Weekend Reads (Nov 18): Gavin Bryars, ChatGPT, Magicians, College Football Coaches
Recommended weekend reading for November 18, 2023.
If you’re a paying subscriber, then be sure to check out this month’s playlist and podcast episode. They both delve into Tor Lundvall’s shadowy music, which I find to be the perfect soundtrack for cold, gray November days. If you’d like to listen to these but you’re not a subscriber, you can change that right now.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Celebrated composer Gavin Bryars, who turned 80 this past January, reflects on his work and career with a selection of favorite pieces from his considerable oeuvre, including 1971’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.
I had no ambitions for the piece at all. We initially made a little recording with just the instruments we had. And eventually I did this version for Brian Eno, on Obscure Records. The name of the label, “Obscure,” was deliberate for both Brian and myself. I wanted to recreate a specific kind of pleasure: when you’re looking for something and find a single reference in the index of a book you hadn’t expected. Which is the opposite of proper record company marketing, but then it developed a kind of cult following. When I made the second version in 1993 for Point Records [Philip Glass’s label] and it was nominated for the second Mercury Music Prize, that’s when it became more public. Paul Gambaccini told me that when he played it on Classic FM, he had more responses to it than to any album he had ever played, both “for” and “against.” There was a lot of press, including a campaign against it by The Daily Star, who said I was exploiting the homeless. But I don’t feel that it’s exploitive of the old man’s situation. It’s raising him to a status that he should have: [one of] dignity and respect. There’s a nobility I find in him. I became aware of the power of that man’s voice when I first started working on it. I decided whatever I added to it was not going to point to me, but to enhance his qualities. It’s been over 50 years of playing it. When I’m standing on the stage, whether it’s with my ensemble or an orchestra or whoever, and that first entry of the voice starts, I still feel something. It still hits me. Then, when we start to play and the chords come in little by little, I’m still touched.
Related: From my own review of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet: “[Bryars’] arrangements are subtle, restrained, and dignified, letting the spotlight shine on the tramp. More importantly, this album does not trivialize what the tramp is singing. The words he is singing are never presented in a mocking or derisive way. They are presented as is, and the listener can derive from them what they want.”
Also from The Quietus, Eamonn Forde reflects on Spotify’s changing payment policy — which I’ve written about earlier — and what it means for smaller artists.
By imposing a monetisation threshold, it all sends a message to new acts that, at the very start, the industry is regarding them as being literally worthless. The economic rewards in streaming, unless you hit proper scale, are not exactly great; but treating minuscule acts caught in this crossfire as pointless, essentially throwing them under the tanks in this supposed war on white noise, starts to smell ideologically repugnant.
“It fails to recognize that this ‘long tail’ includes a huge number of ‘real’ emerging artists, emerging genres, and emerging small labels, as well as artists and labels who are culturally important in smaller geographic territories, ethnic groups or genres,” argues Fletcher. “It includes many musical seeds that have huge potential to grow into exciting new musical forces and change the future of music and culture. Demonetizing these smaller ‘grassroots’ artists is clearly discriminatory.”
Ed Newton-Rex explains his reasons for resigning from Stability AI, where he led the Audio team.
But setting aside the fair use argument for a moment — since “fair use” wasn’t designed with generative AI in mind — training generative AI models in this way is, to me, wrong. Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. I don’t see how this can be acceptable in a society that has set up the economics of the creative arts such that creators rely on copyright.
James Somers reflects on the impact that AI tools like ChatGPT have on coding and whether or not such tools mean the death of programming.
Bodies of knowledge and skills that have traditionally taken lifetimes to master are being swallowed at a gulp. Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it. I keep thinking of Lee Sedol. Sedol was one of the world’s best Go players, and a national hero in South Korea, but is now best known for losing, in 2016, to a computer program called AlphaGo. Sedol had walked into the competition believing that he would easily defeat the A.I. By the end of the days-long match, he was proud of having eked out a single game. As it became clear that he was going to lose, Sedol said, in a press conference, “I want to apologize for being so powerless.” He retired three years later. Sedol seemed weighed down by a question that has started to feel familiar, and urgent: What will become of this thing I’ve given so much of my life to?
Via Kottke.
I love coding, but I’m not so much of a purist that I think “real” programmers shouldn’t use ChatGPT. I haven’t used ChatGPT-generated code in any actual projects, but I have queried it and have been pretty impressed with the quality of code it returns for simple things like querying MySQL in PHP.
I often think about what my 7th grade programming teacher said concerning programmers, that their defining quality is that they’re lazy. By that, he meant that programmers don’t like unnecessary effort; they prize efficiency above all else, from naming conventions to the code they actually write. It seems to me that ChatGPT can take that to a logical end.
In a lengthy — and entertaining — Twitter thread, 3D animator Trevor Baylis recounts his bonkers experience working on the Iron Sky movie franchise. It’s an epic saga of corporate greed, legal malfeasance, and utter buffoonery.
After Iron Sky was released in 2012 the production company formed a new company Troll VFX. They paid me minimum wage. I found out everyone else (Finns) were getting paid more AND there were plans for Iron Sky 2. I'm from UK.
