Category: Blog

I just published this post as an illustration of what is possible and happening right now with Artificial Intelligence. While I have been reading about AI and its capabilities for a few years now, today was the first time that I played with the OpenAI chat and OpenAI’s Dall-E-2 image generator. Below is a brief discussion of the fun from this morning and a quick thought on why I think curation will be critical in the future, and it is unclear to me if AI will be as good at curation as a person who is subject matter expert on the relevant topic.

First, the chat responses are relatively robust, and the style of writing is informative, if lacking in personality. But the usefulness of being able to ask narrative questions and receiving instant, coherent responses is a revolution. Google search allows you to enter an input and receive a list of links with relevant information, the AI chat can specifically answer the question. But the crazy thing is that one could produce content with this technology at an infinite scale. No longer do you need a writer to produce something passable. You can simply ask the chat AI for a 500-word article on any topic and publish it. The line between human created content and machine-made content is functionally invisible.

The ramifications of this are far reaching. For any person that writes, for any person who interacts online, for any person who searches for information. . . The future will be less like google search, and more like asking a chat bot for information and being able to trust its response.

To be fair, I asked it some legal questions and the information it provided was incorrect. But as it gains access to more data and more current information, it will be formidable. On the flip side of this will be its ability to tell what information is credible in the future, especially as information proliferates online as a result of this very technology. While it may be possible for AI to become as good at curation as a person familiar with the relevant topic, it is not there yet (based on my experience this morning).

Secondly, the image generator is interesting, but the quality of the prompt is everything. There is already at least one site (Prompt Hero) set-up to help people craft prompts that result in their desired image. The ability to craft these prompts will become standard learning for people – just as Boolean search became important to anyone dealing with searching data.

There are multiple sites that provide image prompt / creation, and I have only scratched the surface here. If you are interested in learning more, here is a list of websites, provided by OpenAI chat of course:

Can you list websites that use AI to generate images?

Here are a few websites that use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate images:

1. Deep Dream: https://deepdreamgenerator.com/
2. DALL-E: https://dall-e.openai.com/
3. Dreamscope: https://www.dreamscope.com/
4. Generative.art: https://www.generative.art/
5. Artbreeder: https://www.artbreeder.com/

These websites use various AI techniques, such as deep learning and generative adversarial networks (GANs), to generate images based on user input or randomly. Some of these websites allow users to create their own images by specifying certain parameters or by using image editing tools. Others allow users to browse and explore a variety of generated images.

Here is the article produced by Open AI’s chat following my prompt, “can you write a 500 word essay arguing for universal basic income?”

Universal basic income (UBI) is a policy proposal that would provide a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens, regardless of their employment status or income level. The idea behind UBI is to provide a financial safety net for everyone, in order to reduce poverty and income inequality, and to provide a more stable foundation for people to build their lives upon.

There are several arguments in favor of UBI. One of the main arguments is that it would provide a more effective and efficient way to combat poverty. Currently, many low-income individuals and families rely on a patchwork of welfare programs, such as food stamps and housing assistance, to make ends meet. These programs can be difficult to navigate and often come with strict eligibility requirements, which can make it difficult for people to access the help they need. UBI, on the other hand, would provide a simple and straightforward way to ensure that everyone has a minimum level of financial security.

Another argument in favor of UBI is that it would provide a more stable foundation for people to build their lives upon. Many low-income individuals and families live on the edge, constantly worrying about how they will pay their bills and meet their basic needs. This constant stress and insecurity can make it difficult for people to focus on other important aspects of their lives, such as education, job training, and personal development. UBI would provide a financial cushion that would allow people to focus on these other aspects of their lives, and potentially improve their long-term prospects.

A third argument in favor of UBI is that it would reduce income inequality and promote social cohesion. Income inequality has been on the rise in many countries in recent decades, and this trend has been linked to a variety of social ills, such as poor health outcomes and political polarization. UBI would provide a way to redistribute income from the wealthy to the less well-off, and could help to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Additionally, UBI could promote social cohesion by providing a shared sense of community and common purpose, as all citizens would benefit from the program.

There are, of course, arguments against UBI as well. One of the main concerns is the cost of such a program. Providing a basic income for every citizen would be expensive, and there are questions about how it would be funded. Some have suggested that UBI could be funded through a combination of taxes on the wealthy and the elimination of existing welfare programs. Others have proposed alternative funding sources, such as a universal carbon tax or a financial transaction tax.

Another concern about UBI is that it might discourage people from working. Some people fear that if everyone received a basic income, there would be less incentive for people to seek employment and contribute to the economy. However, there is little evidence to support this concern, and many proponents of UBI argue that it would actually increase work participation by providing a financial foundation that would allow people to pursue work they are passionate about, rather than being forced to take low-paying or undesirable jobs simply to make ends meet.

