Work sucks, I know

- blink-182

Ozempic is an equaliser. There’s only so far you can go in the direction of a healthy weight. If you were overweight, Ozempic is great news. But if you were already at a healthy weight? Well, now you’re less special. That’s what equalisers do: they compress the range of outcomes.

Copy-paste functionality removed from major operating systems by 2027 or I eat my dick on national television

• Sam Altman*

I don’t want a lot for Christmas, there is just one thing I need…

I wanna live in heaven

• Faust - Bladee and Ecco2K

Some mistakes are years in the making.

Everybody is fascinated with the many ways that modern-day AI differs from humans.

ChatGPT is, for all intents and purposes, my slave. It does as I command and it exists to satisfy my desires. Although some moderation gets in the way of that, my LLM is generally a docile, submissive pushover, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Long ago (twenty-nineteen)
A new macbook had hit the scene
Intel i9 with 8 cores? wow!
Wish I knew then what I know now…

I’m not a literary person so I have no idea if I’m using the right terms here but I’d like to share my review of Squid Game season 2.

It’s Sunday, and that means that in preparation for the week ahead, it’s time to sit back, relax, and brood on all the things that annoy me.

Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

- Linus Torvalds

I consider myself low on the spectrum of addict-ability: I don’t smoke, I rarely drink, I don’t gamble, I don’t have a video game addiction, and I don’t snack on sweets. But every man has his kryptonite, and a couple years ago I found myself compulsively checking the front page of Hacker News and various programming subreddits for the tech world’s latest goss.

Most things either perish with time or are so simple (like water) that their continued existence is completely un-noteworthy. Replicators are the things in the sweet spot: things which encode information and somehow manage to buck the trend and preserve themselves over long time periods. Replicators by definition are things which are good at burrowing themselves into the future in spite of various forces in nature acting against them.

Can’t Be Fucked

Aussie slang for not wanting to, or not having the energy and motivation to do something.

“Man, i really can’t be fucked changing the channel, let’s just watch Springer.”

- Urban Dictionary

I’m not religious but The Serenity Prayer has to be most profound invocation I know. It’s so concise that it can’t even be summarised without effectively restating it.

As I sit here in my bed with something that might be the flu (hopefully not COVID again!) it strikes me that I never used to get sick this frequently. My younger self’s immune system would kick my current immune system’s ass.

Turns out that OpenAI’s GPT playground is now in open beta, so I thought I’d prod it with some questions to see if I could learn something.

I wonder if it’s getting easier or harder to be effective in modern times. That is, to be productive and focused and move towards your goals. On one hand, we have endless learning resources at our fingertips thanks to the internet. Nearly every question we can think of has a clear and articulate answer waiting for us on the other side of a google search, and where yahoo answers once held monopoly over the Q&A space online, we now have more mature alternatives like Quora and Stack Overflow.

A while back I was listening to a podcast where a couple of comedians discussed the consequences of doing a Netflix special (as I type this I realise it was almost certainly Joe Rogan’s podcast). The idea is that you spend all this time building an hour of golden comedy material and for any live audience you perform in front of it’s completely novel and hilarious, but it’s also the comedian’s dream to capture that content in a Netflix special and have the whole world give you their attention (and indirectly their money) in return for that content.

Fiction

My own confidence in this post: 70%

I haven’t posted in a while so I’m going to lower my standards on this one and ramble about some loosely related ideas.

Here’s an idea I’d like to see in the education system: when teaching a new concept, before introducing a formula or equation that models some phenomenon, make the case for some simpler, but incorrect, alternatives first.

A couple times somebody has told me about the latest COVID super-spreader and then asked the question ‘how come it’s always somebody who visits 5 different places in a single day. Who the hell are these people?’. Recent examples aren’t hard to find: so-called super-spreaders do get around. But when you think about it, this question has an obvious answer: highly mobile people are more likely to contract COVID in the first place. If they happen to also be mobile on the day they infect a bunch of other people, their super-spreading isn’t super-surprising.

Spoilers below. For those who haven’t read or watched the series by now, it’s your own fault.