J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Category: Culture Rants/Shares Page 2 of 21

Words in a Likely Order

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On September 8

In Culture Rants/Shares

Last week I was working on a technical problem for a client. Someone on my team filed a support ticket with one of the software companies we’re working with. The company wrote back with a solution. Fantastic! The problem was really annoying, so I was happy to see that there was a workaround. All we needed to do was change a setting.

I looked up the setting, but couldn’t find it. I sent screenshots to the client. Could they find the setting with their admin login?

They couldn’t find it either.

My colleague wrote back to the software company. They responded that the “solution” was an AI generated response, and was incorrect.

What the actual fuck.

At least four people’s time wasted, because an AI made up some words that resembled a technical solution.

And this type of thing is happening all over the tech world. Companies are cutting costs by reducing support staff, replacing them with AI. But the end result is degraded service for the customer, and extra work for the remaining support staff sorting out the bullshit AI responses.

AI is capable of generating “words in a likely order”, as my wife puts it. But the AI doesn’t know or care if the words are true, and apparently neither do the companies deploying the AI tools.

What a fucking scam.

No More Building on Sand

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On June 16

In Culture Rants/Shares, Personal Updates

When Twitter went downhill, I wasn’t sure what to “do” about social media. Many of the authors and artists I followed fled the platform, and my feed became a cesspool of vile posts from accounts I was not following. Though my Twitter/X feed has become more sane, I rarely go there anymore. The company dismantled TweetDeck, my preferred mode of viewing and posting, and I just lost interest.

Until then, Twitter had been my preferred social media platform. I posted to Facebook and Instagram a few times a year, usually to promote a new release. But I was on Twitter daily, posting at least a few times a week, sharing thoughts, opinions, and retweeting items of interest.

Post-Twitter, I decided not to rush the process of finding my next “main” social media site. I signed up for Bluesky, Threads, and Mastadon, but I didn’t spend much time on any of them.

I’d been burned. I’d spent significant time on Twitter, and my experience had been ruined by Elon Musk’s ego purchase and atrociously poor management (firing top engineers, dismantling moderation teams, inviting fascists and bigots back to the platform, alienating advertisers, and generally running the company into the ground). I didn’t want to repeat my mistake by hopping on a new bandwagon.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had a realization. I already had a “main” social media site. It’s this website. It’s self-hosted WordPress.

If I have something to say or share, long-form text is usually my preferred mode of communication. Sometimes I like to share a picture or two, but usually it’s just words. So a WordPress blog is perfect. People can comment on my posts if they want, or message me. And I can share posts to different audiences on Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn, depending on the subject matter and vibe.

Many of my family and friends visit my site occasionally to see what I’m up to. I keep up with them by following their posts on whatever social media site(s) they post on, or just call and say hi (a Gen X thing). So my blog does function as a social media site, in addition to being a place where anyone can read my posts or learn more about my fiction writing and music.

And I’m no longer building on sand. No one can rug pull my own site, or buy it and ruin it. Nothing lasts forever, but WordPress.org is open source software. I own my own domain and my own content. Being the sole moderator, I can edit or remove old posts or comments whenever I want.

So welcome to my social media platform.

Alta (She Made History)

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On April 6

In Culture Rants/Shares, Personal Updates

My mother-in-law passed away recently. I had a good relationship with her, despite the fact that we were both stubborn people with frequently divergent opinions.

Alta was a poet, famous in some circles for both her poetry and her press. Andrew Gilbert has written an outstanding obituary on kqed.org that really does her justice.

Though Alta was complex, loved attention, and was sometimes overly dramatic, I liked her and have an enormous respect for her life’s body of work. She dedicated herself to art, compassion, equality, and all the qualities that I consider to be progress in the greater picture of civilization.

We live in an era where the radical right is actively dismantling human rights, especially women’s rights. Abortion rights have been trashed, they are coming hard for birth control, and famous influencers say publicly that women should lose the right to vote.

But because of the work of Alta and her peers, the right faces an uphill battle. There are too many female role models in all walks of life to say with any credibility that women “can’t” occupy a particular societal role. There are simply too many living, successful counter-examples of women playing prominent roles in the arts, politics, sciences, and every other sphere. Women still face discrimination prejudice, and under-representation in many fields, but culturally we’re in a much different place than when Alta was growing up. And that’s partially due to her work.

So hats off, and respect.

Purpose Is the Fifth Idol

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On September 16

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares, Utopian Speculations

In Tim Ferriss’s recent interview with Arthur Brooks, Brooks discusses the four false idols, what Thomas Aquinas called “the four substitutes for God.” Aquinas named those substitutes as honor, wealth, pleasure, and power, but Brooks uses fame as an Instagram-age stand-in for honor.

