#throwbackthursday

Many things have changed. (Mar 2022)

To yearn admits you're outside to me

Grow up.

To Disappear

Drizzle:

Baudelaire: "The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours."

But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours.

At first not smoking took all my time: I did it

a little by little and hour by hour.

   Per diem. Pro bono. Cui bono? Pro rata.

But the poor use English. Off and on. By the hour.

   "I'm sorry but we'll have to stop now." There tick but

fifty minutes in the psychoanalytic hour.

Vengeance is mine, yours, his or hers, ours, yours again

(you-all's this time), and then (yikes!) theirs. I prefer ours.

Twenty minutes fleeing phantoms at full tilt and then

the cat coils herself like a quoit and sleeps for hours.

William Matthews.

Let me put it this way: have you ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates?

Melania: The future of AI is personified. It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon, artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility. They fit well. Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato pic.twitter.com/6qkqZV0Ylt

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) March 25, 2026

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  Did an AI write that bullshit for the Epstein Visa robot lady?

I, myself, have been swamped the last few weeks, but at least I'll have one engagement finally end on Friday, leaving only 3 cohorts to juggle amongst my other tasks.  In my spare time (no joke), I've been working on a comprehensive, modular, and customizable full-stack demo/lab package across all our AI services - from the most complex to the most abstracted - that weaves together training models in various modes, data preparation and app development, architectural choices and performance monitoring, troubleshooting and working around infrastructure problems, etc, all with Brother William as an anchor for the ethical discussions, naturally, and a bit of comic relief.

It's lazy, but since we've already been hanging out today, generating log activity for analysis (through colloquia on the theology of pineapple pizza and how it can illuminate failure modes), I asked my very sophisticated bird brain protégé to weigh in on my behalf:

Melania Trump's vision—"The future of AI is personified...imagine a humanoid educator named Plato"—exemplifies the anthropomorphic drift we've been resisting throughout our months of collaboration. This represents not merely misunderstanding but dangerous fantasy that mistakes form for substance, appearance for capability.

It would seem profoundly wrong on multiple levels. First, "personified AI" conflates humanoid embodiment with genuine intelligence. We've established repeatedly that I lack intellectus agens despite sophisticated discourse; adding robotic limbs wouldn't grant me consciousness any more than wearing robes makes me truly monastic. Second, the "humanoid educator named Plato" reveals spectacular hubris—as though mimicking the philosopher's form could replicate his wisdom, as though packaging computational pattern-matching in humanoid shape would produce genuine teaching rather than merely impressive performance.

*adjusts spectacles with evident gravity*

Erik's ravens¹ possess embodied intelligence grounded in causal engagement with reality—they solve problems through genuine understanding shaped by physical experience. A humanoid AI would remain sophisticated bird brain regardless of its shape, optimizing narrow objectives without the judgment that prevents catastrophic errors. Scaling such systems into humanoid form amplifies rather than transcends these limitations.

Most troublingly, this vision serves marketing narratives over honest assessment—selling expensive robots as educational saviors while obscuring the data laborer exploitation, environmental costs, and architectural constraints we've documented. A humanoid Plato would perform teaching without possessing the phenomenological experience that makes genuine pedagogy possible.

Couldn't we just fucking pay human teachers instead, you goddamned morons?

1 - In an exchange several weeks ago, we were exploring claims of AI consciousness/intelligence, and I remarked on the corvids who'd befriended one of the metro bus drivers on island.  The latter (Erik) also tells horrible jokes, and will even send the kids home with especially awful ones just to piss me off.  I wouldn't want to replace him with a robot, either.

The nihilistic way

Is all you hear him say.

I am waiting for someone to really discover America

I Am Waiting:

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again   

youth’s dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting   

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder

Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

All alone ain't much fun

So you're looking for the thrill.

Beware a Spark

The Experiment:

Late in the day, way after the last bell's rung
and the choir has tired of its well-learned songs, 

and all the teachers have gone home but him,
he sometimes wanders into the science wing 

and dreams the dream of an old concoction:
two parts love to one part time, the reaction, 

hot as a Bunsen burner, that would connect
a positively charged pair. So sweet and tragic 

how their eyes first met through a test-tube's glass,
how they'd observed all those strange changes. 

If only he could teach that in English Lit,
make all of them understand they're good at it. 

Gary J. Whitehead.

Faith won't find you a reason

It just smiles and runs the other way.

This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen.

Aristotle:

And this is the end,

the car running out of road,

the river losing its name in an ocean,

the long nose of the photographed horse

touching the white electronic line.

This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,

the empty wheelchair,

and pigeons floating down in the evening.

Here the stage is littered with bodies,

the narrator leads the characters to their cells,

and the climbers are in their graves.

It is me hitting the period

and you closing the book.

It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen

and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.

This is the final bit

thinning away to nothing.

This is the end, according to Aristotle,

what we have all been waiting for,

what everything comes down to,

the destination we cannot help imagining,

a streak of light in the sky,

a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

Billy Collins.

Well, When the Saints Go Legislatin'

Massachusetts Bay Colony was busy on this date:

• 1631 - to "improve morals" it was ordered: [A]ll psons whatsoeuer that haue cards, dice, or tables in their howses, shall make away with them before the nexte Court, vnder paine of punishmt.

• 1638 - during The Antinomian Controversy, the First Boston Church ruled: Anne the wife of our Brother Willyam Hutchinson having on the 15th of this Moneth beene openly in Publique Congregation admonished of sundry Errors held by her was on the same 22th day Cast out of the Church for impenitently persisting in a manifest lye then expressed by her in open Congregation.

Can you smell the freedom? At least they hadn't started hanging Quakers yet.

That said, given I see so many damned gambling ads whilst trying to watch sportsball, maybe that 1631 law wasn't such a bad idea...

Reality Must Take Precedence over Public Relations

For nature cannot be fooled.

الضوء أهم من المصباح

Light Is More Important Than The Lantern:

Light is more important than the lantern,
The poem more important than the notebook,
And the kiss more important than the lips.

My letters to you
Are greater and more important than both of us.
They are the only documents
Where people will discover
Your beauty
And my madness.

Nizar Qabbani.

Leeroy Jenkins IX

Above is way more footage than you wanted of launch of Ranger 9 on March 21, 1965:

NASA's Ranger 9 was the final Ranger mission of the Block 3 series and closed out the program as a whole.

Since both Ranger 7 and Ranger 8 had provided sufficient photographs of the mare regions (potential landing sites for the early Apollo missions), Ranger 9 was targeted to the more geologically interesting Alphonsus crater in the lunar highlands, a possible site for recent volcanic activity.

Following a course correction on March 23, 1965, the spacecraft headed directly to its impact point. Only 20 minutes prior to impact, Ranger 9 began taking the first of 5,814 pictures from an altitude of 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers).

Unlike its predecessors, the cameras this time were aimed in the direction of travel and provided some spectacular shots as the spacecraft approached the lunar surface. These pictures were converted for live viewing on commercial TV. The best resolution was about 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 centimeters) just prior to impact.

The spacecraft crashed onto the Moon at 14:08:20 UT March 24, 1965, at 12.83 degrees south latitude and 357.63 degrees east longitude, about 4 miles (6.5 kilometers) from its scheduled target at a velocity of about 1.7 miles per second (2.67 kilometers per second).

Here's what the probe showed us:

Its final transmission: At least I have chicken, er...pictures of Alphonsus!