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Whenever I do Google searches now I type the words or terms I'm looking for and then add -ai to the end, which takes AI out of the search. Not because I'm worried about the fiscal health of a corporate entity that has strayed so far from its original "Do no evil" credo, but because the AI results are frequently inaccurate or misleading. There's also the environmental impact of the humongous data centers that are being built to serve the AI industry (not to mention the impact on average Americans' utility bills) and sucking up so much energy. One thing about AI--the dislike of it is strongly bipartisan (among said average Americans, anyway).  I don't want to be a Luddite, and obviously AI has enormous potential for condensing all sorts of tasks that's already being utilized. It will also be utilized to eliminate lots of jobs, which probably accounts for some or much of the widespread antipathy that polls seem to indicate. Technology's gonna technology, and this Pandora is well out of the box now, with a disturbing and powerful ability to distort reality or simply recreate it. I really worry about what governments and big business will do with it, particularly in authoritarian societies where there's not even any media around that will or can push back on deliberate misrepresentations. The pop-culture reference I always like to use is from the 1987 film The Running Man (astonished recently to see that it's been re-booted!), in which the government frames the Schwarzenegger character by using digitally-altered footage to make it seem as if he defied orders and opened fire on a crowd of civilians, when in truth the exact opposite occurred. (That movie has proved to be frighteningly prescient in other ways as well.)  In a world where the halls of power were concerned primarily with promoting the collective good of us all, AI would be rigorously regulated, but tech billionaires have placed huge investment bets on AI and said halls seem to be mostly concerned that nothing stand in the tech lords' way. I dunno, man--the future's so dark, I gotta take off my shades.  

That's the first volume of Cecil's Montmartre session, and a great one. Nefertiti looks like this: I agree that the Freedom/Polydor/Fontana/Debut/Spiegelei series is more than a bit confusing.

Well that's great--we all should be able to live our lives as we please ideally, as long as they are not harmful ways. I myself no longer enjoy the night life, I'm an early to bed early to rise guy from decades of work and now it's just how I live. I lived in areas so devoid of good live jazz that I don't feel the need to see it. Don't need to be at clubs or parties. It's been something I haven't needed for over twenty years. . . really this second half of my life, thirty-five years ago when I first married my first wife it started to end. . . and it's not missed. It's no longer about money so much as it's about temperament and living methods. Certainly if I were earning money as a musician that would be different, though like you without alcohol, but my days of performing were brief enough and ended 35 years ago.

Continuing to read this massive "tome" (salute to poster Hardbop if he's still around at all--he favored that term in his posts) in celebration of the city's new era that began today: