Fragments | Joshua D. Graber

A moment in awe of Ryuchi Sakamoto

Watching a Ryuchi Sakamoto performance of async, and it’s almost magical watching him work. The lightness, the near trepidation he seemed to feel when playing the pianissimo accents of the opening, as though he might land just a little too hard on one of the keys and ruin everything for a lack of sensitivity. He touches the keys, but just. A whispered note. Beautiful. The opening credits, a simple black background with his name in white, appear on screen. Soon he begins looping. And the opening, haunting keys linger as organ sounds underneath the electronic soundscape Sakamoto takes such delight in creating. Everything he does is so physical. He leans over the piano with a guitar slide, and makes the most haunting sounds.

Apologizing to the robot

An odd experience today, where I inadvertently triggered AWS’s Q programming assistant to refuse to answer my request and refer me to AWS’s responsible use of AI policy. This happens, sometimes, if I use profanity to vent in a moment of frustration. But this time, I had typed “oh, thanks for catching that, that was pretty dumb of me” into the prompt. I then apologized to the bot for its own misunderstanding. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I wrote, “I was talking about myself. Thank you very much, this was helpful.” The bot replied, kindly acknowledging the challenging nature of the problem I’d been trying to solve, and wished me a happy new year.

In praise of — the international phonetic alphabet

A theme on techne

My whole life, two feelings about the progress of digital technology: first fascination, then terror—always in short succession.

Anyone can have a perfect friend

A.I. as the perfect friend, a technophilic fantasy

Since at least the Olympics back in August, Google has been relentlessly advertising their Gemini AI assistant as a kind of super-assistant-and-best-friend, in some of the cringiest advertisements I've ever seen.

Until the influx of VC cash made generative AI cheap of free, you had to be a genius, spectacularly wealthy, or more likely a character in a film to create an invisible friend with the computer. There were limits on the scope of this particular insanity. What terrifies people is that now any old person can do it.