Looking more broadly, the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another. If I can’t connect to you, I can’t connect to us. Whether it’s racism, class differences, or any of myriad other social plagues, its cost is always the same: a broken and dysfunctional system that prevents us from recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart.

Bruce Springsteen, in the forward to Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.

Clearly I have underestimated Bruce Springsteen.

David Cyrus MacDonald’s new Chattel Fixtures podcast is an entertaining look into real estate on PEI. His first guest is Steve Barber, impresario turned real estate agent; they had a good chat.

A coworker was having an issue logging into a website that requires two-factor authentication. We keep the authentication information for this site, including the TFA code, in a corporate 1Password account. 

While he was getting his TFA codes rejected 100% of the time, I was having no troubles, using the same account, same 1Password, etc.

The problem?

His system clock on his PC was running two minutes slow.

TFA codes are time-sensitive: the time is one of the factors in their generation (that’s why they expire every minute). If your system has the wrong time, your 1Password will generate the wrong TFA code.

The solution: he set his PC clock to the right time.

This piece by K’eguro Macharia may be the single best thing ever written about vegetables.

Or at least about beets:

I have roasted beets. I have roasted them when they are wrapped in foil and I have roasted them when they are wrapped in banana leaves and I have roasted them without any covering. I have roasted them on a bed of whole spices and I have roasted them on their own. Roasting does nothing magical. Roasted beets still taste like beet. And beets taste like dirt and despair.

Macharia has no love for cabbage either, which should cause my friend Ann, doyen of cabbage, to spring into restorative action.

All the experimenting I was doing yesterday with AI-generated images almost filled up my Google Drive. Fortuitously, Kris Howard pointed to this helpful Google tool to assist with identifying and pruning storage hogs.

Andy Baio posted Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model today, and I immediately followed his lead and used this (very helpful, clear) YouTube tutorial to train an AI model on the essence of Peter Rukavina, and then produced AI-generated images derived from that essence.

Here are the 18 images I used to train the model:

An hour later, Stable Diffusion was generating images like this:

I

Here’s a sampling of the 100 or so images that I generated, using prompts that evolved as I went along:

The thing about all this is that nobody really knows how it works. It’s like the anaesthetic of the digital world, a magic potion that does what it says on the tin, but by means unknown.

Almost all of the generated images look like me—if you know me, and you were shown one of them, you’d likely guess it was me. How does it do that? You’ve got me. I have no idea.

What’s clear is that the AI uses photos of me to train a model, a model that is enough to generate other images of me. Does the model “know about people.” I have no idea. Maybe it has just been fed a lot of photos of people, and it’s figured out the patterns. Regardless, it is all tantamount to magic.

And it’s frightening. Not in an Orwellian way, but more viscerally in a personal way: the AI is distilling the visual parts of what makes me me.

In my case, more often than not the AI comes up with derivatives that make me look like an old man. I am an old(ish) man, of course. But the ways in which this is true are accentuated in the distillation: receding hairline, grey hair, prevalent sweaters and button-down shirts. There’s no hiding from it.

We exist in the world—we survive in the world—through a combination of confronting both the reality of ourselves, and the magical thinking we tell ourselves about ourselves: the AI has no such need, and simply plays the cards it’s dealt.

The ramifications of this “digital mirror that shows us who we really are” for our mental health, individually and collectively, are far more concerning to me than losing my job to a machine, robot cars run amuck, and animatronic presidents.

The Favourites page that I set up in 2019 to automatically generate from the RSS reader, stopped working in mid-July when I moved my RSS reader to a new host. I’ve patched things back together, so you’ll find all sorts of fresh favourites to enjoy, and, if you subscribe by RSS, your feedreader will suddenly be filled with a torrent of them. Apologies for the drought.

Recorded for the 2020 Celtic Colours, These Hands, featuring English, Mi’kmaw, Gaelic, and French by Dave Gunning, Darren Stevens, Mary Jane Lamond, Nicole LeBlanc, and Kaia Kater.

Link from my old friend Eve, who, among other things, will teach you ukulele and guitar.

By way of trying out Sane, I pulled some information from the PEI Home and School Federation candidate profiles for the Public School Branch trustee elections and put it in a graph.

It was a helpful exercise: not only did I learn a lot about the candidates—there are some estimable people standing for trustee—but I got a chance to get frustrated by, and excited about, Sane. I’ve signed up for a product walk-through tomorrow with an eye to expressing both.

Ida Josefiina, in Me (a brief history):

I moved to Shenzhen, China as a desperate attempt to immerse myself in the unknown. I wanted to feel like I was drowning in a pool of unfamiliarity and novelty, deprived of the air that was my known reality.