The Internet of Fake

Blogger Kev Quirk shares an email he got from his son’s school:

In hard-copy or online school publications which are widely available, we will no longer use images in which our students can easily be identified.

To allow us to continue to give a visual flavour of school life, we may use AI-generated illustrative images featuring entirely fictional people. These images will not depict real students and are intended only to represent the type of activities, subjects and experiences available at[school name].

On the one hand, this seems like a good idea, protecting the privacy of the students in an age when anyone can do anything with any photo.

On the other hand, it’s an example of a problem that’s been around for at least ten years and is just going to get worse. We’ve told ourselves and our kids that “you can’t trust the internet” and “online is not real life.” The rise of generative AI underscores the truth of those statements.

But also note that the school will be using these fake images in “hard-copy” publications as well. Those mid-century media theorists that warned us about the dangers of photography, mechanical reproduction, and all the rest were right. Maybe AI will finally teach us the lesson.

Idle

I have read many interesting or insightful articles online. I have not read many that make me stop and think, “That was well put.” The work of Wright Thompson and Eva Holland comes to mind, as does a short story by Carmen Maria Machado that stopped me in my tracks when I came across it more than ten years ago. But the vast majority of blog posts and web articles are meant to be consumed quickly. The internet doesn’t lend itself to slow, patient reading. As for re-reading, the internet seems designed to actively discourage it.

You can imagine, then, how delighted I was to come across The Idle Gazette. The guy who writes under the pseudonym Leo Umilio has a casual, brief style that suits the internet, but he also has the ability to turn a phrase. In his writing, he comes across as someone who reads books more than he reads online, which I think is true.1

Here are a few tidbits, chosen for their quality as much as for their insight.

On the jar cellar:

The keeper of the cellar, my grandmother in the classic administration, would descend on some pretext and remain below suspiciously long, and what she was doing down there was auditing: touching lids to check the seal’s dimple, turning a doubtful jar to the light, aligning labels, moving last year’s survivors to the front the way librarians face out the neglected stock. And then, the audit done, simply standing, arms crossed, regarding the ranks. That regard is the dispatch’s whole subject. It was the look of a person counting wealth, and the wealth was real, but no part of it was money: it was proof, in glass, that the year had been lived attentively, that the summer had not escaped unrecorded, that the household would eat its own July in January. Economists have no column for this asset. The cellar keeps its own books.

On cats:

A cat is a live-in demonstration, renewed daily, that a life can be entirely without output and entirely without shame; she is the only ascetic who owns nothing, wants nothing, and has renounced nothing, since renunciation would imply the desire had existed. Every household with a cat contains one being who has solved the problem the rest of the household is working on.

On the man burning leaves:

He has a rake, and the rake matters enormously, being his license. Leaning on it, he presides over a low smoldering heap at the bottom of the garden, and he will preside there for two hours, occasionally turning something, mostly not, watching the smoke lean one way and then the other, and no passerby, spouse, or municipal authority of the old dispensation would ever have described him as idle. He is burning the leaves. It is a recognized activity with a name and a season and visible output. That the actual labor involved amounts to eight minutes of raking distributed across an entire afternoon; that the rest is standing, poking, and long unfocused looking into the slow combustion; that he could compost the lot in a corner in a quarter of the time; none of this has ever been held against him, because the fire cannot be left, can it, and everyone accepts that a fire cannot be left. Nobody has ever burned leaves efficiently. The fire enforces attendance, and the attendance was always the point.

On the quince:

Raw, the quince is a fraud: it advertises like a pear and delivers like a fence post, hard past biting, sour past joking, its flesh full of grit the botanists politely call stone cells.

On waiting to cut wood:

[W]ood that has just changed houses is still arguing with its new air, swelling here, easing there, settling its fibers into the humidity of the room, and a joint cut today, however cleverly, will have quietly walked out of square by winter. The boards are stacked with spacers between them so the air can circulate, which is the workshop’s way of saying that they are thinking. This is not a metaphor, or not only one. The moisture equalizes; the grain finds its final opinion. My intelligence can measure the plank today. Wisdom is not cutting it until it has finished changing its mind.

You really should follow all the links and read each essay in full.

  1. Umilio does not include hyperlinks, even when referencing his own website, which makes the posts self-contained and therefore more permanent than most online writing. ↩︎

Protect the Wildlife

The Sun is not known for journalistic excellence, but its reporters sure do know how to end an article:

In Skamania County, harming Bigfoot is punishable by a $1,000 fine and can include jail time.

This law is meant to protect the mysterious creature and prevent hunters with large beards from accidentally getting shot.

From Idaho B Roll

by Brian Blanchfield

In Garfield, Washington, the second of three 
speed-trap towns cutting over into 
Idaho on the way home from Spokane, 
there is a gray-going-white basketball 
furred from use and exposure, deflated 
only enough to discourage prolonged play, 
in the grass by the public court, beside 
the little park's restroom, the simplest soonest 
option en route. It pleases me again 
to spot it and, before returning to the car, 
to shoot two or three baskets. It must, 
with everything else, be buried under snow 
half of each winter. You lose the news, 
you shake the hour of seated transit off 
and stand quiet with whatever you've seen: 
a tractor waiting to pull the giant buck 
from the double yellow line, the pheasant vanishing 
in the bush, the long bright flowering wheat 
or waves of grain in the anthem area wind 
inspires. Bounce it two or three times and find, 
at the four finger pads of your right hand, 
a meridian bowed across the ball, the grace, 
remembered, by feel, of backspin. Unseen 
mark of experience, in a groove, at the line, 
clock stopped, to get it to roll back to you.

Originally published in the Atlantic

Bonkers

Craig Mod:

I’ve always been opinionated about how software should work. Mainly, it should be fast. The bounds of it should be “knowable.” The contract you have with it should be “sane” (i.e., you just own it).

The rest of Craig’s post is about how he used Claude Code to fulfill his wildest software dreams. (In his own words, he’s gone “software bonkers.”)

I’m not going to lie, the tools he made sound pretty cool. But…

Are the bounds of Claude Code knowable? Is the contract you have with it “sane?” Do you just own it?

In some ways, these are genuine questions. I don’t know much about Claude Code. Maybe it isn’t just another product that will twine itself around your digital life. Maybe its omnipotence is beneficial and it really can help you make fast, sane, knowable tools. If so, cool. But I remain skeptical.