In conclusion, UBI is a policy proposal that has the potential to provide a more effective and efficient way to combat poverty, provide a stable foundation for people to build their lives upon, and reduce income inequality and promote social cohesion. While there are concerns about the cost of such a program and the potential disincentives to work, these concerns can be addressed through careful design and implementation. Overall, UBI is an idea that is worth considering as a way to address some of the most pressing challenges facing societies today.

I then asked for references: “can you provide links to sources about UBI policies that have been put into practice?”

Sure, here are a few links to sources about UBI policies that have been put into practice:

1. “Finland’s Universal Basic Income Experiment: What We Know So Far”: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/finlands-universal-basic-income-experiment-what-we-know-so-far_b_5a5f7792e4b0e84383a7853b
2. “A Universal Basic Income Is Working in This Indian Village”: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/universal-basic-income-india/496570/
3. “Here’s What Happened When a Canadian Town Gave Everyone a Basic Income”: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/saskatoon-basic-income-pilot-1.4992231
4. “Universal Basic Income in Practice: A Summary of Key Findings from Pilot Projects around the World”: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/universal-basic-income-practice-summary-key-findings-pilot-projects-around-world

These sources provide information about UBI pilot projects that have been conducted in Finland, India, Canada, and several other countries. They discuss the results of these pilot projects and the lessons learned from them.

News Summary

LA Times – Successful UC system academic worker strike may be spreading to other states.

NY Times – A big step towards domestic chip manufacturing. While it is unlikely to make the US independent of internationally made chips, it is a big step in the right direction.

The Sacramento Bee – Flooding in Northern California from the “Atmospheric River”

CBC News – 2023 Economic Forecast is rough. Predicting a mirror image of 2022, which started strong and ended weak. 2023 will be weak in the beginning due to inflation & recession, but will end stronger.

Forbes – EU Carbon Emissions Hit 30 year Lows. Many factors at work here, but this is good news!

Calculated Risk – Houses are the least affordable since 1982, when interest rates were at 14%. Bill is an astute observer and previously compared the current housing situation to the 1982 situation.

Worth The Time

BBC News – The Moon hoax that fooled the world. Meant as a satire; the fake story fooled the world. Best bit: “four foot tall man-bats that fornicate in public on the moon.”

Noahpinion – Reason to Believe Inequality May Be Decreasing. We can only hope for such a trend in the new year!

Review of Morning Pages from 2022

Listen more, talk less. Be calm and kind. Meditate more. Stop mindless, unconscious activities – mindless internet scrolling, passive watching and compulsive behaviors. Replace those activities with chosen activities – reading, exercise, and meditation.

Be generous and forgive yourself and others. Practice mindfulness while eating, while exercising, while socializing and when outside. Do not hurry. Take up space. Be spontaneous and joyful.

Get outside and into nature more. Do the popular and big hikes in Southern California.

Know what enough is, and stop there.

RAIN technique from Tara Brach is important when you feel anxiety or stress or physical pain.

2023 Diet

Eat a protein shake >40g of protein in the morning after coffee.

Eat my normal, meal-prep lunch.

Eat a dinner that has >40g protein and 3 servings of vegetables. Then: NO EATING AFTER 8 PM!

One cheat meal per week.

Workout Plan

Four days per week.

1. Do 45 minutes of Zone 2 cardio on the incline treadmill. Add in jogging as heart rate allows. Stay between 128 and 135 bpm.
2. Do a strength training activity per schedule.
   1. Monday – Push / Pull
   2. Tuesday – DB Thrusters 8×8 strict Tabata protocol (20sec on, 0sec off)
   3. Thursday – Push / Pull
   4. Friday – TBDL 531 BBB
3. Be active on weekends.

Information Intake

Read LATimes, NBCLA, BBC (add in WSJ???) in the morning. No mindless internet at night.

I will read, meditate, listen to podcasts or music at night. No mindless scrolling. Treat the internet as a tool. Do not let it be a vice.

Financial Plan

Be frugal; buy nothing. Save as much as possible. Earn as much as possible. . . until you have enough.

Focus on spending on experiences, and not on buying anything other than food.

The last thing I feel like doing right now is writing a summary of my year, or posit the 10 things I look forward to in 2023. Instead, I will review the social media, news media, and podcasts I am consuming and analyze whether I want to make any changes.

Social Media

First, I have never had a Facebook account. I thought it wouldn’t last at first, but as it did, I never felt the need to get on. I was on Twitter, and I really enjoyed it for emergent news events, but it became toxic and I was on the fence about it. Then, when it was bought and taken private, I saw it as an opportunity to quit for good, and I deleted my account(s). However, that leaves Reddit, where I still browse for a few minutes each day, but rarely post or comment. I deleted my main profile a year ago, but I still find it useful for sports highlights and niche content.

