Entry 783: Halloween In The Time Of Cholera

Okay, it's not actually the time of cholera, but I was quite ill yesterday morning. I had been feeling a cold coming on since Monday, but it was nothing serious, just the sniffles, and then Tuesday night I started getting this very uncomfortable internal inflammation. When it didn't go away by Wednesday afternoon, I made an appointment to see a doctor on Thursday. At S's behest, I took a sick day on Thursday, and I'm glad I did, because I woke up feeling like absolute horse manure. It was my morning for the carpool, so I rallied long enough to get Lil' S2 and his friend to school (thankfully, it's only about a ten minute round-trip jaunt; close enough to walk, but, of course, it was pouring rain yesterday), and then I came back and crashed out hard. I woke up thinking it was around 10:30, but when I looked at my phone, it said 12:30.

Those extra four hours of sleep turned out to be just what I needed, as I felt so much better--not 100%, but a little under the weather, instead of debilitatingly infirm. I then spent most the day doing puzzles from the New York Times Puzzle Mania! book. One of my puzzles is in it, so they sent me a free copy, and it's very cool. There are a variety of really fun puzzles in it. Later, I went to my doctor's appointment, from which I inferred that the inflammation is likely not related to the cold. I just happened to get hit with two ailments at once--not great, but, if you think about it, probably better than having one after the other. Less total sick time. The doctor prescribed me some antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory and sent me on my way.

So, that's where I am now. I'm feeling good enough that I worked a full day from home, and I'm planning on going trick-or-treating with the kids tonight. Well, they mostly go out on their own, with their friends, but I'll be wandering around the neighborhood with other parents, eating pizza and not drinking beer (I've heard it doesn't go well with antibiotics). It's nice. We actually have a little community, where everybody lives close by, and we all know each other, and our kids all hang out together. I never had that growing up. I'd go out trick-or-treating near my house and be lucky if I saw one other kid out. If I went with friends, it was always in their neighborhood.

By the way, I just remembered something: I think I was really sick on Halloween a few years ago. Let me check the annals. Turns out it was eight years ago, not exact "a few," but, yeah, the rest is accurate.

In other news, Lil' S2's flag football team, of which I am the coach, won the league championship this season. I'm way more pleased by this than I should be. I know it's just little kid sports, but still it feels good to be the champ. We didn't have an amazing regular season. We won four games and lost three and went into the playoffs as the sixth seed of eight. But we pulled out a one-point upset in the first round, which was particularly gratifying, as the opposing team's coach was jawboning the referees (three 16-year-old kids) the entire game. The next week, we came back in the semifinals after being down early, scoring a game-winning touchdown with only a few seconds left on the clock. Then, somehow, we pummeled our opponent in the finals, winning 33-12 or something like that.

The beauty of it is that it was a total team victory. We have some really good players, but we don't have that one way bigger/faster/stronger, precociously developed kid on our team. We just had everybody do their thing and the whole was greater than the sum or its parts. Lil' S2 played quarterback almost the entire playoffs, and he was great. He's not the world's greatest athlete, but he's got a pretty good arm,* and he's smart. He understands the game and how an offense should work better than most kids his age. It was really cool to watch him play and to be a part of it.

*And good hands. Twice we ran a "halfback pass," in which we hiked the ball to the halfback standing next to Lil' S2, and then he threw it to Lil' S2, and both times it went for a touchdown. That's my genius play calling, right there.

Alright, it's trick-or-treating hour. Until next time... 

Entry 782: Back To Reality, Unfortunately

The Mariners lost on Monday night and got knocked out of the playoffs. They were ahead in both the series (3-2 after five games) and the final game (3-1 after six innings), and they squander away both opportunities. It wasn't an epic meltdown of historic proportions or anything like that, but still it sucks. It means I have to return to reality, and that is unfortunate because reality kinda sucks right now in my neck of the woods. The massive DOGE layoffs, followed by the government shutdown means a lot of people in the DC area are out of work or working and not getting paid. There isn't an end in sight, either. Neither side is eager to negotiate, and neither side has much incentive to do so. Reps think they can pin the shutdown on the Dems, and the Dems want to make it look like they are doing something in opposition to Trump.

