521: Guatemala tips, AI 'poison', and life outside the clock
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Hola from Antigua Guatemala! It’s a quintessential pretty colonial town, but adds a backdrop of volcanos and a startlingly high density of cute retail.
Tips:
Just walk around Antigua and find the little courtyard malls and destinations.
A buddy made this good list of restaurants, etc.
The Hobbit themed ecoresort of Hobbitenango was a worthwhile few hours.
Hiking Acatenango to see the active Fuego volcano at sunrise is the main thing to do here, but we opted for the much easier and also active Pacaya hike.
Driving 3 hours to Lake Atitlan is a must. Then you can take watertaxis around all the cute mountain villages. San Marcos is the hippie mecca, and Eagles Nest and Gaia Dance Temple host the best events. San Pedro is a the party backpacker town (that is also an Israeli hotspot, with signs in Hebrew!)
I got food poisoning twice already though. :( Turns out you can binge pepto bismol the week before travel to decrease your chances of the same by 60%!
Technology
HeyGen uses AI to generate entirely custom videos of humans saying whatever you want them to say to your sales prospects. Ooh boy the future comes fast.
Nightshade is an open source ‘AI poison’ tool that inserts machine readable noise into photos that humans can’t see, thus corrupting the AI models that scrape web photos and protecting the artists such things are taken from. Let the AI arms war commence!
Ideologies
Did you know about Saudi Arabia’s Giga projects? The princes are investing many many billions into making the place a tourist destination, with mind bogglingly large buildings and development projects.
Guatemala and Honduras were the banana republics, countries so controlled by the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) so as to lack sovereignty. The governments brought them in to develop infrastructure, but they did so only to extract resources.
All sorts of nasty neocolonial chicanery ensued, culminating in the company lobbying the US to use the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected president in 1954 purely due to land reform, without a hint of communism.
Man, we have a lot to answer for south of the border. :(
Memes
I finished a few books recently, so may as well share thoughts now.
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell
I picked this up after enjoying her previous meditation How to Do Nothing, but found this one fails to deliver on the title. It does not describe a life beyond the clock, but rather a series of colonial developments of time that messed up the human psyche. Full of vivid historical colonizer facts, though.
I struggle with her thesis. For example, she defends ‘Filipino time’, which we may know as ‘island time’, where it is okay to be hours late. That’s great for the late arriver, but disincentives the first arriver, who then wastes their time waiting! I understand that life is all about the journey, etc etc, but I cannot emphasize with such a philosophy justifying wasting friends time.
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James Scott
This is an ‘it book’ in Silicon Valley that traces several high modernist schemes to improve the lot of their people and failing drastically.
The thesis is that all these schemes create abstract map plans that do not match the actual territory, while success requires an iterative approach.
It’s also full of fun snippets like the fact that LeCorbusier’s planned Brasilia city had nowhere for the workers to live, so they built a shantytown to live in while building it. Or the adage ‘a national language is merely a dialect with an army’, because language exemplifies the heterogeneity of real life.
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
Not as enthralling as Larson’s other books, perhaps because it mostly describes Churchill’s family getting bombed. Some wild facts though:
Britain destroyed most of France’s naval fleet after France surrendered to Germany, to keep the ships from the Germans. France ignored the British ultimatum to send them abroad or hand them over, oddly enough.
Nazi No2 Rudolf Hess flew a solo mission to Glasgow during the Blitz to try and sue for peace with a dissenting Duke, which obviously failed.
Overall the book hammers home just how helpless Britain was, despite the Luftwaffe’s failures, and how utterly reliant they were on American aid.
I also watched the Miyazaki films Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke, which were trippy af, yet also fantastic introductions to Japan’s ancient Shinto religion.