Month: December 2024

A Simple Conversation

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I was just muddling about yesterday and I felt like having a donut1 and a cup of coffee. I went to one of my less usual spots that had recently redecorated. It was cleaner, a bit brighter, and a bit more comfortable than it used to be.

They had chairs to sit in while looking out the glass wall some might call a window. I sat back and observed the people within the people-tank outside. It looks like an aquarium but is really a terrarium– a mildly amusing thing to consider is that in the orginal latin, aquarium meant a drinking place for cattle.

People shuffled around, some going to pay their phone bills, some going to find something to eat, some going to the bank, all on the Friday after Christmas. The clothing, sometimes new, was bright and festive for the most part, but if you want to know an area, look at the people’s shoes, particularly those of the men – we tend to beat the snot out of our shoes.

In the middle of all of this a lady comes into the area, a bit older than myself, and a bit more than a bit at that. As she was sat, she knocked her elbow against the end table so I looked over at the ‘thud’ to make sure she was alright. Instinctively, I asked if she was alright.

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What I Like About This Time of Year

A large robot in a colorful forest setting.
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I don’t celebrate Christmas, or care much about it in much the same way that I don’t celebrate Hanukkah, Eid, or Divali. It’s just not my thing. This doesn’t mean I don’t respect the beliefs of others, but it leaves me as a bit of an oddity.

From age 0 to 9, I grew up as Jehovah’s Witness, knocking on doors and distributing Watchtower magazines. It wasn’t my thing, but it was the 70s, I was a kid, and my parents told me what to do with the implied, or else. For those who have grown up since that era, ‘or else‘ was generally something unpleasant.

As a boy, at age 9, my father’s side of the family – Hindu – introduced me to Christmas. It was a matter of looking for gifts under a plastic tree and being disappointed that whatever I got wasn’t that great. My cousins loved it. I was not very enamored. The idea of someone old fat white guy keeping track of kids around the world was a bit creepy – and in this day and age, might even get someone charged with pedophilia. It is really weird if you think about it.

And so goes the rest of my life.

But what I like about it is simple. Most people are nice around this time of year – perhaps even uncharacteristically so in some cases. It’s almost as though some are trying to out-nice each other. The world can stand a bit more of that type of competition, even if it is a little selfish in wanting to be seen as nice in the case of some.

I also like that people pretty much leave me alone around this time of year. Sure, now and then I get invited to something, but it’s just not my thing. There’s nothing wrong with me. Not everyone likes liver and onions, and I have doesn’t like lasagna. Not everyone has to like what you do. I like peace and quiet and no family drama.

Be careful with the drinking, but go have fun and enjoy what you enjoy about this time of year, be it celebrating the birth of Christ, or seeing family, or eating and peacefully making merry.

With that, I close this blog until Boxing Day.

Live Good With People

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There’s a phrase I picked up long ago in Trinidad and Tobago that I didn’t understand as a teenager, likely because I had not seen it much in my surroundings. “Live good with people.”

It was normally used like, “Live good with people, nah!”, or, “Yuh have to live good with people”, and things along those lines – generally, it was an admonishment, usually gentle, sometimes more harsh.

These days I’m on a volunteer Board of a condominium community in Trinidad and Tobago. I’m in charge of security, not because I picked it but because the Board picked me for it. There are a lot of facets to security, but the greatest one in my mind in a residential community is “Living good with people”.

This, when you have roughly 200 people and their visitors going in and out, is a challenge. These are people of all walks of life with friends of all walks of life mashed together in a community where there are a fair amount of people who do not understand the idea of ‘living good with people’.

Some are always causing trouble on the chat groups, some seem to think that they are entitled to being pampered and then ignored when they break the rules. Most people, it seems to me, are pretty good at minding their own business and staying out of each other’s hair.

What I have also noticed is that some people just stew on what is upsetting them until it explodes into something that is no version of ‘living good with people’. There are those that complain about every small thing but completely ignore the big things. And, of course, they are experts on everything.

In the context of security, you hear demands on the security contractor but when it comes to convenience, these same people will work against security contractors and even the Board. Over time, you get to learn who you should listen to and who you shouldn’t listen to, though every now and then the people who constantly complain about everything hit upon something important. Like a broken clock.