Personally, I think the Dems should cave on this one. They don't have to frame it that way, of course, but I think they should pass a continuing resolution and kick the can down the road. Then they could say something to the effect of, "We held out as long as we could, but too many innocent people are losing their livelihoods in this game of chicken. So, we are going to reopen the government, but continue to fight against rising healthcare premiums." Then they crank up the healthcare stuff to 11, and that becomes the main story by itself, with clearly delineated sides. As it is now, when people start feeling the pain of increased premiums, it's going to get lost in the broader shutdown narrative. It's just going to look like a result of political squabbling -- a pox on both your houses. It seems smarter to me politically (and better for the country) to isolate healthcare as a single-issue fight. It's a likely winner for the Dems, and they could use some wins at the moment.

Anyway... in happier news, Halloween is right around the corner, and tonight we are going to not one, but two parties to celebrate the occasion. We've got an Addams Family theme going on. S is Morticia; Lil' S2 is Pugsley; and I'm going as Thing (the disembodied hand). Lil' S1 is doing his own thing, and he's not going to any of the parties with us, anyway. (One is at the house of Lil' S2's classmate, and the other is an adult party.) I was going to go as Gomez, but the ready-made costume was kinda expensive, and I didn't want to spend a bunch of money for something I'd only wear for a few hours. This is when it would be good to be an artsy guy, who could craft his own costume on the cheap, but that's the exact opposite of me, so I'll just settle for being Thing. Even that is proving to be a challenge, however, as I have to figure out how to connect the plastic hand to my shoulder. I guess I'll duck tape it? Seems like the only option. Although, glue might work. I just have to use a shirt I don't care about.

Alright, I'm running out of time, so I'll just mention one more thing and call it a post. I just finished Mark Lanegan's memoir Sing Backwards and Weep. If you are unfamiliar with Mark Lanegan, you are surely not alone. I barely knew who he was until I bought the book. He was the lead singer for Screaming Trees, one of the less commercially successful Seattle grunge bands of the mid-90s, who still managed to score a few hits you might remember, namely "Nearly Lost You" and "All That I Know". I was never particularly into the band, although I'm pretty sure I saw them play live at some shady club once.

The book is a trip. You never know how accurate memoirs actually are, but if even a third of the stuff he says is true, it's crazy. He grew up in Ellensburg, Washington--a place I've visited many times, as it's a convenient stopping point when driving across the state (also my sister went to college there)--and he did not have what you would call a stable childhood. It's weird how the reader's (or at least this reader's) feelings changed throughout the story for the first-person narrator. In the beginning, I feel super sympathetic toward him and root for him to overcome his difficult upbringing and make something of himself. Then, once he gets a little bit of success, he becomes such an insufferable dickhead, egotistical and self-loathing (a toxic combination), that I only want to see him get his comeuppance. Then, after he fucks it all up and descends into unmitigated junkie-dom, I just hope he doesn't die.* Like I said, it's a trip, and if you're into that type of thing, I recommend it.

*Clearly he doesn't die because he wrote the book, but then he did die a few years ago at 57. Not exactly a ripe old age, but much better than 27, like his buddy.

That's all for today. Until next time... 

Entry 781: Diwali 2025

Tomorrow is Diwali, the festival of lights in Hindu tradition. We had a party at our house last night to celebrate with some of our Indian/mixed family friends. It was a lot of fun--too much fun, perhaps, as I am feeling the effects today. It's not the alcohol--I know better than to overindulge in that department and usually adhere to a two-beer limit--it's the food. We (S) ordered way, way too much of it, and as a result I ate way, way too much of it, and since the moment I woke up this morning, my stomach has felt like a witch's cauldron--a gurgling, vile morass.

It was so good, though. We got massive trays of samosas and pakoras, and those two items are probably my very favorite appetizers across any cuisine. I like to drizzle on both the red and green sauce (which I think are tamarind and mint chutneys, respectively, but I'm not completely sure), so that it adds a little soft texture to the crunch and a bit of sweet and sour to the spice. I probably ate, like, ten total samosas and pakoras, and then I had my actual "meal," a massive plate of biryani and palak paneer with naan. Oh, and somebody brought homemade mango cheesecake, so I had to have two pieces of that, as well. It would have been rude not to.

Part of the problem is that I hate wasting food, so I overeat to reduce the amount of "waste," but I really need to get over that fallacious line of thinking. At some point, pretty early in the night, I reach the amount of food I need to completely satiate my hunger. After that, anything I consume is "wasted" the same way it would be if I threw it in the trash. From a utilitarian standpoint, it is not any better to dump food down my gullet than it is to dump it down the garbage chute. In fact, it's unequivocally worse because it makes my stomach feel bad and makes me fatter than I need to be.

But, like I said, that's only part of the problem. Another major factor is that I love eating (who doesn't?), and I can, at times, exhibit poor impulse control when it comes to delicious food. It's a vice, and it's really my only major vice at this point in my life. Well, that and drinking too much coffee. And as far as vices go, it could be a lot worse. I could be a compulsive (losing) gambler like Pete Rose or a heroin addict like Mark Lanegan. The last two books I read are about these two guys, which is why they come to mind. Actually, I'm not done with the latter book, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir by Mark Lanegan (lead singer of Screaming Trees), but I'm pretty far into it. (I might give a fuller recap on this blog when I'm done.)

Oh, if you are wondering what we did with all the leftovers, I froze as much of it as I could, given our container and freezer space restrictions, and then S gave the rest away to a family we invited last night, but who couldn't make it. It's still way more than they will be able to eat, but if they throw it away I won't care, because I won't know. 

In other news, the Seattle Mariners are one win away from going to the World Series for the first time ever. They can clinch it tonight or, if they lose tonight, tomorrow night. If they lose tonight and tomorrow night, however, then their season is over. It's been an objectively glorious run thus far, but I haven't even been able to enjoy it like I should, so convinced I am that it's still going to end badly. What can I say? 40+ years of letdown can do a number on your sports-fan psyche. I only watched about a third of the last game live. Lil' S2 had a basketball game at the same time, so I went to that, and then S and the kids wanted to watch The Middle as a family, so I did that. When I turned it off, the Ms were losing 2-1 going into the 8th inning. I put my phone in a different room, so that I wouldn't be tempted to check the score or look at my texts from fellow Ms fans. When I finally saw they had come back and won, I wasn't even mad that I missed it. I was just relieved that they pulled it off.

Hopefully, I get that feeling of relief again tonight. It would be especially welcome, given that I have a super busy next three days at work--I have to go into the office everyday--and so I can't be staying up late fretting over baseball too much. If the Ms lose tonight and have to play tomorrow, it could throw a serious monkey wrench into my sleep schedule. So, come on Ms! Win tonight! Win for all the fans who have to get up early on Tuesday.

Until next time... 

 

Entry 780: Marathon Baseball and Schitt's Creek

Very tired today. I was up until 2:00 am watching the Mariners playoff game. In a previous entry, I said that I was just going to enjoy the Ms' playoff run and not stress about it, but the thing about that is that you don't really get to decide about the things you stress about. If you did, nobody would ever be stressed about anything. We would all just choose to not be! As soon as the Mariners started playing, it was like I was a child again, hanging on their every pitch and plate appearance. It's not an enjoyable way to watch to baseball, being so anxious, but I can't help it. Some sort of obsessive fandom got embedded in me when I was little, and I don't know how to get rid it, nor do I really want to, because on the rare (extremely rare, in the case of the Mariners) occasions it works out, it's pretty awesome.

