h. Play

Me: Thank you, Josh!

Him: It’s Maxwell.

Me: My bad!

Also me, under breath: WhothefuckisJoshthen?

Isn’t it time?? I think it is.

(lowkey the latest technology advances like AI and Waymo are whispering “yeah we’re taking care of stuff, relax humans” but you know, greed and dysfunctional societies)

Lots of things going on personally and internationally, I guess. Some management stuff, work load and involvement into various things keep me from writing, smh.

It is the end of the year and memories show up. I made some really good ones this year. Two trips to France whooped my bank account’s ass, but it was so intensely intense and beautiful.

A few weeks ago I showed a native LA friend a gorgeous place she had no idea existed. Always a great feeling to see someone’s eyes open wide!

Fuck gentrification, it has to be said from time to time.

95% settled now. It couldn’t be better right now. Blessed.

While things are getting absurd with OpenAI, I just was confronted with AI driving a car. Yes, Waymo.

So I’m a the light behind it. The light turns green, we go, super smooth. At the end of the next street, there’s a stop. The Waymo stops for quite some time even though there’s no traffic.

There is. A pedestrian is jogging on the sidewalk and about to cross the street. I then notice that the Waymo has a pedestrian sign lit up on its roof. Smart. The car had seen him, in the dark, far before any human eyes could see him.

We then go on and the Waymo keeps its distance with the car in front of us. I pass them both. The Waymo was waiting for that lame human being driver to scoot over. It then smoothly accelerates and come next to me. Windows down.

The Waymo has no driver in the driver’s seat. Not the first time that I see that, but for the first time, it’s next to me.

A CAR DRIVING SMOOTHLY IN TRAFFIC WITHOUT A DAMN DRIVER AT THE WHEEL. THE WHEEL TURNS BY ITSELF. YO

It’s incredible because even though I know it, knew it, seeing it happening in front of you is exhilarating. I—

And yes, passengers in the back. An older black couple looking like they’ve been doing this since 1963, blasé AF. Of course!

Far or close, the now is surreal and very real. Seriously.

I often suggest that fiction is a bit too much and that the real world is enough interesting stuff.

Well this OpenAI drama this weekend has been riveting like the last three episodes of a show’s crucial season. Check this out:

The CEO of OpenAI was fired on Friday by the board but might be reinstated as I type this.

OpenAI might be one of the most influential company on the planet in the near future, if not already. Sam Altman is one of the most connected tech dude around. LLMs are truly changing society faster than anything prior and GPT-4 is way ahead. Microsoft and OpenAI just announced in the past few weeks tons of products and services. I believe GPT-4 Turbo allows you to feed it 300 pages of text.

Some rumors are saying that Sam was trying to get “middle east” financing (aka oil-backed, Saudi money) to build hardware to go faster and compete with Nvidia, who has a near monopoly over AI hardware. The problem you see, is that almost all the best hardware foundries are own by Taiwan and a company called TSMC. Who is printing money producing chips for everyone:

If you will, from 2010 to 2020, that’s smartphone growth. 2020 and on, that’s AI/GPUs growth. Yeah.

So we have a young man with an interesting past at the top of a non-profit/for profit company changing the world and which needs dramatic amounts of everything (apparently mid engineers comp at OpenAI is $800K/year) to keep moving, so much that it shakes international relationships and bends chips markets and supply.

The situation is super wild right now.

I have never stopped laughing at this. I just can’t.

Five straight weeks sleeping like a baby. OMG.

Making myself restaurant-grade salads these days. My mustard usage has gone up really hard, but it’s worth it. Meanwhile my homemade croissantwiches for lunch are also profiting from a variety of condiments and once I’m getting myself an air fryer and cook my chicken breasts, it’s all over.

Getting closer to producing audio again. Excited.

The crib is looking good and getting better and better. I have the best sound quality I’ve ever had. I rediscover some music I’ve been listening to for decades.

Work, family, friends. All is well. Gotta celebrate those boring moments too!

It’s something I’ve seen so many times in my life, by really smart people: they can dissociate things that on paper you can dissociate but that in real life, are not dissociable at all.

Take gambling. Libertarian folks will be adamant that “no one is forced to gamble”. That people are doing this to themselves, and that there’s nothing that can be done to prevent their own harm. It’s their responsibility. We all have to be responsible for the things we do to ourselves, etc.

This is omitting how we live here and now, and I suspect in the past too: we’re living together. We’re building infrastructures, systems around our social behaviors.

Gambling is designed for a certain kind of folks who are really sensitive to the appeal of gain. In 2023, after really hard times caused by a pandemic and the convenience of tech, a lot of people have been attracted to gambling. It’s fun!

It is not possible to say that this is an individual’s responsibility when we design, fine tune, A/B test, use all the psychological data on earth to make products and services to specifically trigger the same gambling buttons over and over until people give up and start gambling. It is not.

Sure maybe it’ll be fine, just for a couple months in winter, bored. It might not, ruining the lives of many.

I take gambling as an example because it’s kind of the mother of all this weird customer optimization going on these days. You know, engagement. Retention. Built-in gamification. Everything derived from gambling tactics.

All those things are meant to catch people. And they’re insanely good at it, from Pokemon to TikTok.

Libertarians folks are often financially been out of being stressed out for a long time. They don’t understand how time passing by ruins your ability to resist easiness. It is not hard to understand that it’s wrong to actively seek to make massive, ridiculously massive profit off of people’s exhaustion of the real world though.

“If it’s not me, it will be someone else” is often the answer to justify those lines of business. Well that’s another point for UBI then; I’d rather have people stay home than do predatory shit to each other.

I’m reading this book, Cadillac Desert about the management of land and water in the American West. It’s super interesting and written with a humorous style so I’m all like “lmaooo dang” reading it.

It also made me realize something: dams. The insanity of building dams, and how it propelled the mystic about America as a different kind of country where things simply get done. Massive things.

Like the Hoover Dam, built in 5 years in the middle of Depression. Diverting a whole ass giant river by creating tunnels with dynamite while those workers were starving, is some hardcore shit. And an insane achievement in such a short time. Video here and there.

That’s one dam. The US Army Corps of Engineers built many, many more. Two things I’ve learned from that:

• Everything about the budget was always off; always ending in taxpayers paying for it forty years later or more. Put it in another way: all those giant projects were financed by injecting money into the economy, not by the economy providing the money through taxes.
• The electrical power capacity of those dams put America ahead of everyone in terms of production. The book argues that it gave America the capacity to produce 65,000 planes in no time for WWII. It created an American West so used to cheap electricity that insulation was seen as unnecessary, despite the cold mornings and nights. It’s biting us in the ass now, as electricity is not cheap anymore, will not get cheaper, and Californians are still clueless about insulation.

It looks like the West will be alright, water wise, if we stop abusing it. This winter is looking like a wet winter, which I don’t like. But it’s really good for our dry soil.

• Dry heat, rocks. Enjoying a vacation in Tel Aviv, flirting with local women sounds like a great time. I’m afraid there’s a wrap forever on that. I’ll never get to visit that rather attractive corner of earth.
• The Gaza strip is so damn small. How come there is even a building left alive after 75 years of war? It’s hard to comprehend.
• Despite all the surveillance in the world, Pegasus and drones and whatnot, they still don’t know where the tunnels are or when an offensive is on its way! Literal billions spent on intelligence. It doesn’t do anything.
• We’re already having debates on what actually happened in world events from 100 to 50 years ago, I have a feeling that the veracity of a text from about 2,500 years ago is not that big.
• It seems like, if it’s been blood and tears for 75 years, maybe it would be a good thing for the UN to renegotiate things.
• I imagine all the heartaches from people across generations loving each other while being tied to one religion that hates the other religion. Excruciating stuff.
• It’s been too long, wtf. Very soon no one will remember a time of peace over there. My dad born in 1952 already doesn’t.

Why clothes don’t fold themselves, get on their fictional legs and go on their racks?

We do not talk about this enough, I believe.