So, I really only participate on Mastodon, as I have become interested in the idea of a social network without corporate overlords. And, I have enjoyed the differences between the fediverse and old twitter. But, it has yet to achieve the critical mass of network effects.

Resolution: Get off reddit permanently and participate in Mastodon only as necessary to understand the culture.

News Sources

I subscribe to the LA Times, the NY Times, and to Barron’s. I don’t need Barron’s or the NY Times. I think I would rather subscribe to either the Washington Post or to the WSJ. I am simply not reading Barron’s anymore. I am not sure their opinions and information are relevant to me any longer, as I drift more towards index investing rather than picking stocks.

I think the LA Times has been excellent in the last year. Their features on water in California have been really informative and timely, and they also cover LA politics better than anyone else. Their oversight and reporting on government efficiency/management is absolutely necessary to a functioning city/county.

The NY Times frustrates me. I do not read their opinion pieces at all, because they anger me – especially David Brooks and Zeynep Tufekci. And I can’t imagine finding anything that Ross Douthat ever wrote interesting or thought-provoking. But the reason I dislike the NY Times is that I feel like their straight reporting is not straight. It often seems to have a pro-system or pro-police bias (here is a recent example). I simply do not wish to pay for that or read that slant regularly. It is irritating and skews one’s view of current events in ways that I believe to be harmful.

I also read newsletters from Noahpinion, The Browser, The NY Times environment, and I will occasionally read Talking Points Memo,
Calculated Risk, and Brad Delong. All of these are fantastic and fit for purpose.

Resolution: Stay with the LA Times and cancel the NY Times. Subscribe to the WSJ, and look for other sources of information. Track individual reporters better and pay attention to who I like and who I disklike.

Podcasts

I am currently subscribed to the following podcasts:

1. Against the Rules by Michael Lewis – I am lukewarm on this podcast. It is good and I think his work is worth paying attention to, but it is not as frequently updated as I would like.
2. Mother Country Radicals from Crooked Media – I really enjoyed this podcast. I listened to it while simultaneous listening to the audible book “The Radical King” by Cornel West. I recommend this, but I don’t know if there will be future content.
3. The Ezra Klein Show – I like his content on policy, his discussions with authors, and just about all of his podcasts EXCEPT for the overtly political content. He is smart, I almost always enjoy the books he recommends or discusses and I think his guests are top quality, generally.
4. The Drive from Peter Attia – I was super interested in this content, but now that I have listened to a hundred plus episodes, I think (a) I do not particularly like the host, (b) that he has blind spots that he is unbelievably unaware of, and (c) I am not sure that I have gained anything from listening to him. I do not need to optimize relentlessly. I just want to exercise regularly, eat well, and be active – and hopefully I will have a long life and retain my faculties as long as possible. It is not clear to me that I gain more by consuming this content.
5. The Tim Ferriss Show – I admire Tim. I think he is smart and inquisitive. I think he is evolving in admirable ways. And, I think he has the common blind spots that someone who lived in Silicon Valley for too long has. I will continue to listen to the shows I am interested in, but will avoid the tech-heavy content he puts out.
6. Volts from David Roberts – I am interested in renewables and will continue to listen to this content occasionally. It is informative, but can be a bit slow and tedious at times.
7. Smartless – this is new to me and I haven’t listened yet, but it was recommended by someone I trust and who knows me decently well.

I could try to find more and maybe should go back to some podcasts on China, history, or finance.

Resolution: curate content more ruthlessly and only listen to shows you are very excited about. Listen to more music!

Thomas Curwen, for the LA Times, has written a great article examining homelessness and the mental healthcare crisis in the area. It is worth reading. Below are a my very brief thoughts and notes.

“The great failure of public policy over the last 50 years is how we discharged people from mental hospitals with no replacement,” said Andrew Scull, a sociologist at UC San Diego who studies the history of mental illness and its treatment.

It is tragic that we continue to do nothing to replace the institutional care model we abandoned, as a nation, 50 years ago. That failure, paired with a failure to build a sufficient number of homes, has resulted in the homelessness crisis we see playing out on the streets of Los Angeles.

I see it at my office every day. The people living in tents on sidewalks are people. Real people. Someone’s son or daughter. But in almost every case they are drug users, likely self-medicating to escape to or from some trauma or mental illness. It is maddening that we, collectively, cannot find a way to help them.

Helping individually feels hopeless and futile. We need a collective response that is equal to the magnitude of the mess we are in. Until that happens, I fear we will continue to suffer – Anthony and others will continue to suffer.

Perhaps the future will unfold in a way that reduces economic inequality, softens environmental collapse, and increases civil rights in most countries. This seems unlikely to me.

