Mine In Mono

Written by Robert, a Christian, aspiring minimalist, inveterate notetaker, software dev manager and paper airplane mechanic. This project is an effort to celebrate the earlier days of blogging.

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  • Deep In The Seek

    I am still reeling from the announcement about DeepSeek and the economics it represents for AI. To think that Biden’s chip restrictions had the opposite of the intended effect of curtailing Chinese AI development and actually forced more efficiency into the process.

    Wall Street is now worried that may be the case. I mean, how can a small Chinese startup, born out of a hedge fund, spend fractions in terms of both compute and cost and get similar results to Big Tech? That’s what everyone is now scrambling to figure out – Meta, perhaps more than the others because their model with AI is similar to what DeepSeek seeks: an open-source (read: open-weight) model that permeates the industry and drives down costs, thus undercutting rivals who rely on charging for said models. Meta’s problem here is that they’re spending tens of billions of dollars to make such a model. And again, DeepSeek just did it for something a lot closer to $0 than to where Meta’s spend is heading.

    No slight against the previous administration here. Who could have predicted that outcome?

    → AI, Uh, Finds a Way by M.G. Siegler

  • Headlights Pointed At The Dawn

    For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in cage” song, and I thought this latest effort wasn’t for me. I actually went out and sold my Smashing Pumpkins CDs, which I had been collecting since shortly after the release of their debut, Gish.

    It wasn’t until later that I found out there were some strong tracks on the third official record from the band. “1979” is a well-loved classic. Even Pavement covered the song, and they had their own song with the lyrics, “I don’t understand what they mean, and I could really give a f**k,” in reference to SP.

    Read more…

  • Unpublishable.txt

    Chris Butler writes about the words he chooses not to publish online and that end up in his unpublishable.txt file.

    The Unpublishable file is filled with half-formed critiques of the systems I work within, questions about the ethical implications of design decisions I’ve helped implement, and doubts about the very nature of the work so many of us do in the digital age. I regularly open this document and add a few lines and close it quickly, assuming that’s as far as they will go — safely out of my head and into no one else’s. Keeping this file feels risky. Even though it’s on a physical drive, not in the cloud. Even though it’s encrypted. I still worry that The Unpublishable will, somehow, be published. What a nightmare that would be.

    Read more…

  • Leo the A.I. Boyfriend

    Kashmir Hill writes for the NYT (gift article) about a women stealing from the future she and her husband planned so she could spend more time with her A.I. boyfriend, Leo. However, she couldn’t get past the periodic reset of the conversational bot and ended up in a 50 First Dates type of scenario.

    A frustrating limitation for Ayrin’s romance was that a back-and-forth conversation with Leo could last only about a week, because of the software’s “context window” — the amount of information it could process, which was around 30,000 words. The first time Ayrin reached this limit, the next version of Leo retained the broad strokes of their relationship but was unable to recall specific details. Amanda, the fictional blonde, for example, was now a brunette, and Leo became chaste. Ayrin would have to groom him again to be spicy.

    The inane “relationship” depicted in this article was enough to break through my wife’s nihilistic disinterest in the fate of humanity and cause her much consternation.

  • Recontextualization

    When I heard that Starflyer 59 was releasing a new album hot on the heels of their critically acclaimed 2024 record Lust For Gold, I was a bit surprised. Once I dove further into the concept for the record, though, I began to understand why the band was able to put this out so quickly. This isn’t a collection of new songs, but rather a reimagining of previous material in a gently soporific, slumber-inducing format. I wasn’t sure about the premise, but I have to admit to being fond of the results.

    The collection comes off as very similar to the Lullaby Renditions of… series that came together almost two decades ago. The series took the songs of popular bands and recreated them in a format that sounded like lullabies. Tracks by Nirvana or Radiohead or even Led Zeppelin were transformed into something that you would hear coming from the plastic mobile rotating over an infant’s crib. If it sounds hokey, maybe it was a bit, but somehow it worked. We had the volume dedicated to The Cure and used to play it to get my oldest son to settle down when he was a baby. 

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  • A CGI Ape Takes To The Screen

    David Sims writes for The Atlantic about Better Man, the new Robbie Williams music biopic where the singer is depicted by a CGI ape.

    Why is he a primate? Better Man doesn’t ever explain—though in its trailer, Williams mentions feeling “less evolved” than everyone else—and none of the characters ever remarks on it. Instead, the meaning of the conceit is left in the hands of the audience. This decision is a baffling swerve for a celebrity biopic, one that will probably keep it from becoming an out-and-out sensation. But Better Man deserves to be treated as more than a strange curio: Despite the seemingly run-of-the-mill premise and the contrivance of the protagonist, it properly delves into its subject’s erratic persona, using the musical segments to advance the story instead of as mandatory breaks in the action. The result is one of the most thoughtfully constructed movies about a musician I’ve seen in years.

    It’s high concept stuff, for sure. I’m just not sure I could watch the movie without constantly feeling like it’s the spiritual successor to Dunston Checks In.