The Online Photographer

AI anyone?

"In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an 'AI editor' expects 'output of 200 to 250 articles per week.' ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with 'AI-generated junk.' Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and 'AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.' The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born."

That's a quote from an article on The Verge called "AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born." The whole article is worth a read. Especially interesting (ominous?) is the notion of Avram Piltch, Editor-in-Chief of Tom's Hardware, that Google might soon be moving away from helping people search for independent information and moving toward simply appropriating it. (Power corrupts, and....)

Disneyfication at National Geographic
Elsewhere in the news, The National Geographic just fired the last of its staff writers, according to multiple sources including tweets from two of said writers, continuing an already-ongoing process of Disneyfication. Disney bought a controlling 73% interest in the 135-year-old National Geographic Society's NG Publishing unit in March 2019. The National Review commented, "...the news that the illustrious magazine National Geographic has laid off all of its last remaining staff writers is a demonstration that we, as a society, have largely chosen to stop paying for news or entertainment, with far-reaching consequences for our lives."

Poetic?
You could be excused for thinking the World currently has a bit of an apocalyptic edge or tinge to it, what with the onslaught of AI, political disunity, the American Midwest currently under a shroud of wildfire smoke, and Texas "rivaling the hottest locations on the planet, including the Sahara Desert and parts of the Persian Gulf," according to NBC. Might be a good time to refresh our familiarity with this poem by William Butler Yeats (pronounced "yates," as you might know.)

The Second Coming

It just occurred to me that "The Second Coming" might be the greatest poem I know. (The best two-stanza one, for sure.) Better than any horror movie in my view (sorry) and as prescient as Orwell. Always given me goosebumps.

Smoke?
I'm only on the edge of the Canadian wildfire smoke currently, but the AQI here is the worst it's been, 178. The problem is 2.5 nm and smaller particles, small enough to get deep into your body and wreak havoc. To put you in context, a typical human hair is 100,000 nanometers in diameter, so, no, you can't see or feel these particles directly. If science tells you something but you can't sense it, do you tend to believe it anyway? The guy who sold me my house neglected to inform me that the radon level in the basement was 56, because he didn't "believe" in radon*.

You can see the smoke particles as a grayish-yellowish haze when looking at distant objects, even on a sunny day, and if you feel a burning in your eyes or in the back of your throat, you're probably breathing too much of it. You also might not "smell smoke": the VOCs in wildfire smoke generally lose their smell after about 24 hours, so, depending on how long it took to get to you.... Counterintuitively, being farther away from wildland fires is actually more dangerous to peoples' health than being close to one, because many people dismiss the dangers if they can't see flames or smell smoke, or if the smoke isn't thick. I just saw a woman pass by walking her dog.

Fight back!

If you can, stay indoors, don't exert yourself, get into the habit of checking AQI every morning when you check the weather, and get an air purifier, for whatever little room you spend most of your time sitting around in. The one I bought is the Coway Airmega AP-1512H Mighty. The Wirecutter, the product review arm of the New York Times, says, "After nine years, during which we’ve tested more than 50 different air purifiers, we believe that the exceptional Coway Airmega AP-1512HH Mighty is the best among them—as we have since 2015." The otherwise identical Coway 200M, available from the same link, has a more conventional appearance and has control lights that you can turn off, making it better for the bedroom. Both are quiet and efficient. Both are economical, to buy and to run. Available in white or black.

Getting to the point
Oh, and the point I started out wanting to make? TOP doesn't use AI. There is no TOP bot. It's just little ol' flesh-'n'-blood me, aging but game, sitting on the front porch at TOP Rural World Headquarters hunt-and-pecking away at a keyboard. No ChatGTP, no AI, no funny business, with my longstanding and finely-honed (albeit not infallible) instincts for that increasingly rare mental skill, "the evaluation of competing claims."

Same as it ever was.

Well, except for the air purifier.

Don't let it all get you down,

Mike
(Thanks to Jay Townsend and George Andros)

*The official safe level is 4 pCi/L (picocuries per liter), but that was "negotiated for" by the realty industry. The real safe level is 2.5 pCi/L. My sellers cured the issue by paying for abatement after the sale. The current level in my basement hovers around 1.1. I don't spend a lot of time down there.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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