Category: WTF?

27/01/2025 Miscellaneous, WTF?

Lugholes

Back in the late 1980s, maybe the 1990s, back in an era when the NHS was more functionally funded, my father would periodically go to the GP surgery in the village to get his ears syringed. He always looked forward to getting it done, and when he came home he would always tell us how pleasurable it was, as if it was not so much a medical procedure, but more like a massage. As a teenager I was baffled, and also grossed-out by terms like ‘waxy buildup’.

On Christmas Eve 2023 I experienced dizziness so intense I vomited, shook like I had an intense chill, and almost passed out. After a few hours’ bed rest the symptoms subsided. A few days later, as I was driving around a large roundabout I looked over my shoulder to check my blind spot and the dizziness returned with a vengeance. I could no longer tell exactly where I was steering the car, how far I was from the other vehicles, or even precisely which way was up. Panic. It took every ounce of my concentration to manoeuvre the car through the four-lane roundabout and into a bus stop where I waited for the symptoms to subside.

It’s still not clear what caused the issue. I suspect the dizziness was ‘cervical vertigo’ – in this case stress knots from my shoulder muscles putting pressure on the nerves in my cervical spine – because I’d been spending long hours at my desk finishing my PhD alongside teaching two classes and completing writing commissions. My GP didn’t discount that, but she also suspected some sort of ear infection – my left ear was pretty clogged. Remembering my Dad, I asked about ear syringing but the GP wasn’t able to prescribe it. If I wanted that I’d need to go to Boots and pay a small fee. Thanks, austerity politics.

Figuring that I know my body I worked on de-stressing, had a physiotherapist massage/consultation, strengthened the relevant muscles and the problem hasn’t recurred. But the ear issue resurfaced when I went to get fitted for custom in-ear headphone tips. It is an entertaining procedure. The otologist mixes together two different pastes to make a fast-setting compound that she pipes into the ear with a syringe, like jam into a doughnut. It goes pretty deep into the ear canal. Once it is set, a few minutes later, she pulls it out and there you have it: an accurate 3D negative image of the inside of your head.

But of course if this is to be accurate your ears need to be totally clean. I’d prepared by cleaning my ears as best I could at home (drops, syringing with warm water, etc.) but when I got to the audiologist it turned out my best efforts were insufficient. My left ear still had a significant build-up of hard old wax. Looking at the image on her specialist keyhole camera was fascinating and abject at the same time. I apologised for bringing my filthy earholes to the audiologist, but obviously she sees worse than me every day. Unfazed, she reached for a pair of long tweezers and got straight down to business.

It was strangely intimate having a stranger gently insert a metal implement all the way inside my earhole to remove a chunky piece of grossness. And it felt… profoundly inappropriately good. Even now, four days later, I find myself thinking warmly about what exactly came out of my body, how disgusting and yet how incredibly satisfying it was to have it come out, especially all in one contiguous blob. I was tempted to examine said blob (it was impressively large to have occupied such a small crevice), but the audiologist primly tucked it into a fold of tissue paper before I could embarrass myself by asking to see it, which was probably for the best.

Now I know what floated my Dad’s boat all those years ago. I’d repeat the experience again tomorrow, but it takes years for grossness like that to accumulate. In compensation, I can look forward to custom-made headphone tips for blocking out the horrific mechanical grinding noises of the Central Line, or of squalling infants on long-haul flights. In conclusion, ear care: 10/10 would recommend.

23/01/2025 Culture, Rights & Wrongs, WTF?

The Great British AI sell-out

I just attended an online town-hall meeting organised by the WGGB about the current UK government consultation about the AI industry’s abuse of copyright. Mostly, us writers are concerned about the kind of AI known as Large Language Models, as this is the kind of AI that most directly affects writers. I’ve been avoiding meetings about AI because, well, too much unfocused handwringing and/or naive boosterism. Thankfully this conversation was focused, informed, measured and actually moderately useful.

Here’s the backstory: rather than asking creatives what they want, the government has presupposed that us writers are cool with complying in advance. Rather than asking if what the LLM creators are doing is legal, ethical or desirable, they’ve skipped to the “let’s just be pragmatic about this” stage and drawn up a set of proposals that place the burden of protecting the creative industry on the people making the work rather than the people seeking to strip-mine it.

The options outlined in the consultation boil down to:

  1. Leave copyright law as it is, and allow AI companies to continue abusing it (really a non-option, included to give the illusion of greater choice).
  2. Create an opt-in system which assumes a default position that AI companies cannot scrape works unless express permission has been given by the rights holders*.
  3. Create an opt-out system that assumes a default position that the AI companies can scrape works UNLESS the rights holders have informed them that consent has been withdrawn.

* not necessarily the writers because not everyone who writes retains their rights

Reading between the lines it seems that the ‘preferred option’ – the one that makes it look like the government is doing something to protect us while actually not placing any responsibility on the AI snake-oil salesmen – is option 3. There is, of course, no detail about what the opt-out system would look like or how it would function. Writing to each different AI company would require constant vigilance from writers/rights holders who need to spend their time doing productive work. If writers can opt-out via a central government website, similar to how we pay our self-assessment tax, that would be nice. But how, then, would that information be acted upon by the AI companies? They aren’t going to manually verify each individual source of scraping.

It seems more likely that there would be some kind of ‘token’ that gets attached to works made available digitally, like the robots.txt file that sits on your website preventing the wrong kind of bots from scraping it. But no-one has outlined what this protocol might look like. It’s almost as if it’s a bad faith argument.

The opt-in is at least easier to administer: the AI companies can only use your work if you expressly provide it to them. Obviously the AI companies aren’t going to go for that. If this does become the way forward they’ll probably find a way to argue that will still scrape the data, but they just won’t use it if it’s tagged properly. In other words, they’ll smoke but they won’t inhale.

And of course, not all rights holders *want* to withhold the works they control from the AI slop-barons. Academic publishers like Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press (who, we should note, don’t pay the writers or editors of their books despite charging university libraries incredibly high prices for the books they publish) have already sold the contents of their catalogues to OpenAI, etc.

https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/2024/08/03/as-more-academic-publishers-embrace-ai-trade-publishers-need-to-get-off-the-fence/

The EU approach to AI regulation seems to be more robust, requiring transparency about training model data. It’s also more sceptical about the supposed ‘benefits’ of the technology:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence

It feels like we ought to refuse to engage on the terms laid out by the government, highlighting that the way the EU manages this is the best benchmark. But the chances of the government listening seem slim, especially because Keir Starmer has just appointed an ex-Amazon exec to head the Competitions and Markets Authority.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/

My take on the mood of the meeting seemed to be that we’re screwed, and that our best hope is that AI is a hype bubble that bursts sooner rather than later. As a creative worker, living and working in mainland Europe has never looked more attractive. (And, of course, this all begs the question: will Northern Ireland be covered by EU law on AI?)

25/09/2007 Film, Music, WTF?

Rockumentary

Palmer asked me if I could help him with a documentary project he’s working on, so this Sunday we went to Sacramento to interview locally-based outsider musician Lenny G. Blat. Something about him reminds me of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

Palmer’s started editing already, and a couple of clips are up on YouTube.

When the camera’s off Lenny is surprisingly warm, and unpredictable. He sings almost constantly, as if he has a musical variant of tourette’s syndrome.