Our fears about artificial intelligence are a projection of the fears about ourselves. The human ego desires to control the world, and AI is probably the biggest threat to human control we have created to date. We know that we are incomplete yet our ego insists on turning to ourselves to resolve what ails us rather than changing our mind to follow the path of Jesus.
Personal Programming
I am old enough to remember a time when there were no personal computers. While computers existed throughout my life time (I was born in 1966), personal computers didn’t exist until 1975 (the Altair 8800) and back then they weren’t very useful because one had to program these computers for them to do anything.
In the 1970s there were no stores for one to go to and buy software needed to make the PC do something useful, instead one wrote their own programs. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, which enabled one to write their own programs, and ironically that led to the formation of Microsoft and the personal computer software industry.
The need to write programs limited the market for PCs to hobbyists who were willing to spend the time to learn and tinker and share their code with others. To most hobbyists the idea of selling programs was abhorrent as they saw them as art to be freely shared, and with this point of view the animosity toward Microsoft was born.
I was struck by how bright these white blossoms were in the morning sun.
Building My Personal Assistant App
Everyone seems to think Apple must have an AI product. Why should that be true? A problem many companies have is constantly chasing the next big thing at the expense of doing their own thing very well. The problem I see for Apple is that it is a hardware company and AI is software. Apple probably should focus on making sure it’s hardware runs AI the best and it could focus on sandboxing AI in a way to protects privacy, but these are not AI products.
XTEInk X4
It’s a damp and increasing cold day for the start of lap 61.
Time As A Retiree
I’ve learned over the years the best way for me to change is through small habits or routines. In 2019 I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and I found the best way for me to manage my blood sugar was by taking a ten to twenty minute walk after eating a meal. My walks are so much a part of my day that it feels very abnormal when I am not doing them.
So, when considering all this time I now have for myself, I began considering what it is I want to be doing each day. There were the obvious things like reading more and learning more, but I also realized that I could be doing a better job of helping to keep the house clean. Rather than doing all the cleaning all at once I broke down these tasks down into 15 minute items, one per day during week days.
Michigan Central
The Michigan Central train station closed in 1988, one year before Ruth and I moved to the Detroit area. I can think of no better symbol for the fall and rise of Detroit than this historic building. Built by the Vanderbilts and opened in 1914, it is a sibling to Grand Central station in New York.
After its abandonment by Amtrak it became a well known eye sore, and as a ruin it became used as a set for movies like Batman vs. Superman. Unlike the locals, our memories of this once glorious building is of a haunting structure with blown out windows.
Reports of its restoration and re-use surfaced throughout the years, but never became real until Ford purchased the building in 2018. It finally re-opened in 2024 and ever since I have wanted to go see it, which we finally did yesterday. The building, like Detroit, has survived the decline of the 90s and early 2000s to be the most prominent physical manifestation of Detroit’s motto: “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.”
See the results of the labor of so many to restore this building to its original beauty in the pictures that I took. I envy those who get to work in this building, one with the personality afforded by wood, limestone, and granite. Designed when architecture emphasized materials of the earth over materials made from the earth.
I use Lillihub developed by Loura as my primary micro.blog web app. The app’s existence is a testament to the open nature of micro.blog, ironically it has all of the things that Dave Winer has been promoting about Wordpress.
If you are a micro.blog member and haven’t tried Lillihub, I recommend you check it out. Loura has recently made some UI improvements that have a fresher and more appealing layout. I also appreciate her prompt response to my feedback for making dark/light mode a toggle and adding keyboard shortcuts. The shortcuts greatly speed the ability to move through the timeline.
Dave Rogers: “The tech-bros are building slaves.” I had not thought of AI this way, but it makes some sense.
