h. Play

Dear future,

That’s it! 2023-24 is the start of something different. Everything can be faked online and robots can do super complex stuff offline, like driving nicely through traffic.

We can fake what we see and what we hear enough to believe it, especially for anyone born 2000 and beyond. Folks who don’t have the analog ear, when faking a voice was just not possible at all. People who didn’t experience the transformation of Photoshop and digital editing.

I just read about a young man who creates AI porn stars, buys IRL videos of models, deepfakes those with his AI stuff and sells those packages as chatbots to other young dudes I guess. The insanity. The implications.

It’s just that seeing Waymo cars every single time I go out now —I’ll probably try one sooner than later—, using ChatGPT daily… The before and after those things that didn’t exist a few years ago. I’m pondering.

It induces a pretty drastic change of how one understands the world. And where it’s going. It’s nuts. The acceleration.

It’s fucking nuts. And society is all disjointed in the middle of this.

(this is why I preach for individual, sustainable housing; to stay out of the upcoming madness)

So that was last year, right?

Now same prompt:

Closer:

I mean Jesus Christ. August 2022 to October 2023 and it’s THAT much better. Harriet? Bet:

I only added she’s smiling to the prompt. Here’s the other version DALL-E gave me:

“Get in son we going back to Cali Cali!”

I’m speechless. It’s just a new plateau for human beings and it’s kind of changing everything. And don’t forget: this is getting better all the time, 24/7 and probably increasing every metrics by 3 to 20x every year.

I urge y’all to demand UBI, I swear.

Anyway. I moved! I’m still in the logistics madness but it’s getting quieter.

The new crib is still in flux but it’s getting there. It’s dope, it’s going to be even better and I’m making this end of the year as sweet as possible.

Moving is always hard but the interesting thing is that it makes us make decisions, right now. Which item is going to be useful, when, should it be at the bottom of a box or in the bag pack ready to roll? It depends. Right now I thought my small speaker wouldn’t be important and I’ve been looking for it for a couple hours although headphones are just fine too.

It makes me ponder a lot. How much space do we actually need per person? Isn’t some outdoor personal space super essential even though we dismiss it all the time? What is really useful in a bedroom? Isn’t a big room where you also sleep in, better than a dedicated room mostly for sleep? We can never be in two rooms at the same time, we’re individuals in flesh.

I’m thinking super-insulated small units would save us and the world, helping us to redesign the bigger spaces so that we’re building healthier and less wasteful societies. Good challenges to tackle, I’d say.

And you hear some nasty coughing in the grocery store two aisles away, though it might be closer:

I’m all over my architecture books going through time and there’s something funny about those pictures: the cars around are always a decade or more off. 80s architecture has 70s cars around. 90s architecture has 80s cars around. Etc.

I think that I only now see cars that are truly 2000s and beyond. They’re also all hybrid or electric meaning that when I see them they’re completely silent, rolling around, making a turn. It’s a pretty hot first impression. And a break from the smelly past.

(shout out to Car Pixel for the pictures!)

Hyundai Ioniq 5

Those sharp lines and overall aesthetic would have been fabulous on 2002-2003 roads, y’all. In the 00s architecture leaned towards polygons a lot, thanks to technology (GFRC, BIM) providing the possibility. It kind of leaped over to car design in the 2010s, maybe thanks to technical advances as well (cheaper to create edges these days?).

Polestar 2

I see them around here and they look slick yet humble and that’s kind of a tour de force design-wise. Love it.

Lucid Air

Rare, but I see some. They look gorgeous. They’re fat and plump and beautiful on our large roads, no doubt. I cannot imagine driving one (I picture that you don’t hear anything inside and I like to hear stuff in a car when I drive, pre-2000 born sorry), but being in the back floating in the middle of a highway in the desert? Yeah. I can see that.

Toyota 2023 Prius

Someone at Toyota snapped over the joke. This version is a thing of beauty. Like, it should be illegal that a basic car like that looks that good. As of September 2023, everyone turns their heads when one rolls down a street. Toyota must have orders until 2039. The Wii of cars: everyone wants one.

Now, all that tech in a vehicle exposed to hacking, malware, surveillance, overriding, ransomware? I need a phone to use my car now? Wrong turn.

The issue for car manufacturers right now, is two-fold:

• Margins on cars are very thin, and haven’t gotten better.
• Car manufacturers depend on people buying cars. No one born in the 90s and above cares about doing that.

The issue with Waymo is not political or about safety. It’s that it annihilates now and forever the need to drive. The need for car ownership.