And last night it worked out! On the brink of elimination, facing the best pitcher in baseball, the Seattle baseball nine scrapped their way to a 2-2 tie after nine innings. (It was the unlikely Leo Rivas who delivered the game-tying RBI. He was in the minors for most this season. In fact, I saw him hit a home run in a Rainiers game I attend with some friends and family.) Then, in extra innings, the Mariners proceeded to blow golden opportunity after golden opportunity, as the game dragged on and on and on. Thrice the Mariners had the potential series-winning run on second with no outs and couldn't bring him around. The probability of not scoring a run in one of those instances is 38%, so the probably of not scoring a run in all three is only 5%, and yet that's what happened. Thankfully, for as inept as the Ms' offense was, their pitching and defense was the exact opposite, and they continually hung zeros on the Tigers to get to the 15th inning.

At this point, about 1:30 am for me, I'm hoping the Ms score in no small part so that I can go bed. It's like 65% I want them to win; 35% I want to sleep. Turning the game off and finding out the result in the morning crosses my mind, but I quickly dismiss it. I wouldn't actually be able to sleep, anyway. I can do that for a low-stakes regular season game, not for a winner-take-all playoff game. So, I stay up, continuing to watch, vacillating between sitting down, standing up like I'm part of the crowd watching in person, swinging a back-scratcher like a baseball bat (as a kid I used to pantomime what I wanted to happen each plate appearance), and stretching -- might as well do something slightly healthful.

I get my wish, and the game ends shortly in spectacular fashion. JP Crawford, one of my favorite players, leads off the bottom of the 15th and flicks a single to center field. Randy Arozarena -- a guy who had one of the greatest postseasons ever a few years ago for the Tampa Bay Rays and has been downright bad this one for the Ms -- gets plunked on the first pitch. Cal "Big Dumper" Raleigh, the Ms best player, in the midst of a historically great season, then flies out, but it's deep enough to move Crawford to third and, after a bad throw from the center fielder, Arozarena to second. This turns out to be a big deal, because it leaves first base open, enticing Tigers manager AJ Hinch to intentionally walk Julio Rodriguez. On paper, it makes some sense, as Julio is the Ms second best hitter, and loading the bases sets up the double play (the Tigers have already turned two of them in extras) and creates a force at every base. However, as somebody who has watched the Mariners play dozens of times over the past few years, I'm not that upset Julio doesn't get to bat. For all his greatness, he frequently chases pitches and strikes out. I actually feel better about Jorge Polanco putting the ball in play than I do Julio. And Polanco does indeed put the ball in play. On a full count, he drills a single between the hole at first and second base, and that's that. Ballgame. Series. Ms win! Ms win! And I go to bed happy.

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In other news of nonsense, I finished Schitt's Creek a few days ago. Great show. I tried to watch it some years ago, when it first came out, and just couldn't get into it. I don't know why. But then a few months ago, S, a big fan of the series, got me to watch the first few episodes again with her, and this time I really took to it, so much so that I convinced her to let me watch the rest of the series on my own, so that I wouldn't have to wait for those relatively rare moments when we are both free to watch something together. I love all the characters on the show--not bad one in the bunch--but below is a list of my ten favorites with a quote from each of them. It's in approximate order from least favorite to most favorite, but ranking your favorite characters is like ranking your favorite songs. If I did this tomorrow instead of today, I would have a markedly different list.

10. Jocelyn Schitt: Once I found a bag of Roland’s ex girlfriends bras... BURNED them... except the ones that were my size. 

9. Tywla Sands: My Uncle Ken only has three fingers now, which is too bad because he's deaf, and he only speaks using sign language. But he made his choices. 

8.  Bob Currie: Hey, Johnny. Keepin' busy, or, uh, hardly workin'?

7. Stevie Budd: I don't think I've ever heard you use the word courage before outside of criticizing people's style choices.  

6. David Rose: I’m starting to feel like I’m trapped in an Avril Lavigne lyric here. 

5. Johnny Rose: Hashtag. Is that two words? 

4. Ted Mullens: I don't know about little, because I'm benching 225 right now, so it's not really something someone little... 