In this short, Brooks uses U.S. cities to demonstrate each of the four false idols, or vices: New York is money (wealth), D.C. is power, Vegas is pleasure, and Los Angeles is fame. He asks which one motivates you? Which one leads you to make poor decisions?

That got me thinking, what’s the main vice of San Francisco? Historically, pleasure has its role in the Barbary Coast sense. So does wealth (gold rush, tech booms, etc.). But I would say SF’s main vice is purpose. A lot of San Francisco’s ambition is funneled toward meaning, vision, and progress. This can become pathological in a number of ways. San Francisco’s Summer of Love had a dark, druggy, rapey, violent underbelly. Visions of improving society with technology can easily tip into Panglossian techno-utopianism.

And maybe that’s what Aquinas meant, at least partially, by honor. Because there’s a performative aspect to the pursuit of purpose and progress. We (especially San Franciscans) want to to appear as if we’re doing good deeds and making the world a better place. So sometimes we virtue signal more than we act virtuously. It’s not for want of fame, it’s the desire to have a good reputation, to be seen as honorable, that can get us in trouble.

And then there’s the true believers, who get a dopamine high by pursuing their dreams for the future of humanity and society: a colony on Mars, self-aware computer programs, fleets of self-driving electric cars, fusion power that provides unlimited electricity at negligible cost. What could go wrong?

Even the artistic side of purpose has a dark side. Putin’s dark reign is greatly inspired by the science fiction works of author Mikhail Yuriev. Purpose is my own main vice–my desire to write science fiction is largely purpose driven. And while I don’t think my science fiction works have injured anyone, it’s always possible to put bad ideas out into the world. And the blind pursuit of purpose via art can easily lead a person to personal and financial ruin.

So yeah, purpose is the fifth idol. Fame certainly belongs on the list, but Aquinas didn’t know about Hollywood or Instagram. So honor should be subdivided into fame and purpose.

New Novella Acceptance, Thoughts on Gender Dysphoria, Art and Money

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On July 3

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares

Australian Giant Cuttlefish photographed by Richard Ling

Announcement

My novella “The Discovery at Alexandria”, a far-future triptych featuring cuttlefolk (uplifted cuttlefish), arcology-dwelling humans, and nomadic dogkin, was recently officially accepted by Sheree Thomas for Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m delighted to have found a great home for this story. Publication date TBD (could still be awhile). This will be my first published novella. Inspiration came from the Murderbot series of novellas by Martha Wells, David Brin’s Uplift Saga, and Evolution by Stephen Baxter (among many other works).

Recent Thoughts and Speculations — Gender Fluidity and Anabolic Steriods

I’m not an expert on gender fluidity or gender dysphoria, but I’ve been thinking about testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) and anabolic steroid use, which is rampant not only among professional bodybuilders and MMA fighters, but also among teenage gym rats trying to get “aesthetic” and men my own age trying to recapture our fading youth. Should steroid use among men trying to appear (and feel) more masculine be part of the conversation around gender dysphoria? While “hyper-masculine” isn’t a distinct gender, it’s a very narrow band on the gender spectrum, and can only be achieved via unusual/rare genetics or the use of exogenous male hormones (combined with a great deal of strenuous exercise).

I think it’s potentially useful to bring “men trying to be more manly” into the conversation around gender fluidity and dysphoria. We’re all somewhere on the gender spectrum with a unique cocktail and ratio of male and female sex hormones and brain architecture, sometimes lining up with our birth-assigned gender, sometimes not. More importantly, many of us would like to be in a different place on that spectrum than we actually are. Sometimes exogenous hormones are the right choice, sometimes a dietary change might be appropriate (less alcohol and more cruciferous vegetables, for example, to reduce estrogen in men), and sometimes more self-acceptance might be the ticket.

Maybe some of the hysteria around gender-change politics could be mitigated if we included bro-dudes like Joe Rogan (who uses TRT) in the category of people who want to shift their position on the gender spectrum (albeit only slightly).

Art-spiration

I’m in a good groove with both fiction writing and music-making these days, and part of the reason why is that I have currently enough money. People make great art under all kinds of conditions, including extreme poverty, but it’s much easier to make art if one has the privilege of mentally divorcing time and money. It can take hours to write a good paragraph (or even a shitty paragraph). Same goes for a four-bar musical phrase, or a painting, and sometimes hundreds of hours of hard work don’t amount to anything tangible (like a sale, or even a completed work). From a purely economic POV, most art-making is a waste of time.

Even when financial security does come along, the mental prison of time=money can still hold us back. Time is time, time is us living our lives, and money allows us more freedom. But we still have to take that freedom, to use it, to break out of our productivity conditioning.

Hope you are enjoying the summer! Feel free to comment about whatever is on your mind.

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