Listen to the Rain

After the frozen winds of this weekend, today is sunny and 21°C. Yesterday it was 26°C! That's Chicago spring weather for you. I took a walk out on the riverwalk and noticed that the $9 gelato place isn't open yet, which is sad because I would have loved to eat it while sitting out on the giant stairs near the water. That time will come soon enough. The restaurants were open and people were sitting on the tables.

We had a surprise meeting this morning, by which I mean I was caught by surprise by it even though it was in my calendar and had been for months. It was just a standard division meeting that's both not exciting and filled with quote CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY information, but there was a section about AI. The thing that got me was that they mentioned they named an in-house AI assistant after one of the people who works here and even came up with a backronym for it. I looked around to see if anyone else was as uncomfortable with this as I was, and no one seemed to be. Then again, I went on a Butlerian Jihad rant to Laila after she somehow used a hotkey to open up Microsoft CoPilot on my computer-

Me: "[blah blah]...okay Laila? No soulless machines."
Laila: "Okay abba."

and I imagine that makes me a bit of an outlier.

I've restarted my full exercise program after a long time of slacking. I used to do dozens of pushups a week but when I had my appendix out a while back I obviously had to give that up. I got back to walking a bunch almost immediately but by the time I could do pushups again I could only do a fraction of the amount I could do before and of course it was discouraging. Well, discouragement can only go so far, so I put all my exercises into my phone reminders because that's proven to be something that actually motivates me. Now I have exercises six days a week, plus all my walking, so hopefully it'll make a difference. It's definitely a bit of a drag--I am not one of those gym-motivated people, and other than walking I do not ever look forward to exercising. But since I'm middle-aged now, I need to make sure I keep doing it if I want to stay healthy.

Alright, work's over, time to go home.

It ended in the best possible way it could, honestly.

I brought my phone in to the Apple Store and left it there for a couple hours--they said they would take it "downstairs" even though the building only seemed to have a single floor and no backroom, so I guess they were bringing it down to secret chambers where the dwarves might work their spells on it to the sound of pounding hammers--and when I came back at the appointed time, they said it was done. They brought it up, I logged into my iCloud account and, after a bit of difficulty, got my phone number back. Most systems seemed to be designed for copying everything from one phone to a physically distinct phone, which I didn't have, so I had to use my iPad, go into the carrier app, and told them to send a new eSIM to my phone. I downloaded it, my father called to verify the number worked, and off I went.

Since the internals were failing and this was Apple, they decided to just use a hammer instead of a scalpel to solve the problem. They tore out everything that wasn't the screen, camera, or casing and just replaced it all. I have a new motherboard, new battery, new everything. They even fixed the USB hookup, which was being pretty twitchy, so now the physical headphones I use only at work (since I listen to podcasts for eight hours a day and my AirPods won't last that long) have no trouble and I don't have to jiggle the plug back and forth six times to get an audio connection. My phone, which I had been thinking of replacing this year when the new iPhones come out because I was having so many performance problems, is now running exactly like a new phone, because it basically is a new phone. And thanks to AppleCare I paid $0 instead of the $650 on the bill that entirely new internals would have cost, so I'm very satisfied.

Now I just need to do something about my device storage. I have 800 gb out of 1000 gb and 700 gb of it is podcasts. Need to do more podcast listening!

I had a lovely (from my perspective, anyway) interaction with the person who checked me in, too. She noticed that my phone was in Japanese and asked me I spoke Japanese, so I told her that I used to live in Japan. It turned out she was a Korean adoptee in America who had taken several trips to Japan and Korea for tourism reasons and to visit birth family relatives, so we had a nice conversation about language-learning and traveling in Japan while we were trying to get my phone booted up and successfully primed for work by the dwarf-smiths downstairs. It was actually a very pleasant way to spend the afternoon, considering I was there because my exocortex broke.

Just finished the upgrade process with my work laptop, which involved someone from IT showing up, a few minutes of transferring things, and here I am with a new Windows 11 laptop. And now I have to get used to the new interface--it's interesting that even though I've had Windows 11 on my home computer for years now, having on my work computer is still throwing me because the context for me using my work computer is firmly Windows 10. It's been that way for years at this point, at least since I got the laptop five years ago when the Plague Years started. I'm going to have to get used to checking for the little bubble on the Outlook icon instead of the yellow letter and making sure to check the middle of the taskbar instead of the left side.

...alright, in the middle of writing this post, my phone just died. I went to go switch tab groups in Safari and it went bloop and won't turn on, so since I work five minutes from an Apple Store, it's off to go talk to them and see what they can do.

So for the past while, I've had weird trouble with my computer. I'm running a dual-monitor setup and my CPU usage was already really high (like 70-80%), even just playing a single game. I'd sometimes get stuttering due to the RAM having to swap to the page file, or slowdowns due to 100% of the CPU being in use, and I always had task manager open to trying to figure out what the problem was. When I saw that Desktop Window Manger had hit 30% CPU usage a few days ago, I looked it up and found out that meant that the CPU was using integrated graphics mode and that's where all the cycles were going. "What?" I said, "Integrated? But I have a RTX 3070? Why is it..." and then I looked it up and I found out that the RTX 3070 has three DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI connector and both my monitors were plugged in via HDMI. That meant my primary monitor was actually plugged straight into the motherboard, not into the GPU at all. No wonder it was choking.

I fished out the DisplayPort cable, switched the cables around, and now CPU usage in a single game is down to 30%. The fans are a lot quieter too.

Made this post before Shabbat but forgot to actually post it until now. Oops.

Wake up, pull out the laptop, log on for work. Say hello, try to get into the database, "Error on Security or DBL connection." Try a couple more times, eventually call tech support.

*ring ring*
*Tech Support picks up*
Tech Support: "You having a problem with [the VPN]?"
Me: "Yes, I am."

So that's my morning.

Poor Laila woke up the night before last in a panic, calling to get out, and when sashagee went in to soothe her, Laila threw up on her. Queue everyone waking up, us trying to get Laila to calm down and drink some water, Laila going into her usual upset panic mode--she just kept saying "Water?", "Apple?", or "Better!" over and over again--and sashagee's parents worrying that there was something about their bed that she wasn't agreeing with. But in the end, Laila went back to sleep, slept through the whole night, and the next morning she was totally fine other than a slight cough. And though she's at the grandparents and sashagee are at home, she's been okay all of today too.

Less so sashagee. We were originally thinking of going shopping downtown today--I need a new coat--but she's laying down in our room at the moment trying to recover. She's promised me she'll have the energy to go shopping tomorrow and hopefully she does.

We just got a phone call from sashagee's parents. Laila does have a cold, which means sashagee has a cold, so that's why everyone is sick.

I got a new phone. I haven't been upgrading very often lately--I had an iPhone 12, and before that I had an iPhone 7 (that poor 7's batteries needed to be charged three times a day by the time I let go of it), so I've had a backwards experience for quite a long time. I've only had the iPhone 15 for less than a week and so far I haven't noticed much of a difference that doesn't step from it having more hard drive space, though the new dynamic notch (or whatever they call it) is pretty neat. But it's not like when I could suddenly use my phone to pay for things, which brought America into the magical world that Japan had a decade or more previously. They may still use fax machines there but they're way more advanced in some ways.

Alright, time for bed.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
-Frank Herbert, Dune

Strange coincidence that I simultaneously saw this article entitled We must declare jihad against AI and also went to a work seminar today about the use of AI in healthcare. The latter mentioned the recent JAMA article about physician vs AI empathy.

I've been an AI skeptic for most of the last decade and for most of the last decade I've been right--I remember arguing eight years ago with someone who laughed at my insistence that we would absolutely not have direct brain interfaces within five years--but I think that's less likely in the future. Nothing is going to constrain AI because there's too much money to be made from out-of-control AI and the social consequences be damned. Look at how much damage has already been done through social media algorithms designed simply to keep people's eyes on the platform--the promotion of outrage engagement, Instagram Face, depression and anxiety in Gen Z, people at risk of having a single bad interaction go viral, etc--and imagine it with programs more sophisticated than the stuff on Amazon that says "Ah, I see you bought a toaster, would you like to buy a dozen more?" That was the point of the Dune quote I posted above, since AI isn't going anywhere so we'll need to manage its social effects.

People talk about AI destroying whole swaths of jobs and that may happen in the future but it's not going to happen currently due to AI's tendency to confidently make up nonsense. It's like Laila--she has a lot of words she says, but she also makes sounds that I'm sure mean something to her but which aren't English (or Japanese, or Hebrew, or French, or any other language she's been exposed to). Like, she's lately switched to pronouncing banana as "bahlahlah." She says it consistently, she knows exactly what it means, but who knows where she got it from. AI is like that. I remember reading a rebbe.io answer where the AI confidently stated that eating poultry and milk together was allowed, which isn't true under any interpretation of halakhah. I just asked it about eating kiniyot during Pesaḥ and it told me this was a matter of individual custom and to consult your rabbi, which I'm a little unsure is the answer an actual Chabad rabbi would give. But it gives those answers confidently and seems to provide reasoning to support them, and it reminds me of that scene in the sealed chamber in 2001 where Dave and Frank decide that if HAL was wrong about the antenna, what else is it wrong about, and if it's wrong about anything, then they need to shut it down to prevent misinformation from jeopardizing the mission. Which is exactly the same reasoning HAL uses to shut them down, which is part of the point of the movie (who is more robotic, the literal computer, or the humans?) and part of the point of the presentation I went to. AI needs to be guided in right thought by humans to really be useful.

