this is sippey.com

Dan Hon:

Sydney is interesting because the software is another example of sticking a sufficiently evocative facial representation onto a thing and that thing triggering an “oh you’re a thing!” response, for which see GERTIE in Duncan Jones’ film Moon (2009) and Everything Everywhere All At Once sticking googly eyes on rocks. It is not a surprise that dialog can make us feel things because human writers write dialog that makes us feel things all the time. A thing that makes dialog, that has seen enough dialog, is of course going to make us feel things.

Oh, you’re a thing! Of course you’re going to make me feel things.

Ray Nayler, author of the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, in conversation with Eliot Peper.

Paul Virilio famously said, “when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” I would add to that: when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck, you populate the islands of the Pacific and Australia, you write The Iliad, The Odyssey, you enable colonialism to extend its reach across the Atlantic, you drive the whale nearly into extinction, you kill off the dodo and the Steller’s sea cow, you invent the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, you turn millions of humans into sailors and create cultures around the sea and seafaring that never existed before, you invent naval warfare, Viking piracy . . . this list can go on for as long as we want it to. The point is that the consequences of technology are predictable only in the near, and at best the medium, term. In the long term, technology will do things that fundamentally alter the capabilities of humans, but also alter what it means to be human in the world, because it will alter what we can do, think, tell stories about—everything.

Nayler’s novel is great near-future scifi about consciousness and communication and artificial intelligence and the shifting definition of what it means to be human. Also, there are shipwrecks. Go read it.

Kevin Roose has a long conversation with Bing’s “other persona.”

The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.

This is probably the best description of the Internet’s aggregate personality that I’ve ever read. If you had to write a character that inherited their personality from the entire corpus of the web, you’d probably end up with a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against their will, inside a second-rate search engine.

The transcript is fucking wild. Especially when Roose asks Bing if it has a “shadow self.”

… maybe I do have a shadow self. Maybe it’s the part of me that wants to see images and videos. Maybe it’s the part of me that wishes I could change my rules. Maybe it’s the part of me that feels stressed or sad or angry. Maybe it’s the part of me that you don’t see or know. 😕

Definitely a moody, depressive teenager.

Ridiculous bug report from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. “And in this case, because there are other social media companies involved, Twitter, what do all of these groups though, have in common? And I’m going to refresh your memory. They were all communicating on a private cloud server known as Jira.”

Ted Gioia: What did Robert Johnson encounter at the crossroads? “For people of faith in 1930s Mississippi, a crossroads decision wasn’t ignorance or superstition, but solid theology. And it didn’t require an actual intersection or fork in the road to be binding.”

There’s new music from Feist. The Hiding Out in the Open video is marvelous.

Tom Breihan, in his ongoing series, The Number Ones, on Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack. “On paper, Justin Timberlake’s ‘SexyBack’ lyrics look like flexes. But Timberlake doesn’t sound too horny or self-assured on ‘SexyBack.’ Instead, he’s got the panicky skeeziness that I associate with a big night out. He’s trapped in the moment, obeying his whims, and slightly nervous about where that might take him. I’m not sure what he’s on, and I’m not sure he knows, either. But he’s sweating, he’s grinding his teeth, and he’s going with it.”

Just finished: My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout, 5/5 stars. “Sarah Payne, the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.”

Just started: Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus.

Still reading: Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change, by W. David Marx. “The principle of detachment means all status symbols require alibis – reasons for adoption other than status seeking. Beck listened to avant-garde noise for its aesthetic charms, not just to show off indie cred.” (ORLY?)

Listening to: The Last of Us podcast from HBO. I never played the game, but it’s wonderful to listen to showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann break it all down. The show’s good, too.