3. Roland Schitt: I'm sorry, taut? (Laughs.) What is that, old English? How 'bout I hold it tight?  

2. Alexis Rose: You try parallel parking in a burka, David. 

1. Moira Rose: Stop acting like a disgruntled pelican.

Until next time...     

 

 

Entry 779: Lousy Situation (With Updates)

Last week, I wrote an entire post, and then today when I hopped on Blogger to write a new one, I realized that I never actually posted the one from last week. So, I guess I'll just do that and call it good. I'll throw in a few updates though.

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I gave Lil' S2 a buzz cut last night, and he's not very happy about it. It doesn't look bad. If you saw him, you probably wouldn't think twice about it. He just looks like a normal little kid with a very short haircut. But compared to what he used to have -- a bountiful, Beatles-esque moptop -- I can understand why he's sad about the change. Unfortunately, however, he contracted a terrible -- like, seriously disgusting -- case of head lice for the second time in six weeks, so it had to be done. Well, it didn't have to be done. We could've stuck with the shampoo treatment, but that can be a huge hassle if you want to do it right, and you want to do it right, because there's not a lot of gray area between right and wrong. Either you kill all the lice and their eggs or you don't, and if you don't, then they multiply and you're are back to where you started. We did two rounds of the shampoo, but during the second S was still combing out a bunch of nits and eggs, probably all dead, but there were so many that we pushed for the clippers. Lil' S2 reluctantly agreed and then was almost in tears when he saw the result. Oh well, he'll get over it, and the wonderful thing about hair is that it always grows back... until one day it doesn't, but he shouldn't have to worry about that for another 20 years or so.

Update: The first day after this happened, Lil' S2 wore a hat the entire day, but now he and everybody else has gotten used to it, so it's not a big deal. Plus, hair grows back pretty fast at that age. In a few weeks, we will probably have to take him to the barber for a clean up. The thing about buzz cuts is that they grow back even everywhere, which looks weird once it gets longer (baby chick look). At some point, you need to get it reshaped by a professional to avoid the goofy stage between short and normal.  

In other news, the distractions in my life are working decently well to keep me sane amidst a world of craziness. It's a tightrope walk to keep yourself informed and stay vigilant without descending into complete doomerism. Sports is my main form of self-medication. I've been able to maintain a steady workout schedule since school is back in session, so that's good. The main thing there is avoiding those nagging injuries that put you on the shelf for a few weeks at a time. I've come up with an ingenious plan to that end: Don't go as hard. That's it--don't run as fast; don't lift as much; don't punch as hard, at least not all the time. I gotta pick my spots now. Because I only go to my gym twice a week (for scheduling reasons), I typically double-up and take back-to-back classes, one martial arts/self-defense class, and one strength and conditioning class. When I first started doing this, nine years ago, it was no big deal. I could pretty much go max effort the entire time and be okay. Now, I just physically cannot do that anymore. I have to scale back during the first class or else I won't be able to survive the second class without pulling, straining, or popping something somewhere in my body. The instructor has noticed too. Sometimes he'll encourage me to be more aggressive and push myself, and I always say okay, but in my head I'm thinking: Nah, I'm not going to do that right now. You'll understand why in 20 years. Hey, if it's good enough for Lebron James, it's good enough for me.

Update: Of course, almost immediately after writing this, I violated my own rule and tweaked my back. We were doing front squats and the RX (recommend weight) looked a little heavy, but I decided to do it anyway, and while I was doing the last set, I felt something strain in my right lat. It's not that bad, thankfully, but still... annoying. Go moderate or go home! That has to be my new motto.

But as the intensity of my own athletic endeavors has ebbed, the ferocity with which I spectate others playing sports has remained steady. And it's a pretty good time to be a Seattle sports fan. The Seahawks are 3-1 through their first four games, having not quite blown it Thursday night against the Cardinals, and the Mariners--the perpetually not-quite-good-enough Emerald City nine--have not only made the playoffs, but they won the AL West for the first time in 24 years. Not only that but they earned a first-round bye, and they somehow have the best odds to win the World Series according to FanGraphs. Now, to be an M's fan is to repeatedly get the rug pulled out from under you, so I'm completely ready for--expecting even--the disappointing collapse, but there is something freeing in that mindset. There's nothing that can hurt me too badly anymore. It's like when I worked as a dishwasher at Pete's Barbecue Steakhouse and the dishes would pile up (because they were too cheap to adequate staff us), and all the servers were mad at me, even though I was going as fast as I could (and they weren't exactly offering to come back and help), and I'd reach a zenlike state where the negativity was just background noise that I could easily drown out (sometimes literally with the Mariners game on the radio, ironically). That's where I am now with the Ms now. They probably won't win the pennant, so I'm just going to enjoy their success now, while I can. If nothing else, they effectively put a stake through the heart of every Astros fan last week with this ridiculous play, and that is some glorious schadenfreude that nobody can take away.

Update: The Mariners play their first postseason game tonight against the Detroit Tigers. M's are heavily favored--they are clearly the better team--but in the baseball playoffs, random variance rules supreme, so the Tigers could easily win three games in a row and that would be that. And of course the games are on FS1, the one major sports channel not offered by my TV package (Sling Orange), so I begrudgingly upgraded (Sling Orange & Blue). It might not be that costly though. I think I can cancel before my next billing cycle, and only get charged about $6 for the prorated upgraded. That's totally worth it for at least three M's games (especially if they win!). Also, I now get NFL Network, so I can also watch the Browns against the Vikings tomorrow morning. It's a terrible game, but it is football.

Alright, until next time... 

Entry 778: On Several Disparate Topics

Whenever a politically divisive story rises to national attention, the one thing you can always count on is people pointing out how this proves the exact things they have been saying all along -- confirming one's priors, as it's often worded. I'm going to do that now, as I think two beliefs I've held (and shared on this blog) have borne out over the past few weeks. The first one is that I said that people on the left should not be cheering on or calling for people to lose their livelihoods for expressing opinions (or sometimes stating literal facts) that weren't 100% in lockstep with the social justice mores of the time. It's terrible politics, as it alienates could-be allies, and it contributes to an anti-free speech climate, which will undoubtedly not redound to your favor when different people, less friendly to your causes, are in power. The other thing I said is that as bad it is on one side, it's way worse on the other. The things "normies" hate about the left are true, but they're much, much more true of the right. Suffice it say, both of these priors have been confirmed recently, yet again, for like the millionth time. And I'll just leave it at that.

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Robert Redford died on Tuesday. I think he's the first "before my time" actor of whom I was cognizant. I knew who he was--he was Roy Hobbes, after all--but I also knew that his best work came before my earliest memories. There were the leading men of my childhood--Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger--and then there was the generation immediately before them with guys like Redford and James Caan and Burt Reynolds. And I started thinking, is Robert Redford the last of the "before my time" male movie stars? Caan and Reynolds are both dead, and so is just about every other leading man from cinema prior to 1980 -- Steve McQueen, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, etc. But, still, the answer is no, Redford is not the absolute last "before my time" actor. Clint Eastwood is still alive, after all, so is Jack Nicholson. And then are a few guys like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro, who straddle the line between "before my time" and "in my time," so I'm not sure whether I should count them or not. But Redford is certainly among the last, and he might have been the best. In fact, if you consider his myriad excellent acting performances, his work as a director, and the fact that he co-founded the Sundance Film Festival, you could make a strong case that nobody had a better overall career in film than Robert Redford.

[So hokey, so good] 

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The other day some landscapers came over for a cleanup job, and I was watching them through the window lay down some mulch, and I was reminded that "mulch" was a word I didn't learn until surprisingly late in life. For the first 25 or so years of my life I called it "beauty bark." I just thought that was its name. Then one time I was at a friend house, and I walked through her backyard with no shoes on, and then I complained that I had slivers in my feet from the beauty bark.

"What? What's beauty bark?" she responded with a chuckle.

