2026-08-25 03:00:00
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the GenAI giants “watermarking” their output, which to say inserting data so you can tell that it’s been generated by ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever. The technology for watermarking images is as old as dirt, works as advertised, and doesn’t affect image quality. What’s new and controversial is a claim that they can watermark text output cheaply, simply, and without harming the quality of the text.
I was curious how they did this so I dug in a bit. I’m mostly convinced that it works and is pretty clever. However, all the explanations are full of Computer-Science jargon that you need to be a professional developer to understand. So here’s an attempt to explain to non-insiders and then, indirectly, opinions on whether it’s good and what it means and doesn’t mean.
[To professionals: The following is vastly oversimplified but not, I think, misleading.]
LLM software generates output a word at a time. The way it works is, it takes the last few words it’s generated and feeds them to the Large-Language-Model process, and what comes out is a list of plausible next words, and a number which represents just how plausible they are. So if the last few words were “my favorite tropical fruit is” the LLM might come back with “mango”:30, “lychee”:20, “papaya”:10.
You might think that LLMs always choose the most-plausible next word, but that turns out to give lousy results. So they randomly select from the list in a way that respects those numbers. First, note that the numbers add up to 60. So in this case, you’d want it to select “mango” 30 out of 60 attempts, i.e. half the time, “lychee” 20/60 or a third, and “papaya” 10/60 or a sixth.
In that sentence, the word “randomly” is doing a lot of work. Let’s look a little closer at one way you might do this. Your computer program could make a list with 60 entries, fill the first 30 with “mango”, then 20 with “lychee” and 10 with “papaya”. Then you’d ask your computer to give you a random number between 1 and 60. Suppose you got 33, so you pick the 33rd list entry and return “lychee”.
And in that sentence, the phrase “ask your computer” is hard-working. It turns out that computer programmers need random numbers like this all the time (let’s ignore why). They get the numbers from a built-in function called a “PRNG” (let’s ignore what that stands for). The way a PRNG works is you fire one up by giving it a “seed”, which can simply be another number that you get by bashing randomly at the top row on your keyboard or by asking a co-worker to pick a number or whatever.
Once seeded, the PRNG is happy to go on giving you an endless series of random numbers. But (this is important) they depend on the seed. By which I mean that if you fire up a second PRNG with the same seed, it’ll produce exactly the same endless series.
Now we’re almost there. If you think about it, the LLM’s next word depends on, and only on:
The previous few words and the model’s “context”, i.e. the prompts and anything it’s been asked to load up,
The internal workings of the LLM, and
The random number used to select from the list of candidate words. Which in turn depends on the seed that the LLM fired up its PRNG with.
So, suppose you want to test whether some text was generated by an LLM. Well, IF you have access to the LLM, and IF you know which PRNG they used, and IF you know the PRNG’s seed, then you can look at the LLM output and see if the words are the ones that the LLM would have generated. This works even if the output text was edited a bit; if a high proportion of the words are those that the LLM would pick given the preceding ones and the PRNG output, that’s a signal that yes, it was probably LLM-generated.
This only works if you know the details of how the candidate next-words are generated, which PRNG, and what seed was used. It would be technically possible for an LLM provider to share this information, then anyone could check the watermark. In fact, all they have to keep secret is the PRNG seed. So at the end of the day, this “text watermark” means something like “Remember the seed”.
I don’t watch the GenAI sector that closely so I don’t know if any of the providers actually do disclose this stuff. My impression is that generally speaking they’ll provide an API to do this checking for you. Or not, if they decide you’re not entitled to do that, or haven’t paid enough, or whatever.
Here (on X, unfortunately) is an explanation that is slightly less oversimplified than mine above; still, I think, inaccessible to non-professionals, but perhaps useful to some.
Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs is the upstream science, from Nature in October 2024. Strong stuff.
AI Text Watermarking Is Free And Good, by Zvi Mowshowitz, also offers a how-it-works, but then includes commentary around the “… And Good” part of that title. I don’t agree with some of it but the arguments are useful to know and quite clearly written. I’m going to steal a phrase from Mowshowitz’s piece to serve as the title of my next section…
Quite a few people, some very smart, have reacted to this watermarking idea with fear and loathing. Mowshowitz scoffs at them. He (correctly) observes that the hostility is in large part due to people assuming that anything the AI vendors say is probably a lie and that anything they do is probably greedy and dangerous bubble fodder. But he (incorrectly) opines that this take is unreasonable.
So sue me: I too think those businesses lie a lot, that their product vision is damaging to civil society, and that they are inflating what is starting to smell like a truly apocalyptic financial bubble.
I do think the watermarking can work as described and won’t slow things down and won’t degrade the quality of the output.
Sometime in the last year I gave up on making predictions about the impact of GenAI on the world. So don’t ask me what the effect of ubiquitous watermarking will be.
2026-08-18 03:00:00
Fools have said that the Prairies are boring. This cannot be true, because in the absence of hills and trees there’s more distance in each direction you might look. Also, Prairie landscapes include the skies above them which, whether blue, star-spangled, or cloudy, aren’t boring. Herewith photoevidence from the vicinity of Wilcox, Saskatchewan, with which I claim no other connection.
The nearby highway is distinguished by an adjacent railway line that carries really big trains; you really don’t want to be waiting on a crossing while one of them spends tens of minutes reversing back and forth lackadaisically, to what purpose I can’t imagine.
See what I said about the sky not being boring?
This corner of Saskatchewan has less absence of human construction than Prairie-typical. Below, four distinct structures rise from the fields, marked by the clusters of trees which surround every locus of human activity here, there to offer shelter from the endless Prairie wind.
I was out for a drive with my mother, now 96. She asked “How many people wonder what it looks like where the makings of the bread on their table come from?” Below, what it looks like after the harvest. The ground’s less pretty than before the wheat was cut but the dirt/cloud antiphony lured my camera out of the bag.
Prairie photography is right up there with Rock-Concert photography in that there’s all the light and visual drama you could want, just get in a good place and point the camera in a good direction.
Remove distractions, highlight the clouds, and you can’t go wrong.
2026-08-14 03:00:00
It’s been a rough few years, for the earth, for the societies that populate it, and for my family. Like they say, “sandwich generation”. There’ve been weeks when I’ve struggled for a smile. I suspect more than a few folk reading this are also feeling stretched thin these days. Happiness has not entirely departed our lives, and waiting for a happier future is a really bad idea. So we should notice and bookmark those moments and hours when smiles come to our faces.
If you share your life online, write the good times down and share them already. I used to do this a lot; here are three out-takes ranging between 2003 and 2011. Maybe one or two of them will cheer you up?
The Picture of Happiness (2003/06/09)
Chestnut Dusk (2007/10/13)
Thanks (2011/11/14)
I should do that more. Starting now.
We live near a street called Main (which it’s not) and a neighborhood called Mount Pleasant (there’s no mountain but it’s mostly pretty nice). Three weeks back, under the rubric “Pleasant Day”, they blocked cars off nine blocks of Main, and the street was repopulated with retail stands (mostly from the street’s merchants), eat/drink patios, and live music.
It was sunny and everyone was happy, me too for a couple of hours. I also enjoyed taking pictures and editing them.
There was a dog-grooming stand with a big white dreadlocked beast that enjoyed everyone’s attention.
Lucky’s Books and Comics is an excellent bookstore. Their selection echoed the summer-2026 zeitgeist.
There were a couple of stands selling India-flavored garments , they seemed to be doing good business.
Chinese-flavored trinkets too.
Check out the dog.
Who couldn’t smile at a flower truck?
BE GAY DO ART they said.
Or just chill at the honey shop.
She was pretty terrible but everyone enjoyed it.
There’s nothing I can think of that would improve the message on that T-shirt.
Yesterday I was out on an errand with a pretty severe eldercare hangover — man, that can get you down — when I heard I Shot the Sheriff playing. I first thought it was a radio or something, but no, it was Reggae Night with Mostly Marley and they were freaking excellent, razor sharp.
I felt a smile welling up from inside, the first in days. Now I’ve bookmarked it.
2026-08-09 03:00:00
Those first three words in the title name the members of the Dunun family, cylindrical West-African drums that you usually put on a stand to play. Think of those sizes as Papa bear, Mama bear, and Baby bear; the names are a bit onomatopoeic. I bought a set and, separately, stands to put them on. They’re pretty enough that I want to post their pictures, which gives me an excuse to share West-African drumming vibes. And recommend products.
I’ve been studying West-African (and a bit of Afro-Cuban) drumming for decades. This kind of music relies on dununs, djembés, and bells. Djembés are goatskin and played with bare hands, dununs cowhide and with sticks. In class, we play the dununs in traditional style, one drum per person, one hand playing the drum sideways on a stand, the other tapping (with a stick) a bell strapped to its top.
Dunun on a stand (but no bell attached).
Courtesy of Drumskulls (see below).
I’m reasonably proficient on the djembé but nobody would call me a star; I can keep to the beat at a reasonably fast pace and even improvise a bit. On the single sideways dunun, I can get along.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been in an invite-only weekly drum jam; a dozen or fewer of us gather in an old church and create rhythms together for a couple of hours. For me, this has become a major mental-health crutch.
One of our regulars, guy named Mark, brings along three dununs mounted side-by-side vertically so you can play rhythms across all three.
That setup is called “ballet style” because it was was popularized by Les Ballets Africains (that site is worth a visit, as is this documentary).
Anyhow, Mark plays djembé sometimes and welcomes others playing his dunums when he’s not, assuming they ask first.
I’d lacked the nerve to ask — Mark is a pretty elite drummer — but one time a few months ago I felt daring and gave it a try.
Which awoke an unsuspected internal demon. I found playing along with the rhythm effortless, then improvising on top of it; my hands went to surprising places, it seemed of their own accord. Eventually I got excited and was leaping around a bit while playing. After, two of our crew called me out and said that’d been excellent. I love consuming music but very rarely as in never before get compliments about performing it.
I took my turn standing in on Mark’s drums for the next few weeks and had similar fun every time. So I decided to get some. Obviously this involved a lot of research and asking around; I generally prefer to buy used instruments, but couldn’t turn anything up. Mark told me, and others concurred, that a really good source would be Drumskull, where Mark had got his, now 15 years old and still sounding sweet.
There was a small problem, namely that I’m currently boycotting products from the United States of MAGA. But when I emailed and talked with the Drumskullers, it turned out they were old-school hippies from Santa Cruz, which, I decided, earned them an exception.
Then there was a big problem, namely shipping. Somehow Purolator broke the three drums into two shipments with different addresses, both wrong. Multiple phone calls and emails and support-bot interactions occurred and I got seriously bent out of shape. Purolator, you had one job.
Finally I got them, here they are.
I think they’re handsome. Also, they sound wonderful, although Drumskull tells me it’ll take a while for them to break in properly. I also got cases for each from Drumskull and those are superb, I’d feel confident checking them in on an airplane or tossing them into the back of a truck. They also came with three pairs of drumsticks.
I strongly recommend Drumskull. Thanks, guys.
The downside is they’re really freaking heavy, in particular that big Papa-bear drum. By the time I get them out of the house into the car, then out of the car into the church, I’m panting. I’m thinking that on some evenings I could get leave Papa bear behind and get along with the two higher-voiced dununs.
The observant reader will have noticed that in the pictures, the dununs are sitting on nice wooden stands. These are from Shaw Percussion, located in rural Ontario. They’re good people;I recommend them.
The great thing is that they’re adjustable to fit your drums, look nice, and very stable. The bad thing is that, because of being adjustable, they’re heavy and have pointy bits. We have a friend/contractor who’s a gifted carpenter, I may ask him to build a custom set which should be lighter and simpler.
Most cities have an African (and less often Afro-Cuban) drumming community and/or teachers. Most teachers provide drums so the barrier to entry is low. It’s energetic, fun, and will probably change the way you think about rhythm. Also, strikingly gender-balanced both on the teaching and learning side.
If we ever meet at a drumming event feel free to ask for a turn on my dununs.
2026-08-04 03:00:00
The world is, I mean. Bottom-up. Maybe that’s just me not understanding? It doesn’t surprise me that there are people who are stupid and/or evil. The surprise is, the others not voting them out of office, passing legislation outlawing what they’ve been doing, and sending the ones who don’t stop to prison.
But anyhow, I got some amusing photographs at a local garden that are, um, reflective, wanted to blog them, picked the obvious title, then the paragraph above came out. Don’t forgive me. Weird times, bad craziness, etc.
In an upside-down world, reasonable people won’t be. Eventually. I hope.
Calm water helps me calm down. Try pointing your camera at it sometime.
2026-07-27 03:00:00
I spent last week at a summer music camp put on by WCAMS, the West Coast Amateur Musicians Society, pronounced “Wickams”. My goal in writing this is to influence a few readers in the direction of attending this sort of thing if there’s one near you. You might be a candidate if you partake of some subset of: Loving music, getting old, being female, worrying about mental fitness, and having time available to invest as you please rather than as you must.
250 attendees, a couple of dozen faculty (all professional musicians), a lovely waterfront venue at a swanky boarding school campus in an isolated small town. The picture above is the cover of the camp booklet.
On the way to the camp.
This space, while the camp is running,
usually contains at least one person
or group emitting
music.
Let me should expand on that list above.
