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Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, December 2 ...

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, December 2022

Jan 03, 2023

Today is Commonday, 09 of Pertunda 4115. [4115.09.09]

…assuming you follow the Common Calendar, of course, but I assume you probably do not. Or should. Ahem. Newsletter!

Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Caribbean Netherlands, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong SAR China, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, St. Lucia, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe this month, which never fails to please me. Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission, provided that you comply with the terms of the license. However, feel free to ask for help or otherwise reach out, too.

December’s Idle Thoughts

Welcome to the thirtieth issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.

Did They Finally Kill E-Mail?

I’ve always tried to defend e-mail. It requires little infrastructure. Everybody gets to operate asynchronously. And messages can have as little or as much complexity as they need. Companies keep calling e-mail “broken,” but they only want to lock people into proprietary solutions, and their solutions don’t generally solve the problems that they present.

This year, it has felt like companies have outright attacked e-mail, somehow allied with charities.

OK, I mostly joke about it, but it still feels like a concerted effort to increase mistrust in one of the Internet’s longest-running systems, when charities start sending multiple e-mails per day about their limited-time matched donation program. Over the course of the two weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, for example, I received many e-mails wishing to prepare me for Giving Tuesday…but also asking for a donation. They followed those by e-mails wishing me happy holidays, and also requesting donations. Then they each sent a series of e-mails updating me on how many hours remained until the end of Giving Tuesday, with plea for matched donations. And then they continued for the rest of the week explaining how to donate if I missed the window.

I’ve always disliked those programs, not only because they feel manipulative to no benefit to the charitable cause, but because it implies the existence of wealthy donors who have an interest in supporting the cause if they can make people scramble to amuse them. But add in a constant stream of updates makes me want to unsubscribe from the mailing list, not donate.

And naturally, companies joined them. At least a dozen companies that I’ve done business with thought that it made sense to send me hourly e-mails to tell me how long I had left for the “big sale,” which actually looks almost exactly like every other sale.

I wanted to let this go, ignoring it as a bad idea that they’d realize frustrated people. And yet, I write this as we approach Christmas, because they have started again. Did you know that you can buy gift cards? I do, because the companies tell me so twice per day. I can also get my charitable donations in before the end of the year for tax deductions, which they keep telling me, as if nobody understands how that works.

Presumably, the near future will involve an e-mail system where you can’t find what your friends said, because junk has drowned them out. And maybe I should start unsubscribing, to register that volume as a problem…

Asking AI to Celebrate the Holidays

At some point, I tried asking ChatGPT to create modern Christmas carols. The results varied wildly, and probably mostly trained me on what I wanted it to produce.

Eventually, after too many religious references or bland 1950s “children and snow” themes, I tried to drill down to how I think about the holiday. I asked it to “create a modern, secular Christmas carol on the theme of people coming together on the longest night of the year to stand up against the darkness.” Sure, the shortest day technically comes a few days prior, but we all know how this should work.

Interestingly, that technicality may have confused the AI, because it largely opted to ignore the Christmas aspect. Had it had something Christmas-specific, I would have included it in a blog post before the holiday. Since it doesn’t, it didn’t really matter when I released it, so it goes here, instead. Note that I did some light editing, but ChatGPT did the heavy lifting, here.

Verse 1:
In this world of strife and woe
We must come together, don’t you know?
To lend a helping hand, a listening ear,
To show we care, to show we’re here.

Chorus:
So let us join together now,
In mutual support, and take a vow:
To help each other through the night,
To make things right, to make things bright.

Verse 2:
In this world of pain and loss,
We must come together, no matter the cost,
To offer comfort, to offer hope,
To show we care, to help folks cope.

Chorus:
So let us join together now,
In mutual support, and take a vow:
To help each other through the night,
To make things right, to make things bright.

Bridge:
We may come from different places.
We may have different faces.
But deep down, we all are the same.
We all want to love, and be loved in return.

Chorus:
So let us join together now,
In mutual support, and take a vow:
To help each other through the night,
To make things right, to make things bright.

First, notice that it decided that I meant “darkness” metaphorically, despite referring specifically to the longest night of the year. Also, I don’t care for the system’s obsession with short quatrains for verses. The bridge seems phoned-in. And as I mentioned, it doesn’t even acknowledge holidays.

That all said, it almost feels workable. I call it (because the AI had no opinions) Winter Vow.

And hey, if someone wants to give it a Free Culture melody, I’ll not only point people to it on the blog, but I’ll give the composer a free membership to my page on Buy Me a Coffee.

Project Previews

As predicted, the holidays got in the way of accomplishing anything of interest for December. It may have had a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to it, since I opted not to push myself and add extra stress to a holiday season competing with three dangerous respiratory diseases.

Media

In no particular order, I present a list of some things that I finished watching, listening to, or read in December.

No, I don’t remember when I started them, unless they didn’t take long. You can probably estimate that I watched about an episode of any given “archived” television show per day, though, if that helps. If you’d like to know what I finish watching as I finish it—sometimes I catch something during the narrow window when people can watch it free—you might consider becoming a member at Buy Me a Coffee.

  • The Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet surprised me, in that it continues the story of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in some ways that I find interesting and others that feel…unnecessary and borderline offensive. It mostly does well carrying on the side-story, but it wastes so much time on the gosh-what-a-nice-guy guy, and fear-mongering for New York City—which comes off as distinctly racist, by the way—that I feel like someone should have cut a significant chunk of the book.

  • Somebody mentioned that The Mysterious Benedict Society, season 2, improved on the faults of the first season (for which, see last August’s newsletter), and while I still don’t love the show, I did enjoy the season more, and even enjoyed a couple of the jokes. Maybe I even got accustomed to the stilted dialogue and acting as part of their world.

  • Stargirl, season 3 felt like a mess, as they dragged out some storylines and completely dropped others to maintain mysteries that I assume the audience had figured out early on. But it also serves as a showcase of how shows go wrong when writers don’t have enough editorial oversight, because this season rushes to follow an existing DC story—James Robinson’s The Golden Age, which no, I didn’t care for and don’t recommend—and as a result, abandons the characters’ personalities (and at least one entire character, depending on how you count) to fit the roles of that story. And it doesn’t help that the final episode wastes half its length on assuring us of “happy endings,” many of which involve murder, for some reason. And yet, somehow, despite all the extensive exposition, the show never bothered to explain why they decided that characters active during World War II have only hit middle age, rather than putting their origin in the 1990s or later, to match the ages of the actors…especially weird, since this season felt so mired in 1990s comic books.

    • I should note that the remainder of DC’s television for me ends with the final season of The Flash coming in February, unless I start picking up an occasional HBO Max subscription to catch up on the shows transferred there from DC Universe. As I mentioned in past months, it saddens me in some ways, that AT&T and then Discovery took the publisher’s representation on television from a variety of “usually above-average” shows across multiple networks, to a couple of shows hobbling to their finales and a few obscure shows hiding behind pay-walls.

  • Our Crooked Hearts tells an interesting story, but I outright despise the protagonist, who seems written a solid five or six years younger than the character’s age, and find the changes in setting (“The suburbs, right now” as the most common) bothersome, rather than fun or informative. I wish that it had taken some of that energy and thrown it at fleshing out some of the ideas that it tosses off and never returns to.

  • I’ve wanted to read The Handmaid’s Tale for a while, now, but didn’t make time for books again until recently, and the Hulu show alternates burning me out with diminishing my interest. And a few times, I came close to borrowing it, but hesitated it, because it feels like an ideal match for Women’s History Month. The book operates on a more abstract level than the show does, and it feels more realistic and more chilling for it. And also, gratifyingly, it doesn’t elevate Offred to a celebrity and leader, instead making it clear at the end that Offred’s importance comes from the survival of her memoir. I can understand why Atwood didn’t care for the show, after reading this, and I probably wouldn’t have watched it for so long, had I known the source material better.

  • Somehow, I’ve never seen Mrs. Santa Claus, despite enjoying a fair amount of Christmas films and following a lot of the late Angela Lansbury’s career. And with Lansbury’s recent death rightly bringing attention to her work, it seemed like the best opportunity that I’d likely get. And…look, it stars Angela Lansbury and Terrence Mann, with songs by Jerry Herman. I don’t know why they set it in 1910, but it still manages to celebrate New York’s historic diversity, the fight for women’s rights, and labor rights. I can’t exactly complain, except that nobody ever forced me to watch it…

  • The Gifted does an impressive job of modernizing the X-Men franchise without access to any well-known characters or trademarks. I definitely don’t care about the teenagers, but the stories have an intensity to them without making the metaphors too transparent, and the cast turns in some amazing performances. It even “rehabilitates” some characters from the comics that I’d call “ill-advised.” If it has a fatal flaw, having the Black guy join up with an overtly racist hate group seems maybe problematic, no matter how often Coby Bell looks sad about it.

  • I watched The Woodwright’s Shop in its early years, and while it never inspired me to take up wood-working outside a shop class in the 1980s, I’ve always had an appreciation for the craft and Underhill’s showmanship. PBS doesn’t provide the entire run, unfortunately, and what they do have includes too many episodes with his buddy trying to tell off-color jokes. Despite that, the show does a great job of using projects as a route to forcing yourself to learn things. Many episodes start out with a quick story of Underhill seeing a strange object in a museum or old catalog, and then walking through reproducing it, along with teaching the abstract knowledge required for various steps.

  • Cult Classic starts slow, with a dubious story despite the great writing, but at around the halfway mark, the story shifts in a pretty spectacular way. It doesn’t quite hold together as a story—I felt like I missed an important chapter—but I still enjoyed it.

  • Drunk on All Your Strange New Words has some clunky setup, but exceeded my expectations, with interesting characters, an eventually tense plot, and some genuinely funny moments. Go read it.

  • Wow, did I ever dislike All the Birds in the Sky. The female protagonist feels like she doesn’t have any personality, and only exists for minor characters to criticize and for her male friend to fall in love with; it has a similar but unrelated plot twist visible from the early chapters but presented as a shock. And it packs in science fiction references like it wants to make sure that you don’t lose the image of “nerdy” people loving nothing more than science fiction. And everybody’s diction feels like it came from technical manuals, except that they curse, sometimes. It feels written for a stereotypical Silicon Valley tech-bro, a Hallmark movie where everybody cares about phone operating systems versions and can’t wait to capitalize on disasters, but with the blandest explicit sex imaginable.

  • Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (on DVD) made up for it. What a delightful film, and probably the only multiverse story that I’ve seen, where almost everything matters. I should’ve scrambled to watch it sooner.

  • A Man Called Hawk falls into a strange category where I didn’t know anybody who watched it—or parent show Spencer: For Hire—when it aired, but everybody loved Avery Brooks as Hawk…in principle, if not through exposure. This too-short show definitely qualifies as “a product of its time,” in that it doesn’t feature any “normal” Black people, instead distinctly separating African-Americans into idealized superheroes, and the worthless fools whose incompetence drives plots. Getting past that, though, it has a lot to love, including two episodes’ worth of musical score by Brooks himself. Seeing Brooks’s on-screen magnetism, and his chemistry with every member of his guest cast, kind of angers me that his career largely stalled after Deep Space Nine ended, especially given that Wikipedia mentions in passing that someone apparently blacklisted him.

    • Actually fun fact, by the way, Deep Space Nine pays tribute to this series fairly centrally. Moses Gunn plays Hawk’s recurring mentor, known only as the “Old Man,” similar to how Sisko refers to Curzon Dax.

  • Star Trek: Prodigy would make an interesting case study. I started out disliking it enormously. It then had a run of a few episodes that I outright didn’t understand. It took a few months off in the middle of the season, and while it dropped the ball a couple of times—the episode metaphorically praising the writers, even though all the original creators have passed, felt particularly egregious—told one of the better stories in modern Star Trek. However, it also highlights what makes the franchise so frustrating. It took the time to highlight biases and legal discrimination against synthetic creatures and “augments,” but quickly swept those legitimate concerns under the carpet, because those concerns no longer directly affect our characters, somehow the worst of both worlds.

  • Good Omens worked better in adaptation, honestly, much as I hate to give Amazon credit for anything. The novel feels like it desperately wants Douglas Adams to have written it, but doesn’t actually understand the sense of humor that it wants. And it also takes a lot of time out to mock the existence of various groups of people. The occasional cinematic scene or solid joke rarely connects with anything useful, and our two leads don’t have particularly deep personalities. The show works much better, at least for me. What a way to close out the year…

Blog Posts for December 2022

In case you missed one and don’t like RSS readers, here’s a round-up of the past month’s worth of posts.

I also revisited and updated some older posts, for various reasons.

Significant changes to the text come with clear and dated markings. Changing the wording or correcting a typo is more routine, but it indicates that I’ve at least been looking at the post. Longer changes probably have a brief write-up in this very newsletter.

The most popular posts on the blog have been Explaining Cryptocurrency, Recutils — Small Technology Notes, GitHub Copilot and Other Programming Doom, and Copyright Searches for the month.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

You’ve seen some of these already in Friday posts, but here’s more from the sources in my RSS reader that I thought were worth reading.

Web Pages That Caught My Attention

These are pages I bookmarked, basically. They might be old articles, non-articles, fiction, or any number of other possibilities. You’ve seen the web. You know what it’s like out there. And you also know that half the titles are probably bogus, because people are terrible at setting their page titles to something useful.

That’s it for this month. Stop by the blog and leave comments or contact me however else you see fit.

—John

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