Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
Musician, scholar, reader, writer. I’m sure things can always get worse, but I still work to make them better.
Art
78%
Computer science
13%
Baby, did you ever wonder / wonder whatever became of me? // I’m living on the air in Cincinnati / Cincinnati, WKRP.
I literally just used “palimpsest” yesterday. And I felt so conflicted even in the moment as it was coming out of my mouth. But I still did it anyway.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Apr 22
I am sorry for the all caps, but: I CAN’T BELIEVE ANYONE WOULD PUBLICLY ADMIT TO ALL OF THIS. For real. People are so much worse than I think they are. Like, how is he not mortified by his own self? This is the best argument I can think of for religion: at least maybe shame would keep this at bay.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Apr 12
International HE students are the single largest export industry in the state of Victoria, and one of the largest overall in Australia. There is also strong political pressure there to decrease that. It’s not like the US, but it isn’t totally rational.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Apr 11
This is better than tubes and dump trucks. It’s better than covfefe. It has everything. Haha, the end is truly nigh.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Apr 11
Trump Education Sec. McMahon Confuses A.I. with A1
YouTube video by RepSuzanneBonamici
youtu.be
This is the single best AI news item COMBINED with the single best federal government news item of 2025. youtu.be/6QL0c5BbCR4?...
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Apr 11
Pressuring Migrants to ‘Self-Deport,’ White House Moves to Cancel Social Security Numbers
By placing migrants in Social Security’s “death master file,” the Trump administration is seeking to cut off their access to credit cards, bank accounts and other financial services.
www.nytimes.com
“By placing migrants in Social Security’s “death master file,” the Trump administration is seeking to cut off their access to credit cards, bank accounts and other financial services.”
Some monster read Orlando Patterson and thought “yeah, we should do that.” These fucking people.
Some monster read Orlando Patterson and thought “yeah, we should do that.” These fucking people.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Apr 10
Good stuff. Brought to you by the fash-tastic people in charge today.
To be fair, none of us are going to survive climate change, so at some point in the next 50-100 years we will have gen omega, and they will actually have the worst time to be born.
Am I the only one here disappointed the navy did not purge their book? I think I did not make my points clear enough.
Trump Declares A Trade War On Uninhabited Islands, US Military, And Economic Logic
There’s a fundamental problem with Donald Trump’s new trade policy: it fails a test that actual 5th graders can pass. I know this because I tried explaining his “Liberation Day…
www.techdirt.com
Worth reading. These people really are a solid combo of nefarious and incompetent.
A crash is good business if you are holding a bunch of capital—say, in crypto. The wealthiest are going to make a killing off of this. At everyone else’s expense, of course. If you want a glimpse of the alternate universe, check out Fox News. No mention of stock market in any headline.
This is the kind of garbage you get from not building a meaningful knowledge base and relying on hyped tech to do your real work for you. It’s not that generative AI can’t be a useful tool. It’s just that it is absolutely not a replacement for human intelligence.
For the record, the dumb glitches in the tariff programme (a 10% tariff on an island that only hosts a US military base, tariffs on uninhabited islands like Svalbard or Heard) is what teachers mean when they say it’s bad that students just put prompts into ChatGPT instead of writing papers.
Anyone have reliable, credible news sourcing on DOGE at NEH now?
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 30
The tools AI provide on their own are like the milk in the wire mother. Good luck to children raised to get education and arts experiences from that. Good luck to us as a species if we don’t recognize this.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 30
Thinking more about AI, education, and arts. Fundamentally I think people who are all in on AI as a replacement for human skill, knowledge, and expertise in fields of education and art need to think more about the wire mother experiments.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 30
Sure is good for making Studio Ghibli-looking images of ICE violence, tho.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 30
Opinion | The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes
A.I. is just what we need in the post-fact era: less research and more predicting what we want to hear.
www.nytimes.com
I know the opinion here is not the widely held one right now, but I find this compelling. I’m sure AI is useful for highly data-intensive, computational research. But thinking about it as mid + hype is helpful. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/o...
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 23
Yeah, it’s funny to me that any Jews at all are taken in by these rabidly anti-Semitic supporters of Israel. They only want to bring the rapture and will be delighted to see Jews suffer. They just need to fulfill prophecy. Which is BATSHIT crazy in 2025. And also our national foreign policy.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
And it sucks worse that they now make a ton of AI junk music by mining copyrighted libraries and promote it over music they would sort of be expected to pay for. And it sucks that lots of people don’t notice. Lots of bad to go around there.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
I hear that and appreciate the point. I also remain stuck with the important differences between big corporate tech and you. Not in a systematic way, I guess, but also in a way that seems important. It deeply sucks that Spotify already doesn’t pay 99% of artists anything like what they should.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
Yeah, no, I also don’t. I think maybe it does operate differently, but I’m not certain of that. I can say that I enjoy more iterations of very similar art than iterations of very similar scholarship. But not in a categorical way. My guess is if there is a difference it is of degree, not kind.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
People would have, in large numbers, have been delighted to get a check. Done and done. Problem avoided. It’s garbage to argue they shouldn’t have. Like, buy the book. That’s what people do. Why not? Consider it an investment.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
Ok, also, on a separate line of thinking: there’s a really lot of money in tech, and yet the big innovations have all led to artists being paid less. Streaming music is the clearest example, but not the only one. Why, actually, couldn’t Meta have paid people for their writing to train the LLM?
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
But inasmuch as this seems to revolve around a combination of knowledge and innovation/creativity, it seems like a problem that despite a long tradition of thinking about it in both theory and practice, I don’t think there’s a really satisfying account of what innovation or creativity is in art.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
I get that my thread here is about a separate issue, to a degree, but I think it’s relevant. I think we ought to have wide understanding of what constitutes a kind of “citation” in making art that should not trigger a compensation to the cited.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
I can’t really imagine why AI would change my strong feeling that The Specials should be compensated despite not making a thing that is specifically at the outer bounds of creativity/innovation. Or why I would not see it as a real loss that fewer people can be so compensated now.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
It’s not unlike the way non-machine learning synths, sequencers, etc. opened up sounds and tools to musicians in earlier decades.
Gabriel Solis
@gabriel-solis.bsky.social
· Mar 21
Also, goodness knows, I know artists who use machine learning as a tool in making art. And some of it is great! (Some of it isn’t, but that’s the way of all things). But notably, the machine bit of that art is incidental. It’s technical.