To pick an example, if you look at the example interactions that were rated in that JAMA article, you'll notice the most obvious unifying point is that each of the AI responses is twice as long as the human responses. No wonder they were voted more empathetic! There's an immediate perception that the AI is spending more time on the response because it's longer, and since Americans have an extremely common complaint that they barely get to see their doctors and when they do, it's more only a few minutes, that the AI seems to be more attentive. But what if the AI was used as an aid, listening to the doctor-patient conversation and taking notes, filling in the EMR in the background, and the doctor checked the results at the end but otherwise spent the time talking to the patient instead of looking at a computer? Wouldn't that make the doctor seem much more empathetic? And this could be an aid to doctors elsewhere too, since the average of twenty minutes per visit in America is actually on the extreme high end globally. In Bangladesh people see their doctors for an average of less than a minute!

Sure, AI will still sometimes produce nonsense. I remember reading a teacher saying they took psychic damage from reading an AI-written essay that the student had gone at with a blind-idiot thesaurus afterwards, leading to phrases like

Unused York City

but also human medical error kills at a higher rate than anything other than disease or cancer. If AI can assist humans in reducing that even a little...

I don't think we're in danger of getting paperclip-maximized any time soon. It's lazy thinking, or not thinking at all, that'll do us in.

Title from this famous twitter thread.

I've been watching Elon Musk thrash around like a bull in a china shop for a week now, from making himself king of twitter to deciding on the price for Twitter verfication by haggling with Stephen King to firing half the company (possibly by stack-ranking, which is mind-boggling) to blocking the president of MMA Global. They rolled out the new paid-for blue check and it didn't work, and then they got it working but said that they were going to implement a NEW "verified" display that does what the old blue check used to, and then it showed up on people's profile for a few hours and then disappeared, and then:



Okay, so Musk is the king of Twitter and just makes snap decisions and makes his staff--which he's reduced by half, mind--try to implement them. But then:



This seems like madness but it is actually part of a plan. Musk wants to turn Twitter into WeChat, the Chinese app that combines social media, messaging, and banking. The difference is that WeChat is backed by the Chinese government--and whatever you think of the CCP, they are an actual government with experience in governing--and Twitter is run by King Elon who randomly changes his mind multiple times a week. Do you want to trust him with your money? I don't. I don't even want to trust him with $8 a month, nor even the miniscule amount of money advertisers make on me, which is why I use an old version of Tweetbot where the timeline is chronological and I don't see any ads or promoted tweets at all. What people want out of a bank is stability and constancy--that when they go to take their money out, their money will be there. If Twitter gets FDIC insured as a bank, then they'll probably end up costing the government a lot of money. If they don't, they'll cost a lot of crypto bros their money.

Basically, what this is revealing is that Musk's real skill, the thing he is legitimately great at, is securing government contracts. This is a valuable skill! But it's not the same as engineering or financial genius.

Edit: Ahahaha maybe Musk fired everyone who remembered that Twitter is under an FTC consent decree and now they might be up for fines. Facebook was fined billions, how about Twitter?

If Musk were deliberately trying to destroy Twitter, what would he have done differently?

Well, not in Chicago, where it's been 35°C for the last couple days.

My desktop computer has finally decided to start dying after six years, which is admittedly a pretty good time period for all the original components to work. It's always been a little temperamental, with RAM crashes every time I move it no matter how carefully I do so--even moving it from what was the office (and is not Laila's room) out to the sun nook, a distance of no more than twenty-five feet, caused RAM problems. Fortunately, the solution so far in every single case after the first time has been: 1) Take RAM out 2) put RAM back in. Then it worked fine until I moved it again.

Now there's a problem that I can't solve so easily, though--the GPU fan is going. Right now it still works intermittently, but with squeaking protests and wildly varying RPM, ranging from about 120 and then up to 2500. I could just replace the GPU, especially now that crypto is crashing and prices could come down, but with everything else being six years old and with already-existing RAM trouble I thought it was probably time for me to just upgrade everything.

I have a new computer on order and the case open on my current computer with a small fan blowing on it that's keeping temperatures at about 75°C even when playing games, but this definitely was the worst time for it to happen, with my savings already down due to all the health troubles our family had had in the last year.

I realize I'm in the glorious elite for not having only one (1) internet choice, but nonetheless I must complain.

One reason American internet is laughably bad is the lack of competition. Most places have only one provider, or two if you're lucky, even in major cities. A provider in a major city might not service the whole city--I can get RCN but thosesocks can't, even though we live only about half a mile apart. And even with RCN, it's only in the last few years that my internet in one of the largest cities in America has reached the speeds I routinely got over a decade ago in Chiyoda, a rural mountain town, where my house was literally surrounded by rice paddies. Until recently, though, I've had mostly good experiences.

Yesterday, the internet went out at 2:30 p.m. and as of this post it is still out. I call every few hours or so and every time the story is the same--there's still an outage, we can't tell you what caused it, we can't tell you when it will be fixed, we're useless. I had at least one person I talked to run some modem diagnostics, have me try some things, and tell me what they were seeing on their end, but I think that's balanced out by the person who literally speed-read a canned script at me and then immediately hung up. No one can tell me anything worthwhile. There was just a Comcast truck outside, maybe providing internet to former RCN customers, though DownDetector tells me that there was also Comcast outages on a beautiful spring day with no weather problems.

Pretty sure Chiyoda had maybe one internet outage in three years, and this is a place where literal wild animals could have been chewing on the cables.

Fortunately, we have other internet technology. I'm working from home today because sashagee has had a rough few days and I'm able to do it through phone tethering. Cell service to phone tether to work VPN so the data is still protected. It's not as fast as my wired internet but it's plenty fast that I can still check webcomics on my iPad (which is also tethered) while I work. sashagee is watching Youtube thanks to us having an unlimited data plan. Just have to keep calling and seeing if there's an update, and demand a bill credit when the internet is back.

Today I was looking into a new mesh wifi system after learning from my father than the Nokia Beacon was no longer being sold to consumers--even though their website tells you they're available, when you go to Amazon website it says they're unavailable--and while doing so, I went to RCN's website to look at internet prices and noticed that the minimum plan was 4x faster than my plan for much less money and they had never informed me of any of this. So I called them.

Yes, they could help me. Yes, they'd be willing to switch my plan. Oh, those plans on the website were all introductory prices, not for existing customers. Where could I see the pricing for existing customers?

𝕳𝖔𝖑𝖉.

There was no central list of prices. Okay, so how much would the 110 mpbs plan cost?

𝕳𝖔𝖑𝖉.

About $60? Okay, what about the 400 mpbs plan?

𝕳𝖔𝖑𝖉.

About $80 but I'd need a new modem? Oh, and I could get 250 mbps on my current modem, but there's a 250 mbps plan not listed on their website? How much is that?

𝕳𝖔𝖑𝖉.

At this point I'm like:



But I keep my cool on phone, because it's certainly not the customer service person's fault. They come back and tell me that the 250 mbps plans is abut $70 but actually I'd still have to upgrade my modem. No, I wouldn't need to schedule an appointment but I would need to bring my old modem in and swap it out for the new modem. Okay, fair enough. In the future, is there a way for me to change my plan online the way that the website says I can? Did I just not find the right page? Oh, no I have to call in? I see.

Whenever I deal with American ISPs, I remember how in Chiyoda I had rock-solid speed and internet service, able to do the Heigan Safety Dance successfully on trans-Pacific ping to the point where I once soloed Heigan from 30% to dead after the rest of the raid got poisoned. Now, Japan still has problems, like how a miscommunication led to us losing internet for three weeks until they got around to flipping the "on" button again, but considering I literally lived in the middle of a bunch of rice fields my actual internet performance was amazing. If only I could get that same performance and quality here, in one of the biggest cities in America.

Further updates if they somehow screw this up.

The subject line is a stretch, but it'll be memorable if I ever have to find this in the future.

There are two things of import that happened lately. The first is that I went through a racial equity training at work hosted by the Racial Equity Institute and strongly encouraged by management. I was pretty dubious of its worth going in, since implicit bias training doesn't work, but though they did touch on that in the beginning that's not actually what the class was about. It was simply informative about the way systems are set up to put white people on top, and how whiteness is implicitly cast as the default and everyone else is in some way a deviance from that. I already knew most of the information they presented about restrictive covenants, the racial wealth gap, and so on, but by their own admission many of my co-workers in the training did not, so hopefully opened their eyes to something that a lot of them had never had to think about before. I'm not sure it really needed sixteen hours--two full working days--of time, but it wasn't the pointless waste of time that I initially expected.

The only thing I really took issue with was their claim that the concept of race began when the white planter class needed to pit workers against each other in order to maintain economic dominance. It's all nice and progressive, but the first racist laws in recorded history were actually the Limpieza de Sangre laws in 15th century Spain targeting Jews and Muslims, and the concept of race is ancient--the Book of Gates in the time of Seti I in 1275 BCE depicts the four races of humanity: the Libyans, the Nubians, the Syrians, and the Egyptians. Inconvenient for their narrative, but history is rarely neat.

The other major thing I did recently is that I ordered a new phone! I've had my iPhone 7 since the day it released, and since it had 256 gb I stopped doing yearly upgrades because I finally had enough space for everything. Well, I filled the whole phone up and now the battery is such that it goes from 100% to 20% while playing music on a 20-minute walk, so when the iPhone 12 came out this year I decided it was finally time to upgrade. It came on Friday with my information all set up on it, I moved my SIM information (or whatever) over and then copied the rest of my phone's data...which I should have done on Saturday, because I have gigs and gigs and gigs of music and I was up until almost 4 a.m.! sashagee wandered in at one point because I hadn't come to bed and found me not playing games, not reading anything, just staring at the progress bar, willing it to move faster. It eventually completed without issue and the next morning I started trying to get used to how it worked.

I miss the button. Now everything is done with swiping, but with different degrees of swiping, so I'm constantly swiping too much and closing my program instead of going to the app switcher. I need to find some kind of guide to all the functions I've missed, because I had my perfect phone and didn't pay attention to any new capabilities. My phone's at 55% and I haven't charged it since Friday night, though, so that's already a huge improvement over my old phone! I feel like I went from a stone tablet to a Star Trek data slate.

FaceID doesn't work with a mask, though, so the future isn't quite here yet.

So we've switched over to the new new database at work and it is a shit show. Just unbelievably bad. Here is a litany of my complaints:

• There's no actual work queue UI, so I'm working of a hastily-built database output in a totally different system where I have to manually delete table entries after they're done.
  
• Everything displayed on a single screen in the 20-year-old database requires clicking through 6-8 screens in the new database.
  
• You might remember the old new database and some checkboxes for important settings that we needed for our work, that we couldn't default to on and had to click every single time we performed any task? Well, so does the new new database.
  
• I just learned moments ago that when searching in the new new database, I can display birth city but not current city, which--since most information we get doesn't contain "city of birth" as info--is basically useless.
  
• Search in the new new database doesn't work unless you search in ALL CAPS.
  
• Search is missing critical fields like "address" and "birthdate" by default. I made my own search query with those, which fortunately is functionality we have, but I find it illuminating that we told them multiple times those were vital pieces of information and they're not in as search fields by default.
  
• Even though I can add those fields to the search, I can't add them to the information displayed about a record. That information is available, but requires--you guessed it--more screens and more clicking.
  
• There's no way to search within the results of any search query without individually scrolling through and looking at all of them. The only function is to order columns alphabetically.
  
• Settings are not preserved. If I change "display 100" to "display 200," not only do I have to do that every time I search, I have do that every time I reorder a column.
  
• There's no way to display critical information in multiple places. If I'm comparing two people's data, I better remember the data of one source because it's impossible to see it while looking at the other source and I can't sick back to the first source without losing my search results.

That's from using it for 45 minutes and completing one (1) task. I'm in the middle of trying to complete task 2, but the database is trying to punch me in the dick the entire time.

I would actually say it's basically nonfunctional. Tasks that took me a max of 30 seconds and were entirely keyboard-controlled previously now take 10-15 minutes of clicking through multiple windows, trying to remember multiple discrete pieces of info and compare them, clicking back and forth repeatedly, trying to find where information that was once available at a glance is hidden...it's trash.

Some of you might remember the story of the data director in a meeting taking requests for the new database, and one my co-workers said "It has to work!" so the data director turned to the board and wrote MUST WORK, circling it multiple times.

Oops.

Will any of this ever be fixed? Who knows! The problems with the old new database were never fixed, so I'm not confident. But in that case, I hope work is only with my output dropping roughly...95%. Conservatively.

Looking forward to us just going back to the old database again because it actually works!

Edit: The birthdate search field won't search unless you include the birth time! Who coded this?!