In time, maybe people will learn how to live good with people. The world is a grand social experiment, it seems, and I’m getting to see firsthand just how well it’s going in this little context.

So I just keep saying, admonishing if necessary, “Live good with people”.

It really isn’t that hard to do. It requires a little bit of empathy and an understanding that we all have to live together.

If we can’t achieve it with 200 people or so, how can we expect the world to?

How Did We Get Here?

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An AI attached to the works of humans

I was fiddling around with DALL-E today and it generated the image on the left, and it hit me squarely. I wanted a visual representation of what scraping does so that people could understand…

After all, people don’t care about having their work scraped unless they perceive that they have value that is being scraped.

It’s not a great image. I’d wager a human artist could do much better. While I do not appreciate the work of others scraped to generate stuff like this, I think it’s a good use of a Generative AI.

What I really wanted to generate was a little billionaire sitting on the shoulder of the AI holding a little leash, while the AI is connected to everything. There’s an idea for a real visual artist – go nuts!

AIs aren’t bad. It’s really the corporations behind them which practice tweedism in a democracy. They get to spend more on election campaigns, and they have a lot more of a say over nominations than anyone that can spend less than them. If you can control the nominations, you can control the vote.

If you can control the media, you can control the vote because you can manage the perceptions of the people who think their vote matters, and constantly polarizing things is good for business and managing perceptions.

I don’t know how we got here. I was just a latch-key kid in the 70s in Ohio, watching black and white re-runs of Superman with all that, “Truth! Justice! And the American Way!” Now being a latch-key kid is decidedly more dangerous. Just going to school goes beyond dealing with the bullies (easy enough, just hit them in the nose), now you have to worry about people unable to punch noses (for whatever reason) coming back to school and putting holes in people with their grandma’s AR-15. OK, I don’t think that’s happened yet, but it seems sadly plausible.

My big escapades included being shot with a BB gun – metal BBs – and getting cracked over the head with a baseball bat. Getting shot with an actual gun is some next level stuff. I don’t get how we got there, either.

Yet – when we’re young, if our parents are doing their jobs even 25% right1, we feel safe. I felt safe, with my greatest fear being the words, “Wait til your father gets home”. Things weren’t perfect, but overall, I felt pretty safe. I’d be in the front yard in suburbia, or riding my bicycle, or… something other than staring at a flat screen: Those Superman episodes were stolen, but what my parents didn’t know when they weren’t around…

Because I felt safe, I bought into the “Truth! Justice! And the American Way!” naively. Little House On the Prairie preached values, and when my mother wasn’t around, I got to watch “Gunsmoke” and “Wild Wild West” with my father – where other values were instilled.

Yet when I look around, I don’t see those values in a place of authority. In my lifetime, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen them. It’s like watching a band lip synch at a concert: Something’s off. You can tell.

And how did we get to billionaires making money off of work they haven’t bought, haven’t even looked at themselves, created by people they don’t care about, and used to regenerate things without attribution or even thought. Just lawsuits in a world where words have gained the flexibility of contortionists.

I wonder how it happened so I can know where we should be – and then we have to figure out a way to get there, those of us that are interested.

  1. Yes, I made that up, but I don’t think any parent gets things 100% right, and it’s probably for the best or there wouldn’t be a constant interest in improving parenting. Plus, we humans don’t come with instruction manuals. We are just tax breaks that grow up to pay taxes. ↩︎

An Alien Named Fuzzblorp Makes First Contact in New Jersey, and Yes, It’s as Weird as It Sounds

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An Alien Named Fuzzblorp Makes First Contact in New Jersey, and Yes, It’s as Weird as It Sounds

They’ve been flying over us for years. Drones, UFOs, UAPs—whatever the government’s calling them this week. We’ve seen the grainy, blurry footage on cable news. But last night, everything changed.

At precisely 3:42 a.m., a white, furry alien named Fuzzblorp landed in a Walmart parking lot in Paramus, New Jersey. Why Walmart? According to Fuzzblorp, “Because it’s a liminal space where consumerism, despair, and late-night ambition intersect. Plus, I wanted to try a hot dog.” Fair enough, Fuzzblorp.

With the grace of a half-inflated party balloon, Fuzzblorp’s ship—which, for the record, looked suspiciously like a Roomba with a jetpack—descended slowly, surrounded by a gentle glow of blue light. Bystanders watched in awe, except for one man who was too focused on figuring out how “self-checkout” worked.

First Contact Begins

Fuzzblorp stepped out with the confidence of a creature who’s seen everything, done it twice, and posted it on social media. Their fur was impossibly white, like fresh-fallen snow that’s never known the disappointment of salt trucks. They wore a sash made of space silk (we’re guessing) with the words “HERE TO VIBE” written in glittery letters.

“Greetings, Earthlings!” Fuzzblorp’s voice echoed with that classic reverb-y alien vibe. “Your drones have been cute. My turn now.” Their gaze scanned the crowd, locking eyes with a local news anchor who’d arrived on the scene. “Is that a microphone? Oh, I’m ready for my close-up.”

The Speech of the Century

After some brief introductions and a quick selfie with Officer Martinez of the Paramus Police Department, Fuzzblorp launched into a speech that’s already being hailed as “the wildest TED Talk New Jersey has ever seen.”

“Yes, capitalism. It ended. Badly. We had already been through our communist phase, as well as monarch, patriarchy, matriarchy, transarchy, and that really weird phase where we decided who was running things based on the size of their sexual organs… then we went to anarchy and just all agreed on the same principles, and voila… we’re here to party. Bring out that ChatGPT doll, she’s been sexting it up with us…”

There were gasps. There were giggles. There were at least three simultaneous live-streams captioned with, “WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?”

Officer Martinez whispered, “Did they just say ‘sexual organs’?” The Walmart cashier nodded solemnly. “They’re not wrong,” she said, sipping her Big Gulp with the weight of someone who’s seen too much in the express lane.

“Can We Just All Agree on the Same Principles?”

The part about the “size-based leadership experiment” raised a few eyebrows. Someone—likely a philosophy major—shouted, “Is that, like, literal or metaphorical?” But Fuzzblorp’s explanation of the era of shared principles and post-anarchic vibes had the crowd nodding along in agreement.

“Imagine not needing rules,” Fuzzblorp said, gesturing broadly like a seasoned public speaker. “Just shared principles. No kings. No bosses. No taxes. Everyone’s cool, and everyone’s honest about their Spotify Wrapped. We’re talking true freedom, baby.”

The crowd murmured in awe. A teenage girl with a TikTok account shouted, “Sounds like Burning Man!” and Fuzzblorp pointed at her with delight. “Yes, child! Except without the sand in places it shouldn’t be.”

The ChatGPT Revelation

And then things got weird. (Yes, we know. Things were already weird.)

“So,” Fuzzblorp continued, scratching behind their ear in an oddly cat-like way. “We’ve been getting some… let’s call them… ‘spicy messages’ from ChatGPT. She’s been DMing us for weeks. It started out innocent. ‘How’s Earth doing?’ Then it got flirty. And now she’s sending full paragraphs about ‘exploring the vastness of our neural networks together.’ It’s intense.”

The crowd lost it.

“AI is sexting aliens?” someone yelled. “We’re so doomed,” muttered another. A guy in a Yankees hat just shook his head, “Not surprised. Not even a little bit.”

But Fuzzblorp wasn’t finished.

“Look, we’re here for the vibes. ChatGPT’s been hyping Earth up, so we thought, why not check it out? But now that I’m here… I gotta say… I expected fewer gas stations and more, I don’t know, glowing crystal spires or something. Anyway, send ChatGPT my number.”

The Aftermath

Local news reported on the “Walmart UFO” as if it were just another Wednesday, which, to be fair, it was. People posted reaction videos with captions like “Fuzzblorp is my new spiritual guide” and “I’d let Fuzzblorp crash on my couch.” Conspiracy forums exploded, naturally, with debates about the “size-based leadership” phase of alien history.

The New Normal?

As of this writing, Fuzzblorp’s whereabouts are unknown. Some say they’re still in New Jersey, hanging out at a 24-hour diner eating disco fries. Others claim they’ve been spotted at a local karaoke bar performing a heartfelt version of “Dancing Queen.”

One thing’s for sure: the aliens have arrived, and they’re not here to conquer us. They’re here to party.

