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!

Entry 776: Back To Normal Chaos

Finally! Both kids are in school again, so we are back to our regular schedule, so we are back to normal chaos. When you have a spouse who travels as much as S does, the natural of order of things includes a relatively high degree of disorder. She's here now, but leaving again at the end of next week, then returning for, like, ten hours, and then leaving again for a few days. It's okay. As the kids get older, it gets easier on me. It's the little things. I still have to do most the big things--meals, dishes, laundry, etc.--but the smaller things the kids can often do on their own now, and that takes a lot of the burden off of me. For example, Lil' S2 can walk to and from school now. He also can be home by himself for a few minutes. Just those two things are huge boons when it comes to planning out my day. Also, my sister-in-law just lives up the street and is almost always willing/able to help out when asked. (We have a nice quid pro quo going: She watches our kids; we watch her dog.) Also, also, S's travels earn me a lot of relationship capital. S already goes through spells in which she thinks she's "doing all the work." I, of course, disagree with this assessment, but it would be even worse (in her mind) if not for her work trips.

My take on the "doing all the work" thing is that she often underestimates the amount of total work that is being done, which I think is common for people -- everybody, not just S -- when they get stressed out/overwhelmed. Also, I think there is a prioritization thing going on, where people don't "count" things as much if they personally aren't that invested in them, which can cause a skewed perspective. For example, S isn't into sports, so I don't get as much credit for transporting/equipping/coaching Lil' S2 in his many sporting endeavors, even though it's a huge time and effort commitment on my part. Similarly, there are things S will worry about that don't seem all that important or pressing to me, and so I'm less sympathetic toward her in regards to these stressors. For instance, a few weeks ago, she became fixated on getting a new car, and it ate up a ton of her already limited bandwidth, even though our old car still worked fine. Yes, it was getting old and wearing down, and we were going to have to replace it at some point in the medium-to-near future, but the immediacy of the issue in S's mind seemed completely self-imposed to me. On the plus side, we have a new car now, so that's cool. 

Anyway... the only reason I feel comfortable airing S's and my marriage peccadilloes is because we have a strong foundation underneath it all. That's a welcome realty check I've gotten recently talking with people who have real relationship problems. I mentioned in my previous entry the father of Lil' S1's friend who is going through a contentious divorce, and I had a very strange text exchange with him last weekend. His son spent the night at our house, and he came over to pick him up in the morning. We were making small talk, and so I asked him where he was living now. He answered, and I literally thought nothing of it. Then a few hours later, I got a text from him asking how I knew he was getting a divorce, as if somehow it was supposed to be a secret, even though they separated like six months ago, and his son and my son hang out all the time. I wrote back a very vague, anodyne response, and the exchange went from there. It wasn't bad, necessarily, just weird and more than a little awkward. Apparently, he wrote similar texts to a bunch of his son's friends' parents, which is not the type of thing somebody does when things are going great for them. So, I tried to be human, while not really saying anything of substance and definitely not getting into the middle of things. And next time I see him, I'm sticking to the weather as a conversation topic.

This text exchange made me think of a friend of mine who also got divorced recently. We also met this guy and his ex-wife through our kids' friends, and we became pretty close socially, especially the dad and me, as we've gotten together for drinks quite a few times. He's been handling his divorce the exact opposite way, where it's been super amicable, and he's been very accommodating -- so accommodating that more than once I've thought he's being too accommodating. I thought he was getting walked on a bit and should be more of a hard-ass. However, in light of how this other dad is handling things, I see things in a different light, and I really respect the way my friend is going about things. It makes a lot more sense to me now, and I bet it takes a lot of strength to be civil in a situation like this (especially given he didn't want to break up in the first place). I mean, I can only imagine how terrible getting divorced would be, and that gets multiplied by one thousand when there are kids involved. Getting through it in a way that minimizes the damage--even if it means sacrificing a bit of what you want and putting your ego and hurt feelings and animosity aside--seems like a very worthy goal.

That last thing I will say on this, for the sake of fairness, is that breakups don't just involve one person, and I don't know everybody's full story (and don't need to or want to know), and it might not always be possible to navigate the situation like my friend is doing. It's something I hope I never learn about first hand.

Alright, my time here is up. I have to get ready for Lil' S2's first flag football game of the season.

Until next time... 

Update: I forgot to post this immediately after I wrote it, so the flag football game already happened. We dominated in a 27-0 victory. Lil' S2 threw a couple of touchdown passes in the effort.