First, I'm no longer working as a cashier at the supermarket. This was a big loss for me as I had been working there for about ten years and grew up there. Now, I'm switching from a social public life to a much more personal private life. It has not been easy and I don't think it will be easy to maintain. However, I'm finding that there have been benefits like better care of my body and health. The main drawback though is the fact that I'm not earning a weekly check. Losing my job due to being laid off was one of my biggest regrets. But life must go on.
Moving forward, the development of AI is the best story of our time. Why? Because its the only exciting story that isn't mostly focusing on the negative. I initially started using LLM's [large language models, chatbots] back in 2022 to do AI art images for fun and relaxation. Now, I'm finding that I can also do AI videos too. And then there's the chatbots usage in and of themselves, for augmenting knowledge based on subjects I already know about. Another fun method I use using AI: I'll use the chatbot to create and edit prompts for images and create the images from those prompts/edited ideas, and then use the images created and turn that into video. There's even AI music and it's a lot better than you would think.
That being said, I think AI is the only truly positive story. AI gets a bad reputation because workers think they're coming for their jobs, but the reality is that AI just isn't there quite yet. You can create AI movies and images and books and music but its not really quite there yet. Rather, you can use AI to augment your ideas and creations for movies, images, books, and music, but the AI in and of itself cannot create great art, media, business model, or music. Like anything else, AI is just a tool for the artist, creator, businessman in order to enhance their craft and production. I would say, think of AI less as a new emerging technology and more of a tool that will be used in all facets of society mostly for entertainment purposes for the layman but also as a tool for artists, creators, and businessmen to sell and advertise art and/or products. It's an advertiser's paradise.
Next, the news stories have been mostly negative. Gas prices are up. Inflation is at an all time high. Avian bird flu and measles might become an issue down the road. Donald Trump is the President yet again. What else is new? It feels a lot like Weimar Germany Republic right before Hitler's rise to power. You can be jewish in Weimar Germany Republic but you have to be very careful. That's the kind of precarity we live in right now within this moment. It's not to be taken lightly and we, as young people, shouldn't squander all our free time partying and ignoring politics. A lot of young people here in California have drunk the Kool-Aid and given up on keeping up with politics and/or reading/watching the news, and rather, they have given into a lot of bad habits like getting bad information from social media or their goofball buddies.
However, how long can a democracy really last? America was fighting for independence from the Brits back in 1776, so it has been quite a while. I sometimes like to joke that America is like a poor man's Rome, and in many ways the current moment in this time is a sort of Rise and Decline of the Western Civilization [Edward Gibbon]. You see that despite the fact that we, as Americans, have more technology, more education, a better richer nutritional economy, and more money than most other people in all other countries, this has not been to our benefit. Rather, you could even argue that it's been to our detriment. With this said theory, you could say that in the long run AI could be a bad thing for American society. But the technocrats would say, "it's all about how you use it."
Lastly, the best news. I've been keeping up with a lot of music practice. I play piano decently now and I'm still plucking on the guitar too. I taught myself sight reading [reading music notation] from studying Mozart scores and writing it out by hand. I do a lot of ear training listening to music. I use classical scores to practice rhythms on piano. Also, I've discovered that there's been a new jazz age but its hidden online on YouTube. There are tons of old jazz records, some that may have only had limited printings and never saw the light of day in record stores [1958-early 1960s recordings], and they're all now appearing all over on YouTube all of a sudden. As a musician, I decided to go more in the jazz direction because jazz offers more variety in music playing and listening and performance, so it's amazing to see that the artform can somehow still keep its heartbeat alive, even if its a small niche audience on YouTube. I play jazz but I use classical, rock, and blues as a template to build upon improvisation. It's been a journey, as I first started playing and performing on guitar when I was a teenager.
Heraclitus: A man cannot fall into the same river twice, for there are ever new waves splashing upon him.
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