Sometime around 1991, as a teenager living on a dirt road in rural Wisconsin with no ability to get to Minneapolis on a school night, I missed my all time favorite band, Too Much Joy, playing at First Ave1. But thankfully the alt rock FM station broadcast it live. With relief and delight, I recorded onto cassette tape from my bedroom.
Despite the recording being awful – a live band, in a venue not set up for recording, broadcast on FM, then saved on a cassette tape recorder I bought from K-Mart – I was cherished it and would blast the concert recording over the wind noise of a third-hand Ford Ranger. I’m sure to anyone in the passenger seat the entire thing was unintelligible distortions. I don’t remember any of the set list other than Drum Machine, as it was the strangest song I had heard to that point, but I felt like I captured magic in a bottle every time I hit play.
Last month, I found a case of a couple hundred CD-ROMs containing “backups” of my university work, early professional work, early programming projects, that time I tried to teach my self a drum machine, and so many other things I had forgotten. I put quotes around “backups” because after 20+ years the majority of the discs could not longer be read. Even the professionally produced ones.
I haven’t thought about deliberating making a backup of any kind in more than 15 years. I trust iCloud does what I pay it to do. So, I was surprised to find generation loss still exists, shifting to something more subtle and therefore more problematic.
I collected 50 odd topics on future For Starters posts from readers like you. I threw them into Claude and got back 8 overall categories with some paraphrasing of the questions I dismissed as normalization. So, I started reorganizing things, re-labeling them, and sending them back to Claude for a second opinion. I ended up with an uninspiring list of bland, corporate words without weight, categories without distinctions. Unsatisfying. But, I just thought I was tired and moved on.
Looking through the original notes today, for the specific person asking a specific question, I was met with the richness, clarity, character, and nuance of all the original questions. All the earlier back and forth with an LLM just provided an increasingly worse response.
This blog post has been a review of The Backrooms. An anti-AI, sci-fi, thriller set in that stereotypical dream trope of finding another room in your apartment where you put everything you wanted to forget, as you’re chased by the darkest, worst remembered, version of yourself.
- It may not have been First Ave. My memory is poor.