Who wants to lease a beautiful car for $800/month, having to drive, care about traffic, insurance, gas/electricity and all that? Less and less folks. The future is to not drive, period. I know people talk a lot about public transportation, but that’s a wrap as well; we went from public transportation to cars for many reasons, the obvious ones being the convenience and freedom afforded.

Waymo bridges those two designs.

I dream of daydreaming going to work instead of having to check my speed and decrease it because this idiot in front of me is checking their phones, or because this moron is not signaling that they’re about to make a turn even though it’s obvious that they’re about to. And I will have to do that 100 times a day so it seems. Pointless shit.

The only time people will enjoy driving is on road trips, and those are rare. Daily commute VS two or three times a year.

Car manufacturers are in massive trouble and because they supply enormous amounts of jobs to thousands of contractors, this is a huge blow into the economy. Hence UBI, again.

The league has never been that good, I believe. Great games night in night out from all teams. Lots of fun.

I know it’s easy to support the top dog, but the Aces are insanely good. Some of the best position-less basketball you will ever see. I think about Jackie Young’s legs now when I shoot a three. She has the best form. Kelsey Plum is like a cartoonish Tasmanian daredevil going to the basket, good luck stopping that. Kiah Stokes has been improving at the speed of a missile (board women get paid!). And of course Chelsea Grey and A’ja Wilson are just killing it.

I love the Mystics. Natasha Cloud’s dimes are like perfect 100% of the time, it’s beautiful to watch. Brittney Sykes has always been fantastic but this year she’s showing it and despite her talent that would allow her to be selfish, she passes the ball and pushes her teammates. It’s beautiful to see.

New York! I didn’t think that big group would mesh but the Liberty certainly did and have been fabulous this year. Shout out to Ms. Laney who low key has kept her team together with her dope defense and strong offense.

Connecticut! The Sun is shining over there, thanks to the awesomeness of AT (that’s Alyssa Thomas for you), who has the best running form to me. I know, kind of random, but it’s great like that.

Atlanta! Rhyne Howard is a pleasure to watch shoot that ball and their teamwork with Ms. Grey and Ms. Parker is strong. The Dream are always going at it, never giving up.

Dallas! Oh my god, Arike Ogunbowale is so phenomenal it’s disgusting sometimes. There’s no one to stop her, it’s only her missing from time to time. Meanwhile Satou Sabally has been killing it on fast breaks and has had magnificent games this year.

Lefties? Between Kelsey, Ariel, Satou, A’ja, Tiffany, Natisha, Odyssey, Allisha, Nia, I’m watching left-handed goodness.

Lastly shout out to Dijonai Carrington. She is so relentless, borderline reckless and I love it. Watch out for injuries, boo.

To Altman, it was a mind-bending experience. “If you asked the 10-year-old version of me, who used to spend a lot of time daydreaming about AI, what was going to happen, my pretty confident prediction would have been that first we’re gonna have robots, and they’re going to perform all physical labor. Then we’re going to have systems that can do basic cognitive labor. A really long way after that, maybe we’ll have systems that can do complex stuff like proving mathematical theorems. Finally we will have AI that can create new things and make art and write and do these deeply human things. That was a terrible prediction—it’s going exactly the other direction.”

What OpenAI Really Wants | WIRED

First, I don’t know what’s up with folks thinking all the time in terms of pyramids and sequences. Plenty of things happen at the same time. That’s what makes the world complex, yet simple if you break it down. But anyway it’s not going exactly the other direction, Sam. Robots doing all physical labor are here and GPT is here as well. It’s all going at the same damn time, which is why we’re freaking out and/or we don’t even know what to say.

It’s been almost a year since ChatGPT_that_actually_works_well_final_draft. I think a whole lot is happening in the background with governments and companies. They know something is about to be super over right now. But they don’t want to say anything, playing poker until they know they and their loved ones will be fine once everything goes in the AI direction, and that jobs don’t carry anything anymore (we’re close to that).

“The dream is to help us solve problems we can’t.”

The thing is we’re rather good at solving any problem (chatGPT was a complete fantasy less than a decade ago!) and, most of the time, the problems were created by us. So we can solve them, 100%.

The dream personally is the unprecedented shift from our current socio-economical world to one where people immediately stop suffering through obscene capitalism.

AGI should be driving cars, cleaning toilets and taking care of nuclear power plants while we sit under a tree, laughing and fucking for fun. That is a possible future and I want it.