What a week, friends. I've been up in Albany all week, and it's been busy as all hell. You wouldn't think missing my thrice-weekly train commute would make that much difference, but it threw off my whole production schedule, and alongside some other incidental nonsense, made this kind of a Thayer Week for yours truly.
My dog is sick, too, so it's been a really tough week to be away.
But what can you do?
1. Inadvertent Website Redesign (AFF)
Aside from all the usual nonsense, we also had our primary editing plug-in crash over on the As For Football website, necessitating a change of theme and therefore something close to a total redesign. Needless to say, this kept me pretty busy. I feel like I did a decent job with it on short notice, but I also know that I'll be picking away at little things all over the site for the next six months.
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| Screenshot of the redesign |
The good news is that the site now runs way, WAY faster. That's actually important. But that comes at the expense of quite a few cool-looking modifications we'd made over the last few years. We may never get some of that back, even if nobody but me will probably ever miss them.
What do you think? How'd we do here?
2. ISBN Number
I wrote about this earlier this week, but I -- finally -- assigned an ISBN number to The Return of Dr. Necropolis and started trying to figure out how to get it out in stores.
At some point during this process, I realized that the difference between publishing this thing through some extant independent press and through the nascent Stratford City Press, a division of As For Football LLC, looks strictly nominal.
No matter what else happens, the basic problem is that no one outside of the extremely online Army Football fanbase knows who the hell I am, and half those people won't care, either. So we're gonna print some hard copies of this thing, sell signed copies all over the place, and basically spend a lot of time essentially touring locally around Connecticut to hopefully give people a chance to find this book. If you really want to help me, the best way to do it might just be to buy a copy off me in person.
We'll see how that goes.
If you missed it, I've got a new description of the book and a new personal biography in the original ISBN Number post.
3. Palace for the People
Greta Van Fleet dropped their new album last week, and I really like it. I can't decide which track is my favorite, but we'll spotlight the first one after the introduction. That's definitely one of the better tracks.
4. Discussion with Paul
My friend Paul Horne came back onto the AFF Army Football Show this week, and then we had a follow-on converation Wednesday night to discuss his Offensive Line grading and modeling tool.
He's got an amazing idea. With apologies for the engineering metaphore, it reminds me conceptually of the SCADA system we use to monitor real-time conditions on the bulk electric system, save that he's using a quality control assistant coach to input data into the system in lieu of a Remote Terminal Unit (RTU). With this kind of objective, real-time feedback, coaches can call plays according to who's playing well and what's actually working as opposed to what their gut is telling them. In theory, this should allow for a much more objective, targeted approach as games develop.
It's an exciting idea. He's got some work to do to get it out to people for beta testing, and who knows what the user-base will say. But I think he's really got something here.
5. Scientists are finding AI may make us remember things that never happened (WaPo)
The experiment began with 24 ordinary photographs: a wedding, a city street, a race. Pattie Maes, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, and her colleagues showed them to 200 people.
After a break, some saw the same photos again. Others saw AI-altered versions — with facial expressions changed, military personnel inserted or signs of climate change added.
Then came a memory test.
Maes winced at the results. Those viewing the AI-altered images had a large increase in false recollections. Even worse, she said, their confidence in the false memories was higher...
New research that involves perception of political events, crimes and even new movies suggests AI-generated images and conversations can implant false details into our brains, even leaving us confident things happened when they did not.
If not proof positive, here at least is real evidence that AI slop melts people's brains. I'm guessing that people remembered more shocking, unusual, or just generally more notable images that the AI "punched up" to make them more interesting or attention-grabbing overall.
Sigh.
I'm not arguing that AI doesn't have its uses because I used it a lot this week during the emergency website redesign. However, this kind of thing is non-productive at a societal level for reasons that have nothing to do with the technology itself and everything to do with the way it's being used.
I don't love it, friends. We're doing this to ourselves. It's not some kind of organic outgrowth of some strange new technology.
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That's all I've got this week, friends.
If you haven't already, sign up for my mailing list and prepare yourself emotionally to have your mind blown when the book finally drops. And if you're going to the game tomorrow, cheer hard.
Enjoy the weekend!
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