If you love music, there are multiple concerts per day, some quickies by whoever wants to between sessions, some highly polished offerings from the faculty. They all offer pure sound; unamplified and in music-friendly spaces. The volume and balance and tone are achieved by the performers’ technique and love, nothing is digitized or amplified.
Then there are the concerts you’ll be practicing for and playing in.
The most common hair color was gray. I mean, there were kids and teens and thirtysomethings, but I’d say more than half the people were at least semi-retired. Not sure why, but it may have to do with retirees having spare time and no childcare duties, and music having been more widely taught back when us Olds were kids, and the price, $1300 Canadian (about a thousand US) per person, bed and board and music all-in. The venue was a private boarding school, thus “bed and board” was of a school-dorm standard, clean and complete but very basic.
There were attendees who were unsteady on their feet and needed a golf-cart to get around and help on the stairs, but they could still play the hell out of their fiddle or trombone or whatever.
The place was a matriarchy. My small string ensemble had three men and ten women, my cello seminar eight and two. Don’t have a glib explanation except that music teachers were plentiful, and women are over-represented in the teaching professions. So, it’s a space where (I’m guessing of course) women are less likely to feel crowded out or bossed around.
As for mental fitness while aging, the research is in and it’s not subtle. Music, both listening and performing, is good for your mind/brain generally, and specifically reduces the risk of dementia.
For privacy reasons, we were all asked not to share photos from the camp in public, but I think this one is safe.
I found the choice of tunes contrarian; did not hear a single Mozart chestnut. I think this works because everyone at the place is musically literate and many are erudite; they’ve heard enough Mozart classics. Let me sort the choices. One basket: Works written in the attendees’ lifetimes, including a lot of female composers and Canadian stuff. Another: Oddments from the back pages of the usual titans, for example Beethoven’s Septet (his first big hit, he came to hate it), and the graceful but weird second movement of Stravinsky’s Concerto in D. Another: Popular-music classics arranged for acoustic instruments. I heard (and will have more to say about) Bohemian Rhapsody for woodwind quintet, Cohen’s Hallelujah for seven violas, and the Cowboy Junkies’ Cold Tea Blues for four female voices and ukulele.
The big final choir-and-orchestra blowout, with 110 people on stage, was Brahms’ Schicksalslied, which I bet almost none of the people reading this have ever heard of (I hadn’t).
And also Bach. Because of course.
You join as many ensembles as you care to. Most people will find themselves in one chamber group or another, an orchestra or choir, and some sideline track like for instance, Early Music, Celtic, or Vocal Jazz. The organizers try to get the music mailed out a few weeks before the camp, but some lags and some only arrives when you hit the first session on Monday. You get five hours of rehearsal and then you perform it on Friday night or Saturday.
Obviously this calls for quite a bit of practice; there’s plenty of space for that. As you walk from wherever to wherever around the joint, you always hear the call of some instrument or voice, often running repeatedly through a tricky bit. Noobs join as many groups as they can fit in the schedule. Veterans have learned to dial it back a bit; I took their advice, signed up for only five tracks and performed only twice.
All this is a pretty fucking intense experience, let me tell you. And here’s what I’ll take away: The radiant and heartfelt smile on the face of nearly every musician when they finish their performance. And basically every piece gets thunderous applause, with hollering. Usually but not always deserved.
I am not particularly gifted at music. I’m old and have pursued the cello on and off since I was a kid, with much more off than on and multiple no-cello decades. What happened was, my wife Lauren is a gifted singer with a powerful soprano who enjoys participating in choral music. Her choir buddies have been encouraging her to come to WCAMS for years. I wanted to support her and it sounded like fun, so I ended a 25-year gap and started cello lessons again last October. It’s been painful clawing my way back toward my previous level of skill, which was never that great. But WCAMS makes it clear that beginners are welcome, will be encouraged and supported. So we signed up.
Anyhow, my cello skills were solidly in the bottom quartile of the couple of dozen cellists in attendance. Which was humbling but not a problem actually, because of that encouragement and support I just mentioned.
But during that 25-year cello gap I took up the study of West-African and Afro-Cuban drumming, with weekly lessons, and then for the last year or so, regular participation in a multi-hour by-invitation-only weekly drum jam. Judging one’s own talents is tough, but I seem to get musically further with less work on the drumming side. I even get the occasional spontaneous compliment that isn’t just politeness; something that has rarely-to-never happened in my cello career. So I see drums as my primary musical hobby.
But WCAMS doesn’t have an African-music group; thus my cello lessons. Then when we got the initial program I spotted the Celtic track, and I know that music comes with drums.
So, without asking anyone whether it was a good idea, the week before the camp I rented a bodhrán. It came with a “how to play” DVD that I watched all of, then I went and typed “bodhrán practice music” into YouTube and of course there’s plenty. After a few hours I was confident that I could keep up if they didn’t go too fast (they didn’t). It’s pretty easy to play even though the actual strike-the-drum motion is eccentric, unlike any other percussion instrument of my acquaintance.
I should mention that “bodhrán” is pronounced with the “dh” silent, “bo” as in “bother” and “rán” as in “roan”.
At the opening-night gathering, I tracked down Amy, the Celtic-track leader, and asked if it would be OK if I showed up with the drum. She was welcoming (everyone at WCAMS seems permanently welcoming). When we struck up the first tune at the beginning of our Monday gathering, she looked a little nervous but when I joined in she nodded emphatically; it turned out the last time a fresh face equipped with a bodhrán had turned up, they couldn’t actually find or stay with the beat.
Anyhow, I joined Amy’s Beginner and Advanced classes, learned a whole lot about Celtic music (starting from zero helps), and had more fun than ought to be legal. Got unsolicited compliments. Our performance was at the wind-up party after the big final Brahmstravaganza, and the crowd yelled and whistled, dancing broke out. I was full of joy — I think the whole band was. I’ll never forget it.
Here are the ones that I can still hear when I think back on them.
The woodwind quintet (who came to camp together as a group) played Bohemian Rhapsody on that little waterfront auditorium in the picture above. The arrangement was respectful and skilful and it highlighted what a wonderful, complex, piece of music that is. 100% by Freddy Mercury, who we all think of as Queen’s muscle, but this is a masterpiece by one of the last century’s top composers, any genre.
Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel in Spiegel by faculty cellist Marina Hasselberg and percussion pro Greg Samek, the latter on vibraphone. Exquisite, the notes suspended in space like rays of light.
Krunk, an Armenian folk song full of tragedy, on solo flute. Impossible to keep your eyes dry.
A Ukrainian song, lyrics by Shevchenko (there are lots, not sure which) delivered by Eric Hominick, a great singer and pianist who is about to retire from the West to East coast, and will be much missed.
Pride of Petravore is a hornpipe, the song that the awesome Amy Stephen used to launch the Celtic-music track. She projected the music on the whiteboard but wouldn’t make a print-out, insisting that we learn it so that when we opened our set we’d be focused on the music not the notes. It’s the song that Amy used to teach me I could get along on bodhrán.
I’ll be honest, I’ve always liked Irish-traditional music, have even been lucky enough to hear it in its natural habitat, a rundown pub in a remote corner of Ireland. But I’d never actually thought about it much. Now I have, and it’s deeper and stranger than I’d imagined. I’m pretty sure I’ll be investing time in it.
I really hope I get a chance to learn from Amy again, one way or another.
D.I.D. Choi is a young Canadian composer who, in his twenties, is off in LA, working on music for films and games and so on. His Remembrance, written in 2019, played by a wind ensemble, created a cloud of music magic in the air over the stage. I found my eyes closed, better to take it in. I’m going to suggest if you notice a concert anywhere near you with something by Choi, run don’t walk to the ticket booth.
I already mentioned the Cowboy Junkies’ Cold Tea Blues and it’s the one that hit me the hardest. The four singers had lovely light voices, the ukulele swung gracefully, and they did a bit of gentle choreography. The harmonies were fabulous. Anyone who’s heard this (and you can guess from the title) knows it’s not a happy song, but they shuffled that under the covers, casting a spell of light-hearted romance. Then when they planted the cruel razor sharp-hook at the end of the line of lyrics they’d been dangling so invitingly, there were audible gasps and cries of sorrow from the crowd. Never experienced anything like it.
I’m old, but this is the music my parents listened to. I’d always thought of it as boring fuddy-duddy stuff. That was, until I got in a theater with good acoustics and a live 20-piece brass band. This stuff is loud and aggressive at a level that approaches Rock&roll, the arrangements are better, and the tunes are strong.
The way it works is, the different horn sections hand the melody and chorus back and forth, never the same twice, then somebody stands up and plays a solo, a pre-assigned number of bars. There was this one solo by a young trombonist that pretty well melted my mind. I wonder if this stuff retains any commercial viability, as in, is there somewhere I can go out and see it?
Earlier today I bought the rental bodhrán, it’s a basic model and was pretty cheap. I think it’s full of happiness.