"That stuff," I replied as I pointed to it.

"You mean, mulch?"

"No, that stuff, right there. It's called beauty bark."

"What the hell is beauty bark?" she said now laughing hysterically.

"That stuff! That's what it's called!"

We didn't resolve it then, and we've since lost touch, but eventually I had to concede that she was right. It's mulch. Everybody calls it that, even a company named BeautiBark.

I tried to think of some other things that I used to call one thing and now call a different thing. I came up with a few. 

Pop. As a kid I was firmly in the "pop" camp. I was familiar with the term "soda," and it didn't strike my ear oddly when people called it that, but I always called it pop. Interestingly, the full "soda pop" would have sounded weird to me. That was the old-timey name you'd read in Archie Comics or something like that. This is completely a regional thing. And if this reddit map is to be believed, western Washington state is now a "soda" area, along with most the country. I might have been among the last generation of pop-sayers in the Sea-Tac region. But now I'm a soda guy. I've just lived too long in a place where it sounds weird to say "pop." In fact, Lil' S2 didn't even know what meant until a few days ago. We were watching The Middle, and one of the characters says something about drinking pop, and he was like "What's pop?"

Cream rinse. At my childhood home, when it came to shower time, we had shampoo and "cream rinse." It wasn't until I started spending the night at a certain friend's house that I realized that cream rinse only existed in my house. Everywhere else it was "conditioner." From what I can gather online, cream rinse was a thinner, less emollient precursor to conditioner, and by the 1980s, when I was a child, it was mostly obsolete, both as a product and a term. It never completely died though. You can still find it today, although it's usually branded as "creme rinse," presumably to make it sound more luxurious. Being that when I Google "creme rinse," however, the first hits are for lice treatment, I don't think the rebrand worked.  

It's funny, thinking back to that time at my friend's house when I first learned of conditioner. We used to wash and style our hair together, just for fun. Actually, Lil' S2 does that with his friends sometimes too. They call it "barbershop." It's cute.

Well, that's all for today. Until next time... 

Entry 777: A Mostly Optimistic Post

It was another rough news week. We seem to be having a lot of these over the past, what, five and a half years? As you've probably noticed, I don't really delve into the doom and gloom on this blog. I'm not naive to it, it's just not what I want to write about, and being that this blog really serves no purpose other than giving me an outlet to write about what I want to write about, I'm not going to write about things I don't want to write about. I'm going to write about things I want to write about, and today that's a really interesting episode of the Lost Debate podcast I listened to about AI. Before I get to that, however, I want to link to an episode of a different podcast, The Gist, about renewal energy. It's good, and reasonably optimistic, and probably on a more important topic than the AI one, but I personally find AI stuff more fascinating than climate stuff, so that's what I going with today.

You should listen to the Lost Debate episode yourself, but if you don't, I'll give you the tl;dl (too long; didn't listen) version below. And if you want the tl;dr version of my tl;dl version, it's this: Over the past year or so, the advancements in AI have mostly stalled out, and there's no indication that they will leap forward again anytime soon. This means the promise of a benevolent super-intelligence solving all the world's problems will likely go unfulfilled. But I don't think too many people were banking on that anyway. On the contrary, I think most people were apprehensive about the prospect of machines attempting to destroy humanity Terminator style, or at least of taking all our jobs, replacing all our human relationships, and depriving of us of any sense of purpose whatsoever. It seems that those things probably won't happen either.

Now, before I go any further, I should say that I am not an expert in AI, and I'm largely regurgitating what the guest of the podcast, a computer science professor named Cal Newport, said. But I do have a strong background in applied math and scientific computation, so I understand a lot of the concepts at a high-level (and I feel confident I could learn the nitty-gritty details if I took the time to do so). I have just enough of a comprehension to put my own spin on things, so I'm not just mimicking what the expert says. Also, everything everybody says is just speculation, anyway. Nobody actually knows what will happen. Not all speculation is the same--some people should be listened to over others--but it's still speculation and predictions. There's no reason why I can't add my opining to the mix.

Okay, with all those caveats out of the way, here are my thoughts...

To understand why AI technology has seemingly stalled, it might help to understand how AIs like ChatGPT work. I once heard somebody describe these AIs as an "amazingly good auto-fill." Basically, given a prompt, they decide what the "best" first word is, and then using that first word as addition input, they decide what the best second word is, and then using that, they decide the third word, and then the fourth word, and so, until they get to a point where the best word is no word, and they stop. If they were good at deciding what each word should be along the way, they will have produced an intelligent response.

This begs the question: How do they decided the "best" word along the way? That's where things you probably heard of like "training" and "machine learning" come into play. Basically, before an AI is released to the public, it goes through a long computing period, where it scours a kajillion bytes of available data -- books, blogs, songs, etc. -- and then it remembers certain markers about these things. So, when the user prompts it, it goes, Oh, I've seen something like this before; I should respond as follows...

It might be easier to think about in terms of a game like chess. The best chess engines can now annihilate the best human players. In the past 30 years, we've gone from machines can never beat humans to humans can never beat machines. The way computers are able to win so consistently is by making moves no human could ever think to make. For example, a chess bot might just give up a knight early in the game for seemingly no reason. It has a reason -- it's played against its self millions of times, and it knows from experience that a knight sacrifice in this given situation is a winning move -- but there is no way any human could possibly deduce this. Humans strategize and think a few moves ahead -- if I do this, they'll do this, then I can do this... Machines assess given situations, and then use what they've learned from their extensive training sessions to make the corresponding moves with the highest win percentages. Nobody, not even the machine itself, can explain exactly why a machine made a certain move other than that's just what the numbers developed through training say.

Because games have well-defined rules and state spaces, it's not too surprising that computers can get very good--far better than any human--at games through this type of learning. It's much, much more surprising that AIs can learn this way for life in general. But they can. In fact, this is what jump-started the AI hype a few years ago in the first place. The major AI companies decided to ramp up the training of their chatbots, using more computing power for a longer period of time, and the results were off the charts. Just by increasing training, the chatbots got way better at things -- holding conversations, solving logic problems, writing songs, etc. So, they did it again, and the gains jumped up again. So, they did it again, and again the results jumped.

This is when we really started to hear about AI taking over, as the belief, understandably, was that AI was going to just keep getting better as the training got more intensive. Working under this assumption, the AI companies ramped up again and built massive computing warehouses, and subjected their chatbots to super-powered months-long training sessions. And the needle barely moved. They got better but only marginally so. Apparently, the improvement for Meta's commercial product was so minimal, it wasn't even worth releasing as a new version. Just as weird as it was to see these incredible jumps in the first rounds of training, it was equally weird to see things suddenly stall out.

So, that's where we are now, and according to Professor Newport, the upward scaling of the training was the promise behind AI. That was basically the whole shebang. Without that, AI is just a normal, impressive, maybe-good, maybe-bad new technology, not a humanity altering singularity. And for most people, I think, this is a comforting thought.

Alright, I actually had a few more things to say on this, but I appear to have run out of time -- gotta go get my flag football coach on.

Until next time... 

PS -- Like last time, I had to hustle off to the game before posting this, and like last week, Lil' S2's team came up victorious. It started out shaky, as Lil' S2 threw a pick-six on the game's opening play from scrimmage, but we persevered, and pulled it out 18-13. I had a moment as coach I'm particularly proud of. Late in the game with us losing, we faced a big 4th-and-long. Defenses are allowed one blitz per four downs (where a kid can just run straight for the QB), and they hadn't use it yet, so I knew they would. The entire drive I had this kid M playing QB, so I put Lil' S2 next to him, seemingly as a running back and then I had M call "go!", but I had the snapper hike it to Lil' S2 instead. The blitzer predictably came for M, giving Lil' S2 enough time to get off a bomb to our star wide out Z, who made a brilliant catch in traffic, converting the first down. Then we scored the go ahead touchdown a few plays later. Bam!