I Don't Think the Retreat Week Bliss Will Be Lasting Much Longer

My yard today. Nice, eh?

Today was my first day back at work after returning from my annual reading and frolicking in the snow retreat. I also worked on trying to create a meditation practice and took a terrific meditation class last Thursday. Coincidentally, Thursday was the day I began to feel chill.

I made a submission today and tried to contact a Medium publication that rejected something I sent them before I left town and has not responded in anyway to a resubmission I made. What's going on there, guys?

The big thing I did today was file my claim as part of the Anthropic case. It was pretty simple for me, less so for a family member filing for a late relative who was a textbook author. Books classified as "education" require a lot more thinking for their claims.

I did some additional reading on the Anthropic case and realized that the court didn't rule against Anthropic on anything. The first part of the case it clearly felt that stealing books to train AI is fair use. The second part of the case involved Anthropic downloading books from pirate sites to use for training AI. I thought the court had ruled against them on that, but I was wrong. Anthropic continued to deny it had done anything wrong and merely settled out of court. All this talk about this settlement being the largest of its kind sounds good, but it diverts attention from the fact that the court case doesn't change much and authors still have no protection from AI companies going forth.

And on a Personal Note 

I have to start cooking again and sometime in the next couple of hours plan meals and make a grocery list so I can go out and restock this house tomorrow. On top of that, we had snow yesterday and last night, and it's four-thirty in the afternoon here and my plow service hasn't shown up yet. Not all is lost. They didn't come until four o'clock after the last storm. 

Still, there's a real possibility that I'll have to spend part of tomorrow cleaning the driveway as well as dealing with groceries. Glad I got some work done today. Though, you may have noticed, it was work that didn't involve new writing. 

I'm still feeling kind of laid back, but I'm not stupid. That can't last much longer.