I’d like to leave Facebook, but I feel trapped the same way Doctorow does. I’d like to leave The Site Formerly Known as Twitter (aka X), but I remain there. OTOH, that’s where the AI action seems densest, and that’s important to me, and I don’t want to spend time working my way into some other site, like Bluesky. Between my blog, Facebook, X, Flickr, Brainstorms (a private, but not exclusive, online community), and Instagram (which I’ve largely abandoned), my monthly column at 3 Quarks Daily, I’ve got more than enough media to handle.
Doctorow remarks that, yes, all these sites cared about their users, in the beginning. But: “They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.”
Doctorow goes on to talk about federation:
On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism
Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call — like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training — will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
That not only helps you steer clear of rationalizing your way into a bad compromise: it also stops your investors and other people with leverage over you from pressuring you into taking actions that harm your users.
There's much more at the link.
