Big Calm [discogs.com] by Morcheeba [discogs.com], is a “fish store album”. It’s one of a handful of albums that I associate with zen and the art of cleaning fish tanks. I spent many hours listening to Big Calm while scraping algae off the insides of aquariums with a razor blade, and siphoning dirt —mostly fish poop— from the rock and crushed coral at the bottom of about 4,000 gallons of fish tanks. For most of 1998 and 1999 I spent many hours every week cleaning tanks at the fish store. Sometimes I even sold some fish, or coral while Big Calm played in the background.
There was always music at the fish store. There was way more hi-fi audio equipment than should be in a fish store. There was a pair of NHT 1.5 speakers connected to an Adcom CD player and amp. The CD player and amp were in the “pump room”, where the big filters for the coral tanks were, slowly being covered outside, and no doubt inside, by salt crust. There was a small pile of CDs that we cycled through; Cibo Matto‘s [discogs.com] Stereo Type A [discogs.com], Soul Coughing‘s [discogs.com] Ruby Vroom [discogs.com], the Beastie Boys‘ [discogs.com] Check Your Head [discogs.com], Ben Folds Five‘s [discogs.com] Whatever and Ever Amen [discogs.com]. I still have all of these CDs, but Big Calm is the one that gets the most play, followed by Check Your Head.
Big Calm was the first trip hop album I ever heard. It’s less heavy, less dark than Massive Attack‘s [discogs.com] Mezzanine [discogs.com] which came out just a couple of weeks later. Mezzanine is much more famous and, I would agree it’s the superior album. So why is Mezzanine not going to make my list of favorite albums while Big Calm is?
Basically it comes down to the fish store. The familiarity of Big Calm, hour upon hour of background music that is forever wrapped up with that feeling of zen while scraping algae off the tanks, feeding the fish, adding trace elements to the coral tanks, putting away fish, coral and plants on delivery days. Big Calm is part of an era of my life in a way that Mezzanine is not. So I keep going back to Big Calm when I want some beats.
Big Calm has a lot of do with my love of lofi style music, trip-hop, acid jazz and similar genre. A natural progression from the instrumental version of ATLiens [confusion.cc] and leading to DJ Shadow (who has yet to make a direct appearance on this list but will, when I get around to it), J Dilla, and more.
I feel [it] might be much too complicated, unless somebody *wants* to explore using AI because their job description says “Look for actual useful AI uses”. In today’s tech world, I assume such job descriptions do exist. Sigh…
I don’t have any survey or stats to back it up, but I feel that we are turning the corner on AI hype. As I browse through my news feeds every morning the number of negative AI articles seems to be on the rise. Not negative in the “Gen AI is theft” or “Gen AI is just a way to fire people”. That is there, but that’s been there since the beginning. The AI companies and businesses adopting it are determined to push right through those issues.
No, this negativity is the disillusionment of the people, and companies, who are pushing. There have been articles about companies who laid off large swaths of people, only to have to hire them back. And of companies who said they were using AI but, in fact, were using cheep overseas labor. Then there was that study from MIT, that 95% of all AI initiatives at companies fail.
I think this negativity goes back to an idea that Cory Doctorow expressed back in 2023:
The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can’t think of anything that belongs in it.
I posted about that back in January 2024, in The A.I. Bubble and Life-Changing Use Cases [confusion.cc], and I don’t think anything has changed. I think there is a lot of AI out there, a lot of it bloating software and services both useful and useless. Some small bit of it useful to some fraction of people. But I don’t think any of it comes close to achieving anything like a justification from the hype.
Microsoft is among the most avid pushers of AI. After the early and ludicrous investment in AI (I guess memories of “missing” the internet last a long time…), the have to push AI in every nook and cranny of their vast empire of software and services. Adobe is another company whose products I use and has baked in AI all over the place.
I just spent two paragraphs disparaging AI but I do find some of it useful. But I think Doctorow’s statement is accurate. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
In Adobe Express and Lightroom, the two products from Adobe that I use, there are a number of AI tools. Setting aside Firefly their image and video generating AI, there are tools to automatically mask an image in Lightroom – to select the subject, or the sky, the background, or a person/people and even specific parts of a person: facial skin, all skin, hair, eyes, etc. Once selected you can apply edits to this (or everything but what you selected). The AI masking is pretty good, it managed to select things I want most of the time. This is a great timesaver, or in my case, makes it so I can edit my photos in a way I would not previously. It takes too long to manually mask things, I only ever did very basic masking, but the AI tools spread things up a lot.
I find the useful set of tools in Microsoft’s software, their “Copilots” to be similar. The auto summary tool in Outlook that allows you to include a summary of a long thread of email in a meeting invite or when your forward the email to some poor unsuspecting colleague is great. But it’s giving most people to ability to do something that they never did, too often people forward long email threads to people with no summary or context, the dreaded “adding so-and-so” or “+someone” or, even worse, the cursed “++”. People are lazy, I’ve not even seen many using this auto summarization yet. But at my job we only just got access to it. I remain hopeful despite the complete lack of evidence.
One, more example: Apple Intelligence, oft maligned, has turned out to be useful on at least one occasion for me. My daughter sent me a recipe and asked me to get the ingredients she needed. The recipe was in ‘Mercian Freedom Units, and quaint as cups and tsps are they don’t sell shit in freedom units. So I copied the list into a note and asked Siri to convert it to metric. To my utter surprise it did it in one go and correctly.
But that’s it. This is the sum total of useful AI I have. Well, except for AI turning search engines into answer engines and killing the internet [confusion.cc]. All of this is automating low value, time consuming tasks. At best these tasks are menial and at worst they are left undone because the value is below the bullshit job threshold.
What about Vibe Coding?
I remain skeptical. If it’s just replacing the interns and college graduate coders with AI then it’s replacing menial work. And is just part of the corporate push to reduce jobs through automation. Nothing new about that. But I can’t see vibe coding as a good thing. The core idea of using a probabilistic generative AI to write code in a world where we have been pushing for more deterministic secure code seems to be going the wrong direction.
I read an article a week or so ago somewhere (maybe in The Economist, but I can’t find it again) about how the business who want to build or use AI needs to Victorian civil engineering for guidance. The story was that in the early days of modern engineering —building structures like bridges with steel— people didn’t have a full understanding of all the capabilities and properties of steel. And the quality of steel was highly variable so excessive caution and over-engineering was needed to ensure that bridges didn’t fall into rivers.
Unfortunately the way modern companies work I cannot imagine any company approving the investments in over engineering AI the way a Victorian bridge was over engineered. It would not be financially responsible to do more than the bare minimum. And I fear that without costly over engineering high-stakes use cases are out of reach. So we are left with low-stakes use cases. Are their high-value versions of those?
So far the people with “look for actual AI use cases” in their job descriptions have come up with low-stakes, low-value use cases. On aggregate these might be enough to justify AI, by improving performance and laying off vast swaths of the workforce in companies they might be able to generate some return on investment.
But eliminating jobs through efficiently and productivity has a downside. The Economist had a guest article last week on this. In “Two scholars ask whether democracy can survive if AI does all the jobs” make a chilling point:
[L]abour automation isn’t just an economic problem; it’s also a political one. Right now, democratic governments depend on their citizens financially. But in a world of AI-powered UBI, the opposite would be true. Imagine a world in which citizens are burdensome dependants of a state that no longer needs them for anything.
Raymond Douglas and David Duvenaud in “Two scholars ask whether democracy can survive if AI does all the jobs” published in The Economist, September 27th, 2005.
It is a chilling thought. And it reminds me that the only positive view of the future I know of across Sci-Fi is Star Trek, where Earth is some sort of Marxist utopia where scarcity has been “solved” and humans have all devoted themselves to “the betterment of humanity”.
In conclusion. Companies are going to spend trillions to make AI automate low-value work, ending bullshit jobs and making us all dependent on our governments to take care of our needs.
I am horrible about posting about my travels, it takes me way too long to do it. It’s become a bad habit. In 2023 I posted the final blog about my 2022 trip to France after returning from Italy. And last year I posted the first blog about Italy in June —not too bad…— but the final one in December, just before I left for Japan, literally on the last day. it’s a bad habit, but taking photos is far more fun than editing them. I mean, to take the photo you have to be there, editing them is nice but it’s not the same thing.
Anyway, I’m trying to do better. Not much better mind you, it’s September, but, baby steps.
This is the final post for my trip to Japan in 2024. I’ve already posted about the side/day trips to Himeji, Nara and Uji [confusion.cc] and the few days we stayed in Osaka [confusion.cc]. Now for the main course: Kyoto. It took a while to review, edit and post the photos, I took over 3000 in Kyoto! I think Kyoto is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Though I’m a simp for Japanese traditional design, and Kyoto was the capital for a thousand years. You know how many temples and shrines you can build in a thousand years? According to two different sites I found there are “over 1600 [Buddhist] Temples and 400 [Shinto] Shrines” in Kyoto. Neither cites a source, but it’s on the Internet so, you know, it must be true (and, to avoid also not citing a source, even if I think the data is suspect; here is site one [sjmcjapan.com], and site two [mykyotomachiya.com]).
