confusion
Another entry into my long running Looking up at Lamps [flickr.com] photo set on Flickr.
Going over the edge… It’s only January little dude.
Dramatic carpark ceiling light.
Office life.
Yet another Looking up at Lamps.
Still 11 days left in January, maybe I’ll take some more worth posting.
We are 11 days into 2024, one more trip around the sun for the Earth and one more for me —I’m 46 today. So, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on 2023.
Personally, 2023 can be summed up as “steady as she (he? they?) goes”:
Still live in Singapore – 19 years now
Still married – 17 years now
Still have two healthy growing daughters – 15 and 11
Still work at the same place – 13 years now
The one thing that was a bit of a downer was that my Grandmother, my mother’s mother, died late last year. She will be missed. She was 94, she didn’t suffer from any major physical or mental health issues, she raised 6 kids with her husband of more than 70 years. She had a good life.
On the positive side of things, I had two great holidays last year: I spent three weeks in Italy with Candice, Victoria and Olivia, and my mom and Sister Sarah joined us. And I spent a long weekend in Vietnam with R████ to celebrate his 50th birthday along with J████, R███ friends for work and another friend of R████’s, S██. Both trips were amazing.
And since this is a blog – I posted 25 times last year. A decent pace. Will try to keep that up.
Looking forward, this year will be a big —and stressful— year for Victoria and Olivia who will take their O-Level and PSLE respectively.
A.I. can write book reviews no one reads of A.I. novels no one buys, generate playlists no one listens to of A.I. songs no one hears, and create A.I. images no one looks at for websites no one visits.
This seems to be the future A.I. promises. Endless content generated by robots, enjoyed by no one, clogging up everything, and wasting everyone’s time.
Lincoln Michel, in The Year that A.I Came for Culture [newreplublic.com], published in The New Republic
Will A.I. turn the internet into a virtual version of the Earth in Wall-E? Abandoned under so much garbage we have to evacuate? Some army of little A.I.’s left behind to cleanup the shit —to correct the hallucinations, remove the copyright infringing generated images and text?
Maybe not. 2023 was the year of A.I.. It’s been building for some time, with AI/ML being a term discussed endlessly at work for a few years. But in 2023, with the launch of ChatGPT (actually in November 2022 with GPT 3.5), A.I. went from something on the periphery of everyday life —something you heard about in passing news stories about tech— to an inescapable monster, on the lips of everyone, from tech CEOs to cultural commentators. A.I. managed to hold our collective attention in a way few things can in our hyperactive zeitgeist.
I don’t agree with everything Lincoln Michel discuses in the New Republic article but there was a line that caught my eye:
A.I. costs lots of money, and once investors stop subsidizing its use, A.I.—or at least quality A.I.—may prove cost-prohibitive for most tasks.
This caught my eye because I just read an article by Cory Doctorow the other day in Locus. In Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI [locusmag.com] Doctorow addresses the the same idea, that the cost of A.I. is it’s Achilles heel:
The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can’t think of anything that belongs in it.
Basically Doctorow says that A.I. is unlikely to be able to fully replace a human for high-stakes applications —think doctors. A.I. can help speed up the process but do you trust an A.I. to make a life-or-death medical decision without human review? And if the A.I. is augmenting the human and not replacing it the economics don’t seem to work given the cost of running the most advanced A.I. models.
Of course A.I. is still getting better. So maybe in a few years it will get to the point that we all trust it to make life-or-death decisions for us without a “human in the loop”. Maybe people born after the LLM revolution will grow up just trusting A.I. more than those born before.
A.I. researches are looking at how to bring the cost down without sacrificing the quality of their models. Apple is working on models that will run on an iPhone rather than whole data centers. After all, technologies march to shrink it’s size and power consumption while increasing it’s power is incredible:
In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.
Roy Longbottom, in Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets [roylongbottom.org.uk]
How long will it take today’s data center sized A.I. models to run in my pocket or on my wrist? And by then will the data center sized models be trustworthy enough to handle the high-stakes —fault intolerant—, high-dollar applications?
Who knows. I’ll leave predicting to future to the Sci-Fi authors like Doctorow.
But, I think Doctorow’s point is good; the current hype around A.I. is a bubble. What will be left when it bursts? Will, as Lincoln Michel wonders, A.I. technology plateau as so many other technology promises have, forever just a few years away?
I’m personally skeptical of truly life changing things coming from the current bubble, small incremental improvements, sure, endless annoying low-stakes use cases, absolutely, but truly life changing? I remain skeptical.
Though, the ability for ChatGPT to answer all your homework problems will force education to change, but schools adapted to pocket calculator and then graphing calculators, they will adapt to A.I. bots in the kids pockets too.
It should also be noted that the current hype cycle is over Generative A.I., which is only one branch of A.I.. Some life changing A.I. applications are already out there, like IBM’s A.I. for folding proteins. I think this is the kind of A.I. that will truly change the world in the long run, helping scientists to push medicine forward rather than spitting out clickbate content to game the online advertising world.
I posted photos from my 2022 trip to Paris almost a year after the trip, just at the end of September. I had intended to post about the other part of that trip, to Strasburg and Colmar, soon after and definitely before this years trip.
I failed.
So, here it is, almost the end of 2023 and I’m posting a link to my photos from the 2022 trip to Strasburg and Colmar. More than a year after the trip. Sad. I hope to do better.
In any case, my family and I spent five days in Strasburg as a break from Paris. We spend most days wondering around the old Alsatian part of town, visiting the Christmas Markets.
Between glasses of vin chaud, the local mulled wine, or hot apple cider, we browsed the market stalls and climbed to the top of the Strasburg Cathedral. And we spend a day in Colmar, checking out their markets and drinking vin chaud there.
While Paris was all about visiting museums and churches, something to do every day, Strasburg was for sleeping in and relaxing, no scheduled ticket times.
Oh, and we waked to Germany. We took the tram to the closest stop and then walked over the Pont de l’Europe, crossing the Rhine and into Germany just far enough to catch the tram back. Just to say we did it.
You can see the few photos I took, mostly of the buildings and especially the cathedