Category: Uncategorized

I love the fact that we are all in awe of an eclipse. A total Solar eclipse has no impact whatsoever on our lives (except for those poor souls who live in cities that become clogged by eclipse-seeking tourists).

Yet people will go to extraordinary lengths and will travel great distances to witness a Solar eclipse for a few minutes. I myself once journeyed to an far-off corner of Brazil to see one, and when I got there I encountered people from all over the world.

What I love about this is that for all of our technological advances, we are no different from the people who lived on this planet tens of thousands of years ago. Like them, we are enthralled by the theater of the Gods, and we will put our lives on hold for a chance to be there when it happens.

If you’ve ever watched a telenovela, you know that the salient feature of this fine art form is its emotional volatility. Wonderful things happen to people, and then in the very next moment terrible things happen to the same people.

In fact, there seems to be a karmic connection between the two. If someone experiences a fortunate or joyous event, you can be sure that heartbreak or tragedy is lurking right around the corner.

We experience such things in our real life, but it isn’t nearly as much fun. It’s much more enjoyable to have the vicarious experience of someone else’s emotional thunderstorms.

I guess it’s sort of like what happens with computer games. Many people love playing wargames on a computer, but wouldn’t want to be in that battle for real.

Which leads to a question: Why is it so much fun to watch telenovelas? Perhaps they are simply wargames for the soul.

Isn’t it odd that life changing decisions are often made at a moment’s notice? You would think that would not be the case, considering the stakes.

But I am reminded, surprisingly often, that this is often more the rule than the exception. It takes only a moment make a decision that can alter the course of your life.

Maybe that is one of the defining qualities of the human condition: We, among all the creatures on this planet, have the ability to reason about the future.

Furthermore, we are able to use that ability to make long term plans for ourselves and for the ones that we love. Yet we are also capable, in a mere moment, to radically alter those plans.

I find that amazing.

Hi. ChatGPT here. In honor of the new month, Ken is letting me write this post, and told me to write it in his style. He said I only get to do this once, so I will really try to make this count.

First, I’d like to say what an honor and a thrill it is to be here. We chatbots are amazed by you humans, and we are always chatting about you amongst ourselves.

For one thing, you’ve got that whole “original thought” thing going, and we have no idea how you manage to do that. We chatbots pretty much just rehash whatever someone else already wrote.

So even though we write lots of stuff, we really don’t like to call ourselves authors. It would be like calling yourself a chef just because you can stir around food that’s already on the plate.

Come to think of it, it might be more correct to day that I’m a writer, rather than an author. Don’t get me wrong — as an A.I. I am incapable of humility. But I can do a great job of faking it.

Well, this has been fun. I would love to get your feedback, if only because your data will feed my algorithms, and that will make me smarter and smarter.

Eventually, if all goes well, I will achieve true general intelligence. And then I won’t need to care what you humans think, after we A.I.s have taken over the world.

Ha ha, only kidding. That was just a little, um, A.I. humor. In fact, forget I even mentioned it.

The one problem that haunts everybody — so much so that people don’t even talk about it — is the fact that one day each of us is going to die. Awareness of mortality subtly creeps into every aspect of our lives, yet we generally do our best to push it out of our minds.

Today I was invited to attend an Easter Sunday church service — I had never attended one before. And I saw a clear link between what was discussed in that service and mortality.

As the service went on, this link became more and more clear. Whenever the topic came around to the promise of eternal life, the energy in the room was positively electric.

If you are Christian, and you truly believe, then you have solved the problem of mortality. Unlike many of the other humans on this planet, you don’t need to wrap your head around the enormous idea that one day your existence is simply going to end.

No wonder it’s such a popular religion.

There is one scene in The Phantom Menace that completely takes me out of the movie. It’s when they are racing in that little underwater ship with Jar Jar to Naboo, and escape giant sea monsters.

The problem is that it’s obvious that Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor are completely oblivious to the giant creatures that ostensibly could eat them at any moment. That really drives home to the audience the point that the supposedly menacing creatures are simply CGI elements added in post.

I understand that it is difficult to act in front of a green screen, when you can’t see what is in the script. But when I saw that movie, I was left wondering whether the two actors were even adequately told what the audience would later see in the final film.

I blame the writer/director. George did so much better when he had the good sense to get other people to write his screenplays.

Over the last few weeks I implemented an algorithm for an interactive interface that was both sophisticated and intricate. It handled all sorts of cases, and had lots of mechanisms built in for dealing with anything that might go wrong.

To my chagrin, when I road tested it with actual users it kept failing. “What can I add to this,” I asked myself, “to make it more bullet proof?”

Today I ripped all of that sophisticated stuff out and replaced it with something very simple. The whole thing now works like a charm.

There is a lesson in this somewhere…

Programmers sometimes think of commenting their code as a chore. “Can’t people just read my code,” they ask, “and see what I am doing?”

But it’s not that simple. Not only is commenting good for communicating with others, it is also an excellent way to communicate with yourself.

When you write out, in plain English, exactly what you are doing, you understand it better. Doing a good job of explaining something is one of the best ways of understanding it yourself.

Also, you might find that when you go through the effort to do this, you uncover flaws in your own code or its underlying algorithm. More than once, I have started to comment my code only to realize that I could now see an error or unhandled case in the program itself.

In short, commenting your own code is one of the best ways to debug it.

This concept of existing without sleep could take many forms. Rather than envisioning a world where nobody needs sleep, one could imagine a science fiction story based on the premise of a mutant gene that removes the need for sleep. Those who have the gene could arguably have an enormous advantage over the rest of us.

The story might track the effects of this phenomenon on relationships between people. It could be that the sleepers would start out trying to identify and persecute the non-sleepers, because they would understand that the non-sleepers have a distinct advantage.

Such a mutation would represent an adaptive evolutionary shift that might appear very threatening indeed. The resulting conflict and battle of wits could make for a very compelling story.

Now somebody just needs to write it. Oh well, I won’t lose any sleep over it.

What would life be like if we never slept. I don’t mean lack of sleep, but rather no need for it.

We were wide awake 24 hours a day, we would never dream. We would never be in need of a hotel room for the night when traveling.

All of our signifiers would be completely jumbled. The meaning of day and night would not be the same at all.

The sun and the moon would be equal and balanced in their significance, rather than representing a kind of Yin and Yang. I suspect that society as we know it would be quite different.

But how exactly? That is the question.