”If you’re aiming towards greatness, you don’t get there by what other people think.”

– Rick Rubin

Ok, let’s stop and think about this for a minute. Don’t get your panties in a twist yet.

So you wrote something and thought it was pretty great. Spent a year working on it. Something that captured a moment in time, something that was real. Maybe not perfect; nothing ever is. But it’s good, at least for you. And that’s not nothing.

But then you show it to a professional, and you’re stunned.

They hate it. Everything about it. HATE IT. Clearly think it’s shite, like they resented every moment of their life they had to waste reading this delusional trash.

There are a few obvious takeaways here, but for the moment, let’s focus on one. Case in point: There are only three reactions one can have to art. Best case scenario: the observer loves it, it’s fucking genius, maybe even changes their life.

Worst case scenario: meh. The observer doesn’t really care one way or another, it’s just wallpaper, background noise. This is definitely not what you want.

Second best scenario: the observer fucking hates it. It actually pisses them off that it even exists. They can’t stop thinking about how much it bothers them. So how is this better than meh?

‘Cuz you made somebody feel something. You elicited an emotional response, albeit not the one you wanted.

But it’s still the second-best reaction, so let’s focus on that.

I’m in the middle of a struggle to achieve a goal with nothing going for me but my wits, whatever brains I still have, and determination to see things through. That may not be enough, but I don’t give up easily.

Failure doesn’t mean death, though, so at least there’s that.

Fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed.

Still in the failing part here, folks, but it ain’t over yet.

Did I help anyone today? Yes, I did.

Then let’s close the book and call it a success.

We are living in a transitional period in human evolution; more specifically, the phase in AI development where it begins to appear everywhere, yet, for the general public, it seems almost transparent. Like it’s not really that big a deal.

But it is a big deal. One AI researchers already don’t fully understand. Case in point: DALL-E 2.

Yesterday’s image “Waterfront at Night,” was created from a short text prompt by the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model initially developed by OpenAI in 2018.

After getting access to the free program, this was my 8th attempt to have the algorithm generate something cool. It’s so simple a child learning to read could use it.

Because it uses machine learning (I.e. it teaches itself by analyzing input, in this case over 6 million images), the designers can’t reverse-engineer how it actually creates a specific image.

In other words, humans created this thing and then gave it the ability to recursively teach itself – so unless it tells us, we don’t know exactly how it makes its decisions.

And yet here it is, in the wild, happily teaching itself how to become better at what it does. To OpenAI’s credit, they’ve tried to limit its capabilities (no porn or violence), but at the end of the day, good luck with that.

Welcome to the future. Ready or not, it’s here and raring to go.

Or perhaps I should say, it’s here and raring to show us what it can do.

Here’s how you open a non-fiction piece of political coverage:

“I feel the fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball.”

What kind of editor would approve that for print? Jann Wenner, of course!

“This was the first time I’d murdered someone, and I was surprised to find I didn’t feel any different than I had before. I didn’t plan on ever killing anyone again, but not because I felt remorse.

The truth was I didn’t feel anything.”

Declan walks in and sees Knobby emptying the safe deposit box into a canvas bag. “You really think you’re going to walk out of here with that?”

Knob looks up. “How the fuck did you get in here?”

“I don’t think that’s the right question, mate.”

“It’s not, is it? Well suppose you tell me what the right fucking question is?”

The two men stop and stare at each other, weighing their next move.

“You remember that time at Crowley’s Circus?” Declan reaches in his pocket and lights a cigarette. “Back in the day?”

Knob stands still as a statue, his face expressionless, impossible to read. An interminable silence leads to an almost imperceptible beginning of a grin. “Carswell. That right prick. Thought the threat of the guv’nor would have us pissing ourselves. What a misguided cunt…”

“Wanna come to a party?”

We were returning from a lecture George Martin had given on his work with The Beatles, and it was still early, maybe 10:30 on a beautiful cool fall night in Boston. I’d driven in from New York for the event after he announced this would be his last public appearance. You were beside yourself with excitement and bought two tickets as soon as they went on sale. Both of us being musicians obsessed with the Fab-Four, this would be as close as we would ever get to hear an eye-witness account of history. We’d stopped by a Store-24 for ice cream and beer before heading back to your apartment when a young woman approached me at the checkout.

“What kind of party?” I said. May as well hear her out; I wasn’t young; the days had long passed when this sort of thing happened as a normal course of events.

“Follow me; I’ll tell you outside,” she said, smiling and motioning to the parking lot.

You were waiting in your car when I approached with my new friend. Clearly not amused. She checked you out, took a second to run some mental calculations, and decided you passed muster before spilling the beans.

“It’s a private sex party; you guys’ll have fun. “You know know,” she winked. ”B & D, that kind of stuff.” Something about her was off, making the whole thing even more enticing.

Always down for weird experiences, I wasted no time. “Sure; how do we get there?”

After giving us directions and a secret password, she got in her car and drove off. I looked at you with a shit-eating grin, my Haagen-Daaz already getting soft, and said, “C’mon — we’ve gotta check it out! We’ll leave if you’re not into it.” Of course, you didn’t want to go, but I was relentless. My plan wasn’t to have sex with strangers, I just wanted to check out what sounded like a freaky scene. I could tell my wife I was doing research. Maybe not the best plan, whatever; I’d figure that out later.

Humoring me, you begrudgingly went along. By the time we pulled up to the address, it was brutally cold. Boston weather’s like that, always changing on a dime. The place was a massive old candy warehouse in an industrial district that seemed to be deserted. We’d been driving in alleys, passing empty loading docks that looked like they hadn’t been used in a while when I saw someone go in an unmarked doorway.

“C’mon, this must be it.”

Oh, this was it, alright. You were my best friend, and this would turn out to be another memorable night in a long line of memorable nights stretching over decades before you passed away seven years ago today.

I loved you, my brother, and still think of you every day.

Rest In Peace.

We all saw this play out in March and April of 2020 with COVID, yet here we are again, making the same mistakes with Monkeypox. Caught up in the last mess as an ER nurse, It seemed like we failed completely. How could we have been so unprepared?

Watching the current crisis unfold, it occurs to me I wasn’t factoring in one important variable.

Solving problems in the lab is very different than solving them in the real world. Once your cohort becomes the entire population of the country, much less the planet, it becomes exponentially more difficult to control.

Labs are orderly. People are messy.

This is not to make excuses for the apparent failures of our government and public health agencies. Rather, it’s just an acknowledgement of why the problem of controlling viral outbreaks seems to fail with depressing regularity.

It’s true we eradicated smallpox and polio, but that was in a time before the Internet, and both of those initiatives took years, if not decades, to implement.

Of course, back then there were no social networks, no tsunami of misinformation, and no ability to attempt to fact-check epidemiology much less immunology. Two topics, BTW, that cannot be fully understood by trained medical professionals, much less the population at large.

Sadly, controlling global populations seems to be a fools game at worst, or a process taking years at best.

In the meantime, try to avoid skin on skin contact with other humans.