Environmental collapse has already begun and is gathering pace. Soil microbiomes, of which we have a limited understanding, are losing biodiversity, which will make them more susceptible to collapse in the future. Insect populations are collapsing at an estimated rate of 2% per year. As insects provide the base of the food chain for birds, fish and others; provide pollination for many crops that humans depend on, and make up about 2/3 of the biodiversity on the planet, you would think this would be headline news, as the consequences are alarming to say the least.

Oil companies have permitting and development plans in place to raise global temperatures more than the 2 degrees target. Two degrees is a catastrophic future with chaotic weather patterns that will no longer conform to historical patterns, and thus are unpredictable and stochastic. We are on track for worse than that. . .

So, it seems more plausible that those with power – whether it is a central state power, multinational corporations, or the emerging class of the super-rich – will find ways to further privilege themselves and cement their grip on power as the environment spirals chaotically into a warmer world with unpredictable extreme weather events occurring more frequently.

In this view of the world, it looks to me as if there are two likely tracks emerging in the world. First, there will be autocratic governments that will increasingly use technology and good old-fashioned violence to keep their people in line. Secondly, there will be states where government power fragments and multinationals and super rich individuals will control.

Both systems will use the same technology to control and wield power. Tracking and surveillance technology will be ubiquitous and either will be compelled (autocratic system) or voluntarily taken up (market-based system) to participate in some aspect of the economy. Both systems will likely be roiled by social unrest due to environmental collapse, food and water allocation issues, and the energy transition to abundant and ubiquitous renewable generation on a community level.

Apparently, our world will be increasingly defined by the massive divide between the rich elite and everyone else, by the nations bearing the brunt of climate catastrophes and immigration of climate refugees and others that are less impacted, and by regions that will become more habitable and regions that become less habitable. Further divisions will be due to the stark difference in political approach taken by the West and the more authoritarian and centrally controlled model of China and its sphere of influence.

I believe both systems will ruthlessly put down its discontented populations, using those who believe that they are upwardly mobile or advantaged by the system to do the dirty work against the people who see clearly who is wielding power unjustly. The stories of resistance will be cautionary tales, and the narrative will be ruthlessly controlled in both systems.

To see the systems clearly, one must read media carefully, mindful of bias and information hygiene. And, in the “market system,” corporatist-controlled systems, one must avoid most participation in the popular markets – think social media, mainstream consumer culture, the western diet, the western medicine view of health and healthcare, and see the “justice system” for what it is (a justification for the entrenched, institutionalized power structures maintaining the status quo).

All of this is not to say that there isn’t hope, or that this is an accurate prediction of the future. It is simply my observations based on the last few years. Peering over the present moment, on the verge of 2023, I see only continuation of current trends. I hope that people will rise against these trends and fight the rising tides of more control, more inequality. . . But I am not hopeful that will happen. It appears tome that most people are too occupied by living hand to mouth to make accurate observations about how they are manipulated, let alone whether they are getting accurate information from media or officials. . .

This has turned into a bit of a ramble. . . I am not optimistic about our ability to navigate our present moment to find a solution that avoids massive suffering and inequality. . .

This essay, by Cory Doctorow, seems to sum up the current state of things.

It feels important and accurate to me. I need to research a bit more and think of countervailing narratives before opining too directly. . . .

Published in 1995, Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur Fascism” is an overview of the author’s recollection and reflections on fascism, and his direct experience of it as a child in Italy during the Second World War. He lists fourteen points that define the “fuzzy” fascism, noting that the defining characteristics can be contradictory and really cannot be made into a coherent ideology. The overarching purpose of the program is to require, and obtain, compliance and simplified reasoning that will be incapable of refuting their program.

The fourteen characteristics listed by Eco are:

1. The cult of tradition
2. Rejection of modernism
3. Action for action’s sake – without thought
4. Disagreement is treason
5. Fear of difference
6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class
7. Obsession with a plot
8. The enemy is both weak and too strong
9. Life is permanent warfare and struggle
10. Contempt for the weak
11. Heroic death is celebrated – Viva la Muerte
12. Misogyny is requisite
13. Selective populism – the leader is the interpreter of the peoples’ will
14. Newspeak – a language of reduced complexity to limit facilities of critical reasoning

I will not go through the exercise of applying this list to modern American politics on the right. It seems evident to me that our politics in the United States have drifted towards fascism since the 1980s. This drift accelerated rapidly after 2016.

God help us.

I hope there are enough people who are willing to fight for liberty and enlightenment to push back against the gather storm. I fear that we will go through dark times before the revolting stench is banished, if only temporarily, from our political discourse.

There is real clear evidence that plastic “recycling” never existed.

It was a hoax by the oil companies to make you feel better about buying and using a shitload of plastic.

See here: