I still haven't had the stamina to write one of the two really long pieces about generative and LLM tools -- the stuff you are mistakenly calling "AI" because it benefits the forces of evil to get you to think of it like that, and they have successfully put one over on you in a very big way. I have one piece I want to do which is an explainer, nice and simple, so you can stop falling for their crap. I have another which is about what happened when generative art flooded DeviantArt and what I learned from it. Neither of them can be done in under five thousand words, and that may be conservative.

Meanwhile, my rage and frustration continues to leak out the seams. I think the thing that frustrates me the most is seeing how many people are willing -- eager, even -- to default on using their brains. They are rushing to use tools that remove their own responsibility to think. (Or claim to, anyway. That is, "you don't have to think!" is a major selling point for these piles of crap.)

I can only conclude that a whole lot of people don't want to think, that thinking is not valued by the majority of the populace. This is an extremely depressing conclusion.

Of course, the forces of evil do not want you to think. They have spent a lot of time and money fracturing your attention span and anaesthetizing your critical abilities and throwing so much mud that it not only becomes nearly impossible to determine what the truth is, but a lot of people just decide that truth vs falsehood is not an important thing to determine anymore. The forces of evil cheer at every deepfake. When no one can tell what the truth is -- worse, when almost no one cares what the truth is -- it becomes much easier for them to flood the zone with lies and suffer no consequences for it.

We're fucking doomed, basically. At least, short of radical action that no one is willing to take, some of which I don't think I'm comfortable discussing even in this relatively private space. Polite answer: We are at the rioting stage -- except that many of us are not yet prepared to do so. Many of us do not even realize where the problems actually lie.

I'm very tired. It's hot and my focus is missing. I have only one thing I absolutely need to do today (more on that in a moment) and I haven't done it. I'm waiting to fix a crisis, and of course the person who has declared a crisis is now taking her time delivering me the information I need to deal with it, so I'm waiting on her. I get really annoyed with this. If you pull the fire alarm then you should damned well be sitting by the phone (metaphorically) waiting for my follow-up call.

I saw an orthopedist on Wednesday -- a first, for me -- about my knee. The appointment lasted five minutes, and the upshot is "we'll try physical therapy first." I'm thrilled that a professional confirms my opinion that it's just arthritis/muscular and not cartilage or bone decaying ... but I'm not thrilled about the idea of PT.

To me, physical therapy is just forced exercise -- a concept I have been fighting tooth-and-nail since I was, like, eight years old and simply said that I was not going to participate in gym and they could do whatever they wanted to do to me, too damned bad. I went through my entire elementary and secondary schooling career without participating in gym or any other kind of forced exercise, I have adhered to this standard ever since then, and I hate to see my streak broken now.

Also, I don't know what PT is going to prove. We already know that exercise loosens the joint and mitigates the pain -- we know this because of my three-mile walks twice a week, where the knee stops hurting after about fifteen minutes of warmup and doesn't hurt for the rest of the walk. We also know that the knee immediately begins to hurt again the instant I stop walking. I don't see how PT is going to be any different, or is going to help with that.

Anyway, so, I have to go get on the phone again and actually talk to a human -- my least favorite thing in the world, even worse than forced exercise -- and before I can do that, I have to go fix this crisis before the next data run at four pm. So I guess I'd better get moving.