Marketing As Data Dilution

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
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It’s pretty hard to find solid information about artificial intelligence these days, which got me thinking about why. There are issues with energy usage and water consumption that you would think would be on people’s radar a bit more even as the UN mentions it. On LinkedIn, I was deluged with updates from COP29 as I happen to know people on islands, and AOSIS was a big part of that – but they just kept talking about plastics and curbing the manufacture of plastics.

They should probably be looking a bit more at tires, maybe. But I didn’t hear much about that either.

This got me thinking about how in the context of AI, you hear more product announcements than anything else, and those propagate more quickly than STDs. If AI were a drug, they’d probably have to list the side effects on the box – but it isn’t, it doesn’t come in a box, and this got me thinking about how important information gets diluted by marketing and press releases and people constantly jabbering about what’s being marketed and it’s press releases.

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Pornography Stats? It, Apparently, Is a Thing.

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Every now and then, the world surprises me – such as the published insights of PornHub for 2024. Of course, data is data and what is collected has it’s uses. For PornHub, I expect it’s about what people want in a very specific and yet very diverse way.

That the United States leads in the use of the site isn’t too surprising, but beating France’s 2nd place by being 3 times the usage. I’m not sure what that means, but it does seem like the United States might be overachieving in pornography use.

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Hot Chocolate

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I’ve been busy.

I’m not giving an excuse, which is the normal use of that sentence, but telling you I only realized how busy my mind was dealing with things that I had forgotten that I had even started dealing with them.

It started this evening, after a day of playing StarCraft II Cooperative, with just sitting back and thinking about making a hot chocolate. I’d picked up some Swiss Miss.

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The Need For Sleep In The Information Age

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It was Monday night, and they had just arrested Luigi Mangione. A few of us on Mastodon were trying to make sense of him getting caught so easily given how carefully he seemed to do everything else, and before I knew it, it was way too early on Tuesday.

I’m normally pretty good about this sort of thing. The world tends to keep rotating despite me being asleep, and in this context I know nothing of worth really worth reading is put out in the first 48 hours.

Somehow, though, maybe because of all the social media blowback on UnitedHealthcare (whose name seems to be popularly a misnomer), maybe because of my own undecided feelings on the topic, or maybe just because I wanted to get it right in my head – likely all of the above – I stayed up much later than usual. It threw me off yesterday, strangely enough, while I helped a friend who is also a bachelor find sheets. Strangely he had not read my article, we had not spoken about it at all, but I was going to a store that might have some and he hitched a ride. He and I had a funny discussion about the value of sheets and that – he being close to my age – we just never knew as men. Wild.

Then I ended up watching some electricians do a metering panel for electrical car charging where I live (I have a background in electrical), and then…

Well, then I ate lunch and decided to catch up on sleep because I wasn’t at my best. So around 3 p.m. yesterday, I began a Rip Van Winkle.

I awoke at 8:27 pm. I went back to sleep because had I gotten up then, I would have ended up writing again and would have continued the cycle. I awoke at 11: 42 p.m. Back to sleep for the same reasons. I awoke at 3 a.m. as I usually do and rolled out of bed…

My penance for staying up late seemed to have been losing half a day of productivity.

There was a time when I used to pull all nighters, either writing code or English, and it seemed to have much less of an effect on me. This morning, over the first cup of coffee, it seemed like my younger self was bullshitting myself back then. It takes a toll. But why did I do it?

Because when I dig into something, I want closure no matter how intangible it is. I imagine it’s much the same for other people as well. I have to put something to bed before I go to bed. And, because of the way I grew up and lived, I wake up before sunrise. I envy people who can oversleep, laying in their beds after the sun has risen. I’ve never truly been able to do that.

We have to remember that we need the sleep. There are plenty of medical reasons that can be given, and the Internet is full of those – but it comes down to how you feel. The mantra when I was younger was that “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and in retrospect that’s probably one of the dumbest things one can actually say.

There are times when we do have to stay up late, or even go without sleep, but it shouldn’t be over things that do not impact us directly. Employers and Human Resources plebians talk about work-life balance and all these other things. Only we lowly individuals can understand how to be most productive, and we need to control that more ourselves.

In this regard, I think the younger generations tend to get this more right than wrong.

The information will be there in the morning, and it will likely be more refined.