Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Claude. He’ll help you hone your bull-shit detector skills

    Since hiring Claude to help me do research, I feel two things. First if Claude were human, I would have fired him after his first big hallucinatory botch it was so egregious. Second, it’s now kind of entertaining to throw Claude a simple task and see how much of it he gets wrong. Claude, of course, is what Anthropic has called its artificial intelligence software. If I were naming this software I’d call it BDT for bullshit detector training software. I described my initial encounter with his fails here.

    Today I asked Claude to give me a list of publications or podcasts that might appeal to National Guard family members. The top of the list Claude kicked back was:

    Guard Family – A magazine specifically designed for National Guard families, covering deployment support, benefits, family programs, and resources

    I went searching for this publication and couldn’t find it, so I asked Claude: “Can you give your source for Guard Family? I’m not finding it online. Is there a possibility you hallucinated this magazine?”

    Here’s Claude’s answer: You’re absolutely right to call that out—I should search to verify this. Let me check what actually exists. … Good catch—I did make an error. There isn’t a magazine called “Guard Family.”

    Then I said: Is there some way I can tell you in advance to do actual research instead of making things up?

    Then Claude said: That’s a really fair question, and I appreciate your directness. Honestly, the answer is: not really in a way that would guarantee I won’t make mistakes like that. You can ask me to search or verify things, and I should be doing that proactively for factual claims (especially specific publication names), but there’s no setting or instruction you can give me that will completely prevent me from occasionally stating something confidently that turns out to be wrong.

    Claude: verbose and unhelpful. I find this so reasuring. I perceive that AI will get drafted to fill jobs and people will get fired. Then, a couple weeks in, crying managers will be calling their fired employees and begging them to come back.

  • Beautiful small bookstores

    The book was waiting for me. It was a moment when you can’t help believing in fate.

    I’ve been compiling a list of books to discuss with fellow writers at a workshop I’m giving in June. I want a range of voices and genres, and woke up one morning in early January thinking to include Leslie Marmon Silko and her book Ceremony. Jumped up, went to the bookshelf where she lives at my house. She wasn’t there. I went to all my shelves. Not there. Not there. Not there.

    Damn. Maybe in a burst of purging, I let her go? Or loaned her out? Days passed. I forgot about it, pulled some other book from the shelf.

    Then we headed to San Francisco for a week of gawking around the big city, and I can’t visit without dropping into City Lights Bookstore, among my favorite of the independent shops (in Salt Lake City, it’s The King’s English, in Denver The Tattered Cover, in Seattle Elliott Bay Book Company). It’s as though someone is personally curating for me at City Lights.. Not huge like Portland’s Powells,which is lovable in its sprawling “we have everything!” way. City Lights is more “don’t worry, we got you.”

    I had no thought that morning for exactly what I wanted when we entered. So. Step in, turn right, pass some shelves, turn right again, all random, just saying hello to the bookstore, blink, and what is here in front of me? At eye level, Silko’s Ceremony. It’s as though City Lights is saying “welcome back, Susan.”

    A good hour browsing in the store that was founded in 1953 by poet, artist, activist, essayist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reminded me how a well-curated bookstore can bring me to places I am surprised to learn that I want to go.

    Some unknown impulse drew me to the shelves of European authors. Once there, the book titled The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese, an Italian novelist, caught my eye. I know nothing of Italian authors. But I will know a something or two shortly.

    Ferlinghetti, who also founded a publishing company, was charged in 1956 with publishing an obscene work: poet Allen GInsberg’s Howl. He was acquitted in that land-mark first-amendment case. It was sweet to be in his store, especially in this current period of American history. I loved a hand-scribbled sign above the shelves: “Free speech zone.” Was glad we wandered in on Thursday because Friday (Jan. 30), they shut their doors in solidarity with the anti-ICE shutdown.

  • What? Here?

    Bison probably don’t top the list of charismatic mega fauna you’d see in San Francisco. But there they were, right in the heart of Golden Gate Park on a sunny Friday afternoon.

    They do top my “unexpected encounters with bison” list. Second on that list would be the time I spotted a wood bison, grazing in a forest along the Alaska Highway somewhere in the Yukon, circa 1990. I didn’t even know about wood bison back then. I just thought one crazed beast had gone walk-about. But no. The wood bison is a subspecies of the plains bison, significantly bigger, probably just as crotchety, that’s found mostly north of the Canadian border and up into Alaska.

    Almost extinct by the 1880s (less than a thousand remained of vast herds estimated at 60 million individuals), the massive creatures caught the interest of Golden Gate’s superintendent at the time who brought the species (by ones and twos) to the park starting in 1891. They’ve stuck around.

    Today, there are between 400,000 and 500,000 bison in North America, mostly managed as commercial herds. The largest free-roaming herds of about 4,000 can be found in Yellowstone National Park.

    Atlas Obscura has an article about Frisco’s bisons, noting that they have a history of escaping, once in 1924 when a couple dozen followed a big male who charged and broke through the fence. They scattered across the city, munching flowers and grass in urban yards and requiring more than a day to be recaptured.

    An electric fence and a sturdy metal one surrounds their little plot of ground in the park today. Bison munching placidly while city traffic drones nearby.