The YouTube show Blind Covers is back!
I blogged about the show years ago, before their long hiatus. Since that post, I wrote a whole book about cover songs in which I elaborate my principled refusal to define cover. But I totally understand if you want to say that new music for old lyrics isn’t a cover per se.
In which I find myself unironically missing old, hard-copy Yellow Pages.
I came into the possession of a vintage sport coat which was in excellent condition except for several strata of dust on the shoulders, from hanging unused but uncovered for decades. The care instructions say dry clean only, so I went looking for a dry cleaner. The internet suggested there were several near me. On further examination, however, one was shuttered up. Another had remodeled and become just a regular laundromat.
Continue reading “The tangled web”In arguing for the exclusive primacy of the studio track as the work in rock music, Theodore Gracyk points out that the Beatles stopped touring as they became fixated on sophisticated albums. I heard an interview with Michael Lindsay-Hogg today which upends the example.
Continue reading “That tracks”Via Daily Beast and Daily Nous: The administration at Boston University has made a number of tone-deaf suggestions for how faculty can juggle students while their graduate student TAs are on strike. Among these: “Engage generative AI tools to give feedback or facilitate ‘discussion’ on readings or assignments.”
Last year, I wrote that “there will be people who lose their jobs because of generative algorithms. This won’t be because they can be replaced, but instead because of rapacious capitalism. To put it in plainer terms, because their management is a bunch of dicks.”
Dots. Connected.
Two small updates:
Via Ars Technica, I’ve learned that shady Amazon sellers have been using chatbots to automatically write item descriptions. The result is hot offers on items like “I cannot fulfill that request” and “I apologize but I cannot complete this task.” This is a natural progression from Amazon product listings which were simply misdescribed by humans.
Continue reading “Engines of enshittification”Recent updates to the department website have added a direct link to my CV and a list of representative publications, so it made sense to rewrite my bio as well. Here’s what it says now:
His areas of research include philosophy of science, the philosophy of art and music, the epistemology of technology (Wikipedia and AI), and pragmatism. His work in the philosophy of science, motivated by a falliblist but non-sceptical conception of scientific knowledge, has addressed topics like the underdetermination of theory by data, natural kinds, and values in science. He regularly teaches courses in philosophy of science, logic, epistemology, pragmatism, and philosophy of art.
I just stumbled across an old interview with Alexander Nehamas. This line about his life captures mine just as well:
I walked backwards into a life, deciding to do whatever seemed easiest at the time, just postponing difficult decisions indefinitely. Either by design or by accident, I ended up in philosophy.
Like pretty much everybody else, I’ve been thinking about chatbots and generative AI. Unlike other things I write about, like scurvy, this is a hot topic. It’s hard to keep up using my usual strategy of rambling here on the blog, ruminating, and letting ideas simmer. Nevertheless, there are these two papers:
