lesser daemon: brent bailey's personal weblog

29

May

I don't like being on the computer anymore

I quit social media again. I do this every few years, deactivating or deleting accounts or abandoning platforms entirely after either the platform itself becomes too evil for me to justify my presence on it or I just see a post or a trend so bad that I decide being online is just bad for me. This time I just saw a Bluesky reply argument that was so stupid I decided to deactivate my account immediately. Bluesky has a bit of a problem with constant context collapse: leftists and irony posters are sharing a much more confined space with Maddow-loving

3 min read

27

May

State of Nature

Graeber & Wengrow's Dawn of Everything opens with a discussion of the (admittedly one-sided, since Hobbes had been dead for a a century) debate between Hobbes and Rousseau on the state of nature: the way humans are in the absence of society. Hobbes holds that humans are, by nature, in a state of war against all others: in the absence of a social contract or bodies to enforce it, everyone's only incentive is to seek their own benefit. Rousseau contrasts this with an Edenic vision of true freedom, where the introduction of the law and private property serve as a

3 min read

22

May

So Far It's All Still AI

People online collectively lost their mind yesterday over this video a Reddit user generated with Google's Veo 3. It's built with Google's new multimodal model, Veo 3, that can do video and audio from a prompt or a source image. Depending on who you talk to, this is the newest frontier in hellish AI slop and/or the future of video content writ large. I try to avoid goalpost-moving too much, so I'll be the first to admit this is wild. As a flashpoint moment it's comparable to the original Dall-E release. We're lightyears from Will Smith eating spaghetti: the

3 min read

21

May

If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Poorly

It feels appropriate that in sitting down to write this I intended to reference something I read recently and realized I had forgotten to bookmark it. I have been trying to be better about keeping a "second brain" with Pinboard and Obsidian but I still forget to bookmark things, forget to write things down, lose them somewhere in the sea of tabs and browsers and devices that are a part of my daily life. I have always aspired for this site to be something like Simon Willison's blog - a constantly updated, eternally useful source of knowledge - but mostly

2 min read

16

May

I just want people to not have to be so afraid

Every now and then I come across something that reminds me how deeply out of touch I am. This week it was this trend piece about West Village TikTok girls. Ultimately it is the same story that gets written once every few years: young people are terrible and they change neighborhoods for the worse. In other news the pope is Catholic.

The article made me think about this Brian Philips essay about the constant feeling of financial safety and comfort being out of your reach, a feeling that so many millenials have been grappling with for most of their lives.

3 min read