What time is it, Gentle Reader(s)? No, it’s not Too Late, and it’s not Too Early. It’s the Right Time. More specifically, it’s time to get both numerological and philosophical. In this installment of Matador Playlist we shall address one of the Weighty Questions of Our Era. No, this question does not concern the looming threat(s) of our AI Overlords or global warming or the unrelenting horror of the current Goblinoid kakistocracy, although those are seriously weighty matters indeed. Instead we shall focus on a thorny matter that people from Arkansas to Alice Springs have been wrestling with since, oh, the mid-1950s at least: Ideally, how many members should a rock & roll band have?

Holy smokes, Gentle Reader(s)—it's Wednesday and I'm just NOW getting around to posting last Thursday's Matador Playlist! Whattup wit dat, you might ask. And well you might, but we'll not get into that now. However, far from being idle, I have been cogitating these last few days about making an official InkyInkInc. corporate statement as regards the company's position on the question of AI. For a while now I've been poopoo-ing the whole AI brouhaha, in part because (much like crypto) I don't really understand any of it. A couple of recent articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker regarding the July 11 hack of the French company Hugging Face by 'agents' created by OpenAI finally laid out the entire scenario in terms that even a pseudo-luddite such as Your Humble Narrator could understand. Last Friday's edition of the PBS program Washington Week with the Atlantic did a good job of summarizing the growing concerns about AI and data centers (the two are inextricably linked) in a straightforward 25-minute presentation—I strongly encourage you to watch it. After taking all of this in, my grasp of the situation comes down to this: It ain't good.