Finished reading: Hostile Takeover A Jessica Warne Spy Novel by Cheri Baker 📚
I think this MIT Technology Review article, noting a gap in knowing what is going on with AI between experts and non-experts, asks the wrong question and reaches the wrong conclusion. The gap is about trust rather than knowledge and it is a lack in trust of the humans making/using AI more so than the AI itself. Non-experts having lived with the Internet and seeing the corrosive effects of an addictive social network fueled by greedy humans have no reason to trust nor believe any claims of new technology for altruistic reasons.
I think North Side Baseball provides an explanation on the Chicago Cubs that as good as any other and I would summarize it thusly, they have no margin for error. Without any big bats in the lineup prone to hit home runs they need the entire lineup to be hitting, and the probability of that happening consistently is low. For me it all comes back to how this team has been constructed around good but budget friendly players.
Well, that was a shock. Down arrow-ing through my morning bookmarks and hit lillihub.com to find a complete UI overhaul, most prominently being dark mode. I don’t see a way to turn dark mode off and usually such web sites mess up my eyes, but for some reason that is not the case. Perhaps it’s because the text is not in bright white but either an off-white or another shade.
Spring has come.
Retirement First Quarter Report
At the beginning of April I passed the first three month milestone of retirement and I want to write down some thoughts about this new phase of life. Am I glad that I retired? Absolutely, but I would be lying if I did not admit feeling some fear caused by the fact that our retirement income is tied to the market that reacts to the whims of the President of the United States.
The market, and my reaction to it, is emotional and so the challenge is in managing those emotions. Uncertainty is a reality that always exists and my technique for living with uncertainty is to focus on, to the extent possible, what I know. For example, if all of our savings were to disappear, which is a very unlikely scenario, I have had these three months of life lived to my schedule whereas I could be still working, still have the savings disappear, and not have had that time.
Retirement for me is about savoring the most precious gift of time, which always passing and often only appreciated via hindsight. The best way to face uncertainty is in gratitude for the current moment. I have reasons to be grateful simply to be alive to experience this moment, but I confess that in the later years of my career I grew frustrated with having the precious time of my life controlled by a corporation that simply did not know nor care about me.
I’ve been working since I was 12 years old. When I define work in the context of my life, I broadly include in it all the requirements placed on my time by others, school and employers. Forty seven years, almost non-stop, of waking up to an alarm clock dictated by somebody else, and when I became more aware that my remaining time in life is shorter than the past life I have lived I grew more irritated with having to share that remaining time with a lifeless corporate entity.
Had you asked me what I planned to do in my retirement I would have simply answered, not work! Loveboy’s Working For The Weekend has been on loop in the soundtrack of my life these past 47 years. I retired so that there were no more stressful Sunday nights as my mind and body gave up the brief bit of relaxation it started experiencing the prior Friday evening.
Mission accomplished! I have even found on a few occasions that I forgot the day of the week, feeling as though it were a weekend.
Same Ole Cubs
Every year it seems the problems with the Chicago Cubs is the same, they struggle to hit with runners in scoring position because they have poor hitters. When the same issues keep appearing that indicates to me there is a systemic problem, which is not something fixable through signing one or two players. The evaluation of talent and construction of the roster is producing the same results we see year after year.
Getting the Cubs to the World Series after a century of losing is turning out to be easier than getting them back a decade after. It’s easy to get a talented team when you tank seasons and trade away what experienced players you have for prospects. The core of the 2016 team were those prospects lead by experienced veterans, but veterans who were in the later half of their careers.
Obviously, fans are not going to allow such a heavy rebuild. Seems to me that if you aren’t able to load up on prospects you have change your approach to obtaining MLB players. Every free agent signing the Cubs have made since 2016 are of players who are in the back end of their careers. Signing Alex Bregman this year is no different than signing Dansby Swanson, players who have won championships but who are not in their prime and therefore seem less capable of hitting consistently over a season.
Read Joan Westenberg’s essay, Optimism Is Not A Personality Flaw. Christians actively working to initiate armageddon are the most dangerous of the pessimists that Westenberg describes.
Finished reading: Before Religion by Brent Nongbri 📚