- Howard mentioned that he was using Claude or Codex to remake an old game called Little Computer People for his own amusement. That gave me a sudden brainwave: I could remake High Seas Solitaire, a simple Windows-based game I used to love. I’ve tried several times in the last decade to find something like it, or get it running on my Mac — one attempt involved setting up Boot Camp and installing/patching Windows, which took up most of a day.
- It’s actually simpler and more fun to just make a whole damned game than to deal with Windows. Here’s a post about Island Solitaire, my recreation of the same game mechanics with some of the vibes. Or you can play it directly at solitaire.sangsara.net.
- Tim Cook spoke to the WSJ and set expectations for Apple to raise prices because of the rising cost of RAM and chips. I took that as a sign that this is the year for me to finally upgrade my 2020 M1 MacBook Air. The order has been placed, and I hope to welcome an M5 model next week. The irony that this is indirectly happening because of people making shit with AI is not lost on me.
- I was thinking about AI art while in the shower yesterday and came out with some thoughts I figured I should write down, so here’s a little interlude.
A shower thought on valuing human art against AI art
When we buy human-made art, we’re not just buying someone’s vision. We’re buying the time put in — a slice of their life that can never be recovered. It’s the process of trying to put a price on a year spent realizing and perfecting a single idea. This much is already obvious.
AI art works from a different equation. It’s less produced with time than with compute — GPUs, data centers, and electricity. We pay for electricity constantly without a second thought; as an input, it carries no inherent meaning. But when you pay for human art, you are purchasing the accumulated experience of a life. The conversations they had with their parents as a child. The mistakes they made in their twenties. Every influence, decision, and accident that shaped their way of thinking and seeing.
Generative AI models “think and see” through a distillation of civilization’s digitized products. One process is organic and irreproducible, while the other is probabilistic and derivative. Both are magnificent in their own ways, but we more deeply value the one that speaks to how we are built.
Collecting art satisfies two deeply human impulses: the urge to possess and the desire to appreciate. When you purchase a work, you are claiming a piece of someone while simultaneously declaring, “This life had meaning.” Even in AI-generated work, the most interesting component is the human intent — the prompter’s editorial choices. An idea is only a nucleus. Yet an entirely human-made work is a whole atom: not just the nucleus, but the colossal mass of time that surrounds it — years of practice and application. An artist may emerge who creates AI works so intricate they’ll take years to complete. That would be a different story because the effort imparts the value.
When an artist makes many things, we call it a body of work. Each piece informs the next, and narratives emerge; some are easier to see than others. It is a curious coincidence that art uses the word “cycle” to describe a sequence of related works sharing a purpose. But in AI generation, cycles run in the opposite direction: millions of GPU cycles are spun up to produce a single output. Human cycles accumulate meaning through experience over time, while machine cycles search for probabilities through brute force.
- We watched Alice and Steve on Disney+, a six-episode comedy about what happens when one 50-something man starts dating the 26-year-old daughter of his 50-something female best friend. It’s uncomfortable but funny, which I suppose is the kind of setup for which you cast Jermaine Clement as the older friend. I’d say it’s worth watching although they never quite sell the mutual May–December attraction, and it doesn’t end as satisfyingly as I’d hoped.
- I went out to see The Furious (2025) with Jose and Reg. This is a martial arts film you cannot help seeing mentioned online this month, in part because the legendary Jet Li talked about it on his podcast (what a world we live in). It’s a Hong Kong production with a Japanese director, and is set in an unnamed South East Asian city that mashes up the entire region. The streets look like they’re in Thailand, but you hear characters speaking Tagalog, Bahasa, English, and Mandarin. It’s designed for maximum relatability, although, as someone pointed out, most of the baddies are brown and the good folks are Chinese coded.
- I ate two hot pot-based meals and got food poisoning from the sukiyaki (I suspect their handling of “Japanese raw eggs”), but the Chinese one was fine. Coincidence?!
- It’s the middle of June, which means I listened to Glass Animals’ 2020 song, Heat Waves, quite a few times. This of course is because it contains the line, “Sometimes all I think about is you / Late nights in the middle of June”. I’ll bet it’s a very good week for their global streaming royalties.
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