The Price of Eggs, the Value of Taste

Thursday March 20th, 2025

Tags: archive, cats, currents, food, music, no-ai, personal, politics

One of my coworkers has an entire carton of eggs in the shared fridge. I don't know what they intend to do with them. We don't have a proper kitchen here. Maybe they have a little electric hob or griddle they plug in at their desk. It seems like an awfully inconvenient way to eat eggs. Maybe the jacked-up cost of eggs has given them a perceived value beyond their actual worth. They must be worth all the hassle if they cost nearly $8/doz, right?

Or maybe they're not here to be eaten. Maybe whoever it is is simply trying to keep the precious ovoids away from whatever greedy hands are fixing to crack them.

Me, I don't really get it. I like eggs fine, but their main value to me is as a cheap source of protein. If they're no longer cheap, I can get protein from other sources. Eggs have a little vitamin D, some B6, a tiny bit of iron, but there are plenty of other cheap ways to get those too. I guess I'd be upset if eggs were some incredible delicacy, but I don't think they're that tasty. To me they're mostly a vehicle delivery for salt and pepper. To each their own, I suppose.

I'm not saying the skyrocketing cost of eggs isn't annoying, I just don't think it's as big a deal as a lot of people seem to think. For example, I don't think it justifies allowing a fascist takeover of my country's government. If the choice is paying a lot for eggs or voting in the fascists—it wasn't, but even if it was—I'd be perfectly fine eating more chicken salad until prices go back to normal.

There's No Accounting for Taste

This is one of those clichés that's been repeated until it's lost all meaning, but I think it's a good way to describe the ways recommendation algorithms and "AI art" leave me wanting. Computers are good at dealing with quantifiable information, and the qualia, the subjective internal experiences that define our artistic tastes, are unquantifiable. There are no formulae a computer can understand that will communicate the reasons I like or don't like a particular piece of art.

There are a million examples I could pick, but let's take music. I intensely dislike the band Rush. On paper, one might think they'd be in my wheelhouse. I like progressive rock. I like complicated guitar stuff. I like vocalists with unique and unpolished voices. But I can't stand Rush. They never did anything for me. My dislike could stem from the fact that they have right-libertarian beliefs and wrote an album inspired by Ayn Rand, but I didn't like them before I knew that about them.¹

A computer could look at the fact that I like classic prog like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, and epic guitar/synth shreds from jam bands like Phish and The Disco Biscuits; and it might conclude oh, of course this person likes Rush. There's no way they couldn't. These elements add up to a perfectly Rush-shaped sum. But I don't like Rush. There's no accounting for taste.

There's no accounting for why "AI art" makes my skin crawl. A computer can look at a bunch of disparate elements and add them up into what its programming concludes is the most logically perfect distillate of art. But that has no bearing on whether it's something humans want to look at. There's no function that defines what makes people feel things.

Now, I'm a materialist.² I don't think anything about this process is the result of a soul, or a god, or anything supernatural.³ But that doesn't mean I think all of our subjective experiences can be quantified and codified. I think there are processes in the brain that we don't understand on a technical level, and are probably unknowable. And that's cool. It means philosophy and art can never be "solved". Our quest to understand and express ourselves is a constantly-evolving journey of learning and introspection. If it were possible to program a computer to make perfectly enjoyable human art, we'd lose an important source of meaning in our lives. Thank goodness it's all bullshit

Cat Food Flavors

I don't know why they sell cat food in flavors meant to appeal to humans. "Mixed Grill"? "Salmon Dinner"? "Prime Filets"? I think my cat would enjoy it just as much even if the can was labeled "Poop". And, well, from my perspective that would be a more accurate way to describe how it smells. Sunny will still eat it up, though. She likes other cheap proteins, like chicken and tuna, but she'll also go bananas for various whimsical flavors of nauseating meat paste. There's no accounting for taste 🦝

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A Foolish Blunder

Friday April 25th, 2025

Tags: blog, food, outside, personal

Today on my lunch break 5K,¹ I decided to stop at a gas station, one of a small handful of stores within a 30-minute radius of work, to get something different for lunch. It's not a good gas station, like a 7-Eleven or Sheetz, it's a second-tier regional chain inexplicably named "Par Mar".² But they at least have some refrigerator sandwiches.

They're one of many stores in my college town that won't let you in if you have a backpack, so I took out the bike lock I keep for this purpose and secured it to a disused air dispenser at the side of the store. I looped it through the fabric top-handle, which isn't the most secure thing in the world, someone with a decently sharp knife could saw through it, but I would only be a couple minutes, it's mainly to keep people from grabbing it and running off.

I picked out my items as quickly as possible, and I was in the checkout line when it occurred to me I didn't think to look at the combination before I closed the lock and scrambled it. Well, it had been awhile since I used it, but I knew for certain the first digit is a 2 and the last digit is a 6. The other two digits will come to me, I reassured myself. In fact, I was pretty sure it was 2586.

Well, I got out with my sandwich and jalapeño cheese puffs, and I entered the combination and realized that the numbers don't go up to 8. They only go up to 6. Okay, I thought, the 3 could easily be mistaken for an 8, so it must be 2536. Still no luck.

Panic set in. I tried a few more adjacent combinations, none of them worked. My lunch break time was steadily ticking away, and I had no idea what I was going to do. I started fiddling with it aimlessly, thinking about all the passers-by wondering what the hell I was doing for so long. I thought about going into the store and asking if they had a pair of bolt cutters I could borrow to destroy the lock, or barring that, a big knife to destroy my backpack. Finally, through sheer dumb luck I fell on the right combination. It's 2532.

So I'm back at work just as my hour was up, eating my crappy microwave burger³ and writing this as my inaugural post in my new blog, because if I post about it maybe I'll embarrass myself thoroughly enough to remember to check the combination next time 🦝

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A Foolish Blunder