Mitch's Blog

2001 profile of Vernor Vinge, the brilliant science fiction writer and computer scientist. By Katie Hafner at The New York Times:

A linchpin of his thinking is what he calls the “technological singularity,” a point at which the intelligence of machines takes a huge leap, and they come to possess capabilities that exceed those of humans. As a result, ultra-intelligent machines become capable of upgrading themselves, humans cease to be the primary players, and the future becomes unknowable. Dr. Vinge sees the singularity as probable if not inevitable, most likely arriving between 2020 and 2040.

Vinge passed away in 2024, after a struggle with Parkinsons. I wonder what he would have made of AI today. Would he have thought we were truly on the verge of the singularity? Would he have thought we had already passed it? Or would he have thought it was all a Ponzi scheme?

Via Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr — thanks!

I read three print books and have no big thoughts about it.

I have done nearly all my book reading as ebooks since 2010. However, I was unable to find ebook versions of the “Funny Papers” trilogy by Tom De Haven, so I bought print versions.

The experience reading print books after years of electronically was … fine.

It confirmed I prefer ebooks, not for any grand philosophical or esthetic reason, but just because they’re more convenient.

But faced with the same choice again — wanting to read a book that is not available as an ebook — I’ll get the print book in an instant.

Tom De Haven’s Funny Papers trilogy is a sprawling, picaresque romp through the lives and neuroses of the men responsible for creating a wildly popular comic strip over a period spanning more than a century.

The first novel in the series, “Funny Papers” tells the story of Georgie Wreckage, a dour but oddly likable illustrator for the yellow scandal newspapers of 1890s New York. In the era before newspapers could publish photos, Georgie rushes to the scene of grisly crimes and disasters and draws them for the benefit of readers. The work suits Georgie’s gloomy demeanor and he loves it.

One day, Georgie finds an odd-looking boy at the periphery of a murder scene, a bald kid wearing a derby hat and nightgown, with a dog named Fuzzy. Georgie draws the boy and dog and suddenly the artist finds himself a celebrity cartoonist — rich, famous, and miserable. The boy, whose name is Pinfold, is baffled, meanwhile, to find that a fictional version of himself is now famous.

There is nothing cute about Pinfold in real life. He’s bald because a gang of boys set him on fire for sport and he’s wearing a nightshirt because his street clothes were soaked in blood during the murder.

Despite the grim events, Funny Papers is joyful and energetic, exploring the streets of 1890s New York and its denizens, easily following a dozen colorful characters.

The sequel, “Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies,” jumps 40 years in the future, to 1936 New York. Each book in the series stands on its own — I read the second book first, unaware that was part of a series, and I’ve reread it several times over the past 30 years.

The boy in the derby hat now has a new name, Derby Dugan, and new creators. Al Bready, the first-person narrator of the novel, writes the scripts for the strip, with another man serving as boss, artist and the public face of the team. They are close friends, though Bready denies it and claims he doesn’t even like his boss. Bready certainly has no reason to like the artist, who has achieved fame and fortune from Derby Dugan, goes to fashionable parties, beds beautiful women and lives in a mansion, while Bready toils in anonymity, lives in a one-room apartment and only owns one pair of shoes. And yet Bready is happy, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s young, healthy and a prince of the city.

The story is reminiscent of Damon Runyon — or a comic strip — filled with colorful characters and told in Bready’s snappy, street-smart voice. He’s a pulp writer and an autodidact but he knows how to use a semicolon

I reviewed Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies in 2010: A talking dog and puckered shoes: Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies

Gotta admit I didn’t care much for the third novel, “Dugan Under Ground,” which jumps ahead 30 years to the early 60s and 70s and then jumps ahead again to the year 2000. Derby Dugan has been canceled due to poor circulation, but revived in an unauthorized underground comic. He’s now the Imp Eugene, whose X-rated adventures have a cult following of maybe about a dozen people. Like the first two novels, the main characters of “Dugan Under Ground” are the comic’s neurotic creators, but unlike the first two novels I just didn’t enjoy spending time with these sad sacks. “Dugan Under Ground” leaves midcentury New York — a place and time I have a lifelong romantic attachment to — and follows the characters from suburban New Jersey to late 60s hippie San Francisco and back.

The author, Tom De Haven, has also written a novel about Superman, “It’s Superman,” which alters the core mythology in intriguing ways that I think work even better than canon. “It’s Superman” is based on the comic strip’s very early days. He’s also written a history of the Superman character, “Our Hero: Superman on Earth, which sounds almost like another volume of Derby Dugan; it’s high on my to-be-read list.

In Finland, as in the US, new parents get a package of freebies. In the US, it’s “an underwhelming package: a small drawstring bag containing a few tiny samples of baby shampoo and diaper cream, and tons of coupons.” But in Finland, it’s different, acccording to 99% Invisible:

[In Finland], they get a large cardboard box full of supplies for a newborn and its parents: items like picture books, nipple cream and warm booties for the freezing Finnish winters. The box itself even doubles as a crib. It’s a starter kit of everything a family will need for the first six months of a baby’s life, and virtually every new parent in Finland is eligible to receive one.

… in its almost 90 years of existence, the Finnish baby box has evolved from a basic survival tool to a national symbol, a rite of passage– and possibly the cutest social engineering tool in the world.

Stephenson:

I’m not an expert on how the brain works, but I can say that, when writing by hand, one is continually solving a series of small problems having to do with the spacing of words, how letters are connected, the crossing of the letter t (sometimes more than one in the same word) and the dotting of the letters i and j, and how to accomplish all of those things through coordinated movements not just of the fingers but of the whole arm. All of that has to be integrated in real time with whatever is happening on a more abstract level in the brain’s processing of ideas and imagery.

Concurrently I have been following discourse on Reddit and other sources about how widespread use of AI has forced educators to return to the long-abandoned practice of having their students take exams in person by writing things out longhand in blue books. This has created new challenges for students who never really learned how to write by hand, and for teachers who can’t make sense of their students' terrible handwriting.

About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way. The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was a stack of handwritten pages 42 inches high, which for a time was on display at the Museum of Science Fiction in Seattle. With the exception of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., which I co-wrote with Nicole Galland by emailing Word files back and forth, every book I’ve written since then has been composed with fountain pen on paper.

…

Here are some fairly simple dos and don’ts for people who want to reap the benefits of writing by hand.

I rarely write by hand anymore. I do all my writing on the Mac and, often, the phone. When on the phone, if it’s more than a few words, I’ll dictate rather than type.

Nolan starts by quoting Cullen Roche, an investor and writer, who went to the Tour de France and marveled at “how poorly they monetized the event.”

Roche:

In short, the American model creates a wealthier, more capitalized industry, while the European model sacrifices financial maximization to generate a widely distributed, unpriced public good. Which is better? Most certainly a mix. The hard part is getting the balance right.

Nolan:

The way that America’s version of capitalism proves its utility is by adding up all of the profits created by the privatization of public goods without subtracting the value that has been destroyed by the same activity. We have created the largest enshittifying machine in world history by employing a financial logic that leaves out half of the equation.

Take a scenic countryside and fill it with billboards. You can calculate precisely the amount of profit that has thereby been created for advertising companies, and the associated rise in profits for the companies that attract more customers with the billboards. But what is the cost of the destruction of the scenic countryside view? Don’t ask! It would, of course, be something of a philosophical project to place an exact dollar value on the lost beauty. The bigger problem is that, in our economic system, we do not even try. Across our economy, externalities are simply ignored.

Bruce Schneier:

⁠The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.⁠⁠

⁠⁠At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.⁠⁠

⁠⁠The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work–if the task has to be done and no one cares how–then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.

I like the metaphor or a wagon or a forklift because they don’t do the job for you. They still require a lot of work on your part. That is my experience using AI. It’s a huge help, speeds the process and helps me do things I would not have done on my own. But it doesn’t do the job for me and it still requires a lot of work.

I don’t use AI to write posts here because what I do here is a “gym” task, not a “job” task.

The discussion around the Odyssey movie has led me to realize that I have not actually liked most of the Christopher Nolan movies I’ve seen. I liked “Inception” and “Interstellar” a lot, but the rest of them – including the Batman movies — seem like the work of a man who’s dealing with issues that are alien to me.

“You either die a hero or live long enough to be a villain”? No, that’s not true.

I am not trying to disrespect Nolan or his fans. Taste is subjective.

Cyclosporiasis would have been a great name for a 70s jazz fusion band.