I pointed out to producers that I still owned all the IPR for my work on Iron Sky and asked for a salary review.....I was immediately sacked! They were trying to steal my work and Troll VFX owner had already made a €200K deal for my IPR.
My work had already been sold to a games company in Poland to make the game Iron Sky Invasion. I was bemused by it all. The games company were even sending me messages to ask for help with the files.... I told them I was taking legal action!
I watched the first Iron Sky movie shortly after it came out in 2012. I don’t remember too much about it, other than its outlandish premise — after WW2, a group of Nazis escaped to the far side of the Moon, where they began amassing a force to conquer Earth — probably would’ve been better served by a 30-minute short than a feature-length film.
X/Twitter’s self-inflicted downward spiral has been dominating the headlines lately, but let us not forget about Donald Trump’s Truth Social.
The embarrassing financial news was laid bare in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing made this week by Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), the shell company behind a flailing attempt to take the social media business public. It states that Truth Social has only made $3.7 million in revenue since it launched in Q1 of 2022. By contrast, the company lost $50 million during that year and lost an additional $23 million in the first half of 2023.
Of course, this should come as a surprise to exactly no one.
Roger Kastel, the artist behind the iconic movie posters for The Empire Strikes Back and Jaws, died this week. He was 92 years old.
Kastel was born in White Plains, NY in 1931. After graduating from White Plains High School, he attended the Art Students League in New York City until serving in the U.S. Navy for four years during the Korean War.
Kastel got his first paying art job at the age of 15 doing industrial cartoons. He sold his first illustration in the early 1960s and illustrated paperback book covers and movie posters over the next forty years. Roger worked for all of the major publishers In New York City. His painting for Jaws is included in the books, The Illustrator in America and 200 Years of American Illustration.
If you title an article “Mummified baboons point to the direction of the fabled land of Punt” then you’d better believe I’m going to read it. Also, I was today years old when I learned about “the fabled land of Punt.”
Despite being a trading partner for over a millennium, the ancient Egyptians never disclosed Punt’s exact whereabouts except for vague descriptions of voyages along what’s now the Red Sea. That could mean anywhere from southern Sudan to Somalia and even Yemen.
Now, according to a recent paper published in the journal eLife, Punt may have been the same as another legendary port city in modern-day Eritrea, known as Adulis by the Romans. The conclusion comes from a genetic analysis of a baboon that was mummified during ancient Egypt’s Late Period (around 800 and 500 BCE). The genetics indicate the animal originated close to where Adulis would be known to come into existence centuries later.
Via 1440.
A recent study suggests that magicians are less prone to mental illness than other types of creative performers.
The study, published in the journal BJPsych Open, measured the psychological traits of 195 magicians and 233 people from the general population and compared it with data from other creative groups.
The findings showed that on three key measures of psychosis or degrees of losing contact with reality, magicians are significantly less likely to suffer than artists, musicians and comedians.
They are also less likely to have hallucinations or cognitive disorganisation, which can make it hard to concentrate.
One possible reason for this may be the precision and rigor required to perform magic tricks. Which reminds me… I should start brushing up on my ambitious card routine.
Finally, college athletes wanting to get paid has been a controversial topic, but Nancy Armour argues that the real controversy ought to be fiscal irresponsibility of college officials, as evidenced by the obscene amounts of money spent on coaches and facilities.
Texas A&M is going to pay Jimbo Fisher more than $77 million to go away after firing him Sunday. Throw in the money owed for bonuses he’s already earned, the payoffs for his assistants and the contract for the new coach, and the total price tag likely will be north of $100 million.
But sure. The greatest threat to college sports is athletes being allowed to profit off their name, image and likeness and the possibility courts or federal officials could deem them employees, which would require schools to pay them.
No one forced Texas A&M to give Fisher such a ludicrous contract, just as no one forced schools to upend traditional rivalries and geographical common sense with the recent realignments. This sordid mess that threatens the entire ecosystem is no one’s fault but the fine leaders of these colleges and universities, who lost both their sense of fiscal responsibility and grasp on reality long ago.
My alma mater, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has its own ridiculous deals. UNL’s previous head coach, Scott Frost — who was considered a golden boy when he was hired due to his ties to the legendary Tom Osborne era and his impressive coaching at University of Central Florida — was fired last September after a dismal record. But he still walked away with a $16.4 million buyout.
The coach before him, Mike Riley, received a $6.2 million buyout when he was fired in 2017. And the coach before Riley, Bo Pelini (who was also supposed to lead Nebraska to the promised land), received a $6.54 million buyout after he was fired in 2014.
None of these are as bad as Jimbo Fisher’s buyout, but still… And they’re all proof that being a fired college football coach is the best job in America. Where else can you earn millions for being a failure at your job? (Besides Congress, that is.)
From the Blog
The humble URL is a foundational aspect of the web, but most people probably never give a second thought to the URLs that they see in their browser — or create for their websites. However, there’s something to be said for creating elegant and beautiful URLs.
URLs are like map trails, street signs, and incantations, all rolled into one. And if it’s possible to make them more efficient and aesthetically pleasing without sacrificing any utility or functionality, then I can’t really think of any reason why you shouldn’t take a few moments to do so.
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