It’s that or slow death.

Not looking forward to another summer of wildfires. Had one a few years ago. Have air conditioning units that I connect to the windows for days when the smoke is bad. Suppose I should get a bag for evacuation ready. Plan to cut one of a trio of aspens down. It is too close to the house.

‘I don’t worry about a robot takeover’: AI expert Michael Wooldridge on big tech’s real dangers (and occasional blessings) Although I'm not big on game theory, the theorist behind it is interviewed in this piece from The Guardian. His thoughts on AI. Some of it is absolutely frightening. “The limits are the computer power and the data that you’re able to throw at it. And data is now a real constraint.” The whole of Wikipedia made up just 3% of GPT-3’s training data, he says. “Where do you get 10 times more data from next time around?” Data is becoming a valuable resource for that reason, and some organisations possess a potential trove of it. “The NHS is sitting on a huge amount of data about human beings. That’s the most valuable kind of data imaginable.” Private corporations would pay dearly for it, he says, “but I suspect that whoever signed off on such a deal would live to regret it”. He imagines a dystopian future scenario where “you’re only able to have access to the NHS if you agree to be wired up to wearable tech that monitors you on a regular basis … I think we are very quickly going to a world where the next generation of online influencers basically agree to have all of their life experiences, everything they say and do and see, harvested to provide data for AI.” From an academic standpoint, Wooldridge resents the way Silicon Valley has come to dominate the AI field, both in terms of resources (“GPT-3 required 20,000-odd AI supercomputers to train; there are probably a couple of hundred in the whole of the University of Oxford”) and the public discourse. “We have seen the narrative stolen by Silicon Valley, which is promoting a version of AI [profit-driven, job-replacing and almost entirely focused on large language models] that certainly me and an awful lot of my colleagues have no interest in promoting or building,” he says. “It’s kind of depressing, as somebody who’s spent their career trying to build AI to make a better world and to improve people’s lives.” If he could, though, he would slow the pace of AI development, “just so that we have more time to understand what’s going on”. It is, he points out, a classic “prisoner’s dilemma”, one of the foundational parables of game theory. My reservations with game theory is--it seems to me--that the answer to most of the 'dilemmas' are to be found in the age old truism: The truth will set you free.

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Link to video Disgraceful.

Link to video This is beyond the pale. It's easy to say but it's true.

I might take jon's recommendation as well, and thank you so much wtg and Andy.

We can't have people not be divided or the people might start thinking about things that matter.

Either that or Alexa speaks cat. Reason enough to never have a device that spends my money because it thinks I want something.

Wtg Waxwings are winter visitors but I still have to see them. Your gnomes look right at home

@andyd I'll take a good decade over a good one and a bad one. My medical power of attorney is complicated AF. I'm going to make sure it's know that I want DNR and no life support. I've had an interesting life. I have no plans to spend years suffering if there's no real point. As far loss, lifelong friends, since I was 3, since I was in high school, since I was in college, have become estranged over the decades. There's one I'd like to find but haven't had any luck in years. I have no family except a brother who is a narcissist from hell and has decided for the second time that we will be estranged since there's nothing I have that he can get from me. I have a cousin who doesn't understand me. I'll put that diplomatically. I have an aunt in her '80's whom I think the world of, and she's invited me to Seattle, but in will be a year or more before I'll be moved, settled, healed, and in a new rhythm managing my new responsibilities. The grim reaper cut down almost my entire family without giving me much of a break. Such is life. Well, we all know what our greatest poet said-- 'Better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all.' Strangely, I want to be on my own. It's a new adventure.

Yes it is. We get it here occasionally.

Well, it looks like 90° F every day. We had some rain yesterday, we're supposed to have some today, and again tomorrow. This is good news because the State's draught is exceptionally bad.