I’ve seen many of the “must see” temples and shrines on my past visits to Kyoto, in 2004 [confusion.cc], 2005 [confusion.cc], and 2010 [confusion.cc]. But my daughters have not, my oldest was 2 in 2010 so doesn’t remember at all and my youngest was born 2 years after that trip. So, we did have to revisit all the must see sites. Which I don’t mind. But we did visit a few places I’ve never seen so it was great.
Kyomizu-dera
We didn’t have a set plan in Kyoto, which is unusual. It’s how I prefer to travel, but in many places it doesn’t work anymore since you can get tickets online. The ability to get tickets online and the fact that many places have limited tickets per day means you have to plan ahead. For Italy and Paris I had to plan out almost every day and book tickets weeks or months in advance. But things were much more relaxed in Kyoto, most temples and shrines don’t require any pre-booking or buying tickets in advance, you can just walk up and get tickets. I did check what days things were closed but we decided what to do the evening before, or even on the morning of.
The first place we decided to go was Kyomizu-dera [wikipedia.org]. The idea was to see the autumn colors while they lasted. The unusually warm summer and autumn meant that many trees were still covered in red, orange or yellow leaves around Kyoto. But less so with each passing day. Of all the places we wanted to go, Kyomizu-dera was the one that I though we should go to first. And we were not disappointed, the colors were amazing. Possibly, the best colors I’ve ever seen.
But everyone else in Kyoto also had the same idea. The crowds were almost as amazing as the colors. It was Harajuku crowded. But totally worth it.
And, because I had fun doing it last time, let’s compare some of this trips photos with previous trips. Here is the main hall or Hondo, at Kyomizu-dera 20 years apart, in March 2004 and December 2024.
2004
2024
Kinkaku-ji
I think that Kinkaku-ji, the “Golden Pavilion”, must be the most famous site in Kyoto. Though, maybe, the torii’s of Fushimi Inari-taisha could be more famous. Either way Kinkaku-ji is stunning and a must see.
Kinkaku-ji is extra special, beyond its beauty, to me because it is where, in 2005, I got engaged. That made for some fun with my daughters on this trip. I showed them the exact spot. The extra shot from 2005 below is when I got engaged.
2004
2005
2024
Ginkaku-ji
We chose a gray, rainy day to go to Ginkaku-ji [wikipedia.org], the “Silver Pavilion”. Fitting as the first time I visited Ginkaku-ji back in 2004 it was also raining. And in 2005. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been to this place when it was not raining.
Overcast sky’s and light rain are fitting for Ginkaku-ji. The mossy gardens and hills around the pavilion work quite well in the rain. Or maybe that’s just because I’ve never been there when I was sunny. Anyway, here are a couple of photos of a rock with a handle that some monk left on a stone bridge, for more than 20 years now…
2004
2024
Nijo-jo
Nijō-jo-jo-jo-jo-jo. Nijō Castle [wikipedeia.org], is where the palace of the Shogun was. Is. Nijō-jo actually has to palaces; the Ninomaru Goten, and the Honmaru Goten.
Ninomaru Goten was the actual palace of the Shogun, which has the “nightingale floors”, which sing —or squeak really— and stunningly beautiful paintings and woodwork. All of which you cannot take photos of. I’ve visited Ninomaru Goten multiple times.
Honmaru Goten was an imperial villa which was (at least in part) moved to the grounds of Nijō-jo after the Meji restoration from the grounds of the Kyoto Gyoen, the Kyoto Imperial Palace. This is the first time I’ve been in Honmaru Goten, apparently it was recently renovated/restored and reopened to the public. It’s beautiful, amazing fabrics, printed/stamped paper, paintings. As you would expect for a imperial residence/retreat.
Of course there are also gardens. All proper samurai need extensive gardens to wonder around while they compose verse.
Since you can’t take photos of the gorgeous interiors of the palaces, here’s a stone lantern in the garden, from 2004 and 2024:
2004
2024
Fushimi Inari-taisha
Fushimi Inari-taisha [wikipedia.org] is another must visit place. Especially in the Instagram era, I guess. I first learned about the iconic Senbon torii, or “thousand torii” from the movie Memoirs of a Geisha. So, I didn’t visit it in 2004, but I did visit it in 2005 after seeing Memoirs.
It is a mecca for the Instagram, or Tik Tok, or whatever other social media there is. The crowd of people at the most iconic corridor of torii, the Senbon torii is insane. Really only one person can take “the perfect shot” at a time and they need to all take a hundred so it takes forever to get a chance. I don’t actually have good shots of my daughters because I was just done with the crowd. When I went to look at the photos I found that the focus was off and so the photos are not good. If you squint the are OK on a small screen but they are not good. C’est la vie. It leaves something for them to want to go back for.
Here is a shot from 2005 and 2024. I don’t even have a shot of the Senbon torii section from 2005. It was snowing and not very crowded when we visited in 2005, we didn’t stay long, should have take some more time and gotten a good shot.
2005
2024
Now I wanted to point out some places that I visited for the first time on this trip:
Saihō-ji
First up: Saihō-ji [wikipeida.org] or the “moss temple”. There are a couple of temples or shrines in Kyoto that are not so easy to get into. Saihō-ji is one of them. It requires reservations for a specific day and time and you cannot make reservations for more then two people. Traditionally you send a request by mail the a return postcard. But these days you can also use their website (every temple and shrine has a website and many of them have amazingly beautiful designs). There is also a minimum age of 13 to go.
We made reservations and went in groups on different days. And Saihō-ji did not disappoint. After copying a sutra we were able to walk around the gardens. Apparently there are 120 or more types of moss that make up the carpet of moss covering the entire garden. I didn’t count. Once again the late onset of autumn made for a even more beautiful visit. The moss was covered in many placed with deep red Japanese maple leaves. There was a single man waging a war on them racking up large piles and carrying them away in bags. But they were falling like snow.
Tōfuku-ji
Tōfuku-ji [wikipedia.org] is a temple that was not even on my radar. We saw it on a flier or poster or somewhere and on the last full day we decided to go check it out. It’s stunning, I wish we had done it earlier, most of the trees were already mostly bare, the lower branches still red or orange but the color was ending. The view from the Tsūten-kyō a bridge over a small gorge filled with tree, must be stunning. Even in the state we saw it, it was beautiful.
Additionally, there are four “zen” gardens around the abbots quarters that would make the visit worth it even without autumn (or spring) trees. There is a traditional dry rock garden filled with raked spirals and lines, some natural rocks and moss covered mounds. That’s the biggest garden. Then there is one that has bushes trimmed to be flat topped squares checkered with more raked gravel. A garden that is half moss and half raked gravel around several short stone pillars. Finally there is a moss garden with small squares of stone that form a checkerboard pattern with the moss and ‘fade’ as you move from one end of the garden to the other: a fully complete check pattern on one side changing into a pattern with a few missing stones, changing into only a few stones among the moss and finally only moss, no stones.
This post is really long and there are so many more things I could have written about. Let’s just say, Kyoto is one of my favorite cities in the world, a place filled with indescribable beauty, side by side with the hubbub of a modern city.
I’m just going to list a few other places we went. Some I’ve been to before, some where new:
Arashiyama Bamboo Grove [wikipedia.org], also in Memoirs of a Geisha but I knew about this one before the movie. It’s a lovely, if short, walk. Been there before.
Yasaka-jinja [wikipedia.org], or Gion-jinja, the shrine Gion district.
The Philosopher’s Walk [wikipedia.org] or Tetsugaku-no-michi, a path along a canal hugging the hills between Ginkaku-ji and Nanzen-ji. Been there before. Amazing colors when we where there this time.
Nishiki Market [wikipedia.org], a covered arcade with many shops selling raw and prepared foods. A great place to grab lunch or an early dinner. Been there before. Unfortunately this time I could not find the pickled watermelon! It looks like a giant white raisin.
Tō-ji [wikipedia.org] a large Buddhist temple, we went to because it was having a flee market, which they do every month on the 21. Tones of vendors, it was fun. First time visiting.
Chion-in [wikipedia.org], a large Buddhist temple just next to Yasaka-jinja in Gion. Not really a tourist site, we just wandered in after visiting Yasaka-jinja. A few interesting things but not much unless you are their for religious reasons. First time visiting.
Byōdō-ji [wikipedia.org], a small Buddhist temple near our hotel that is dedicated to a Buddha associated with medicine, but it seems the temple is popular with people who have pets too. First time visiting.
There were other shrines, temples and what-not. We also visited a lot of places to shop. Spent most evenings accompanying my daughters shopping in arcades and malls around Shijō-dōri. It will be a few years, but I’m sure I will go back to Kyoto again. So many more places to see.
You can see the full Kyoto, Japan, December 2024 [flickr.com] photoset on Flickr. Or brows through the gallery below.
Yea, that’s from a video about Disney Adults. I guess pearls of wisdom can come from anywhere; a pearl is an oyster’s reaction to an irritant. And we use it as jewelry.
