Author: cbcrenshaw

C.B. Crenshaw is a musician, artist, writer, coder, gardener, and maker in Alabama.

“Algorithms”

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

TikTok is the future of web browsing. You won’t surf the web; it will be served to you “algorithmically” instead. After a while you’ll be served the content you want and it will feel like it was your idea all along.

AI is the engine to do this. The AI feed will repackage the web, all of the books, all of the recorded audio, and all of the video (which it has already consumed) and deliver it in a feed. You will open the browser and the content will appear. You will scroll and new content will appear.

This is basically the Facebook News Feed or TikTok FYP, but there is a crucial difference. Content there still leads users away from the source. People make the content (or prompt it); people (or their scripts) post the content. They need you to click on it and they want you to follow them off the feed. It’s a dialectic twisted around revenue. Facebook and TikTok want you to keep scrolling so your eyeballs roll over their ads, but Facebook and TikTok need content from users to keep you coming back. Creators who post there want you to click on their content so your eyeballs roll over their ads (or you send them money directly, but they need Facebook or TikTok to put your butt in the seat.

The AI Feed will certainly be burdened by its own internal contradictions, but it will escape this dialectic. Users will stay on the feed because it can endlessly generate content in a way that makes them feel like they’re unique, living on the cutting edge of information, and in control. Creators may post on their own sites (like this one!) but, lacking the “algorithm” and the network effects of a major platform, they will labor in obscurity. Further, the Feed will just consume their content and repackage it.

Maybe the Small Web will come back. Maybe print media will come back. I’ve explored both of those ideas in this blog at many points in the last ten years. Or maybe the AI Feed will be amazing. Who knows? The only certainty is change, change, change.

Help! My TRIRIGA GIS Query isn’t working

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

TRIRIGA/MREF GIS Queries must Include GIS Latitude and Longitude and these must be labeled “Latitude” and “Longtitude.”

This is a quick note in case anyone is struggling with the same problem I encountered caused today.

Here’s the scenario.

  1. You’ve got a GIS portal section in TRIRIGA/MREF.
  2. You’ve created the GIS Map record that powers the section.
  3. You’ve set up the extent, configured your basemap(s), connected to one or more data sources for layers.
  4. You’ve created a “GIS Query” record to display TRIRIGA data on the map.

For most of you, it probably just works. Congratulations! If you’re a grug brain like me, though, read on.

No matter what you do, the map doesn’t work! It’s so broken, in fact, that the portal is unstable and your browser reports that the page is unresponsive.

If that’s you, what now?

The TRIRIGA documentation says it plainly enough: “Queries must include display columns that are labeled Longitude and Latitude. The Latitude and Longitude fields pinpoint the item on the map.”

After spending a couple hours today troubleshooting a GIS query, let me make it even more plain.

  • Make sure your query includes the Location Business Object and (of course) the correct association string.
  • Add the triGisLatitude and triGisLongitude fields from the Location BO to the query.
  • Label these fields Latitude and Longitude. This step is important! The fields are called “GIS Latitude” and “GIS Longitude” on the BO, and that won’t work.

Save the query, reload the portal, and voila!

Now I must confess what I did. Learn from grug.

grug see GIS query has longitude and latitude but TRIRIGA locations have no latitude and longitude data

this bad — it mean no TRIRIGA points on map

grug see GIS layer from ESRI includes ID

grug think user need way to open TRIRIGA record when they see something interesting on map

grug see “Show Table” on map viewer and see that records can be opened from the table

grug get idea

maybe user click on “Show Table,” find what they need with ID, and open record that way

this not great, but only option

grug change query to show data shown on GIS layer

grug think user no longer need latitude and longitude on query because these always blank

grug delete latitude and longitude from query because efficiency good

now portal no work and browser mad at grug when page load

grug try fix many ways until stop and eat lunch

maybe read documentation will help, grug think, but it only help a little

after few more tries, grug find answer and then write answer here

If this helped you, hello from the past! If you’re inclined, leave me a comment.

Just Post It

cbcrenshaw1 Comment

I need to write. I need to create.

I don’t need prestige. I don’t need to write for a living, or make art for a huge audience, or, indeed, to create anything for anyone else at all. I don’t need to build an audience, be an influencer, count my likes and followers, or do any of the other things that seem, on the surface, as though they might somehow validate my experience as a human being.

Because to create is the most human impulse. 

Pursuing validation from a crowd of followers, staying on top of algorithmic trends, building an audience on a platform I don’t own, networking and seeking acceptance from editors and selection committees, boosting my CV to appear legit, going to the right schools, living in the right cities, publishing in the best journals, adopting the right ideas, keeping up with fashion – these are just ways of playing someone else’s game. 

I don’t need to please the gatekeepers. I have everything I’ll ever need right here, on this website.

If someone else gets some pleasure from anything I create, I am (of course!) thrilled to know that I have given them joy. But that isn’t the reason I’m here. Writing and creating art is a way of thinking through the world, of meditating, of paying attention to people, places, things, and ideas in a way that I can’t otherwise access.

Creating is also a compulsion. I need to write. I need to create.  

So here’s what I’m going to do. Anything I ever write, make, photograph, or whatever, from now on, is going here. This is the place for it. This won’t break my writer’s block, put a new song in my head, or miraculously give me something interesting to paint, but it’s something. A little digital yawp. 

I have some things in mind.  

Cutup Bartleby

cbcrenshaw1 Comment

A cut-up poem assembled from the scraps of Bartleby, the Scrivener

“Are you looking for the silent man?”

I am one of those touched.
I said something,
something in question.

“What do you think of              
uneasiness?”

But he answered not.
He remained as ever,
a fixture in my chamber.

It might be,
I perceive,        
his faults in myself;
the poor, pale, passive mortal.

Ask and ye shall receive

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

lol

I know chatbots aim to please, but this was not on my AI bingo card.

Read the rest here.

How many of these emergent problems will have to be solved before the product is secure? And even if we could think of everything, how many entirely new problems are these tools creating which will, in turn, also have to be solved?

[Edit: I finished reading the rest of the post, which I’ve just linked again, and holy shit.]

Dreamtime in Real-Time

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

Watching people ask ChatGPT questions about technical matters for which I am a sort of expert and then presenting the hallucinations back to me as facts in real-time is a lot of fun. Does this happen to you?

I lifted the quote below from this bruising and well-deserved critique of GPT-5. The author of that post takes it from the original tweet here.

With LLMs it’s always the same problem. They don’t know the answer; they just know how to run an input sequence through complicated functions that predict the next word in an output sequence. The quote below from this excellent article puts it much better than I can.

Observations from Thunderhead

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

This is part of a series of posts exploring video games as spaces players inhabit. If you’re wondering what this is all about, I tried to explain myself here.

Here are some travel notes from a brief stay in Thunderhead.

  1. People disappear; their commodities remain.

2. There is no stone here. All, save one brick building, is temporary.

3. Civilization passes away; nature, similar to commodities, endures.

4. Labor is spectral. It is silent, but always present.

5. Class climbs the hill, reaching for God.

6. Memory is analog.

Watch it go

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

Facebook has been a bad product since the introduction of the News Feed, but the switching costs have always been high and it was optimized by some of the best engineers our universities could produce for stickiness. The dual onslaught of Groups, which incentivize low effort/high engagement content, and AI junk, which sometimes checks both of those boxes just right, makes it an even worse product.

It’s still sticky, because we’re all still here, but will that last? Will it last when most of the posts I see give me zero value? Will it last when groups, which are weighted so heavily in the feed, are cesspools of AI-generated nonsense? I hope not. I hope a product manager at Meta is losing sleep over this problem tonight.

This is happening to the whole Internet, though. AI slop is already filling up web pages and discussion forums. Reddit will succumb to it because upvotes are the metric. Comments sections were already astroturfed; now the astroturfers will just cut out the humans sitting in the phone farm. I just had a meeting today where one of the topics was using AI to generate blog posts. There’s no turning back from this garbage because the incentives to use it are so high, and the bill for that convenience won’t become due until the entire Internet is consumed by it.

I printed (and web published) a ‘zine because I believe print is going to make a comeback very soon. By its very nature, print defies the logic of machine generation. We need analog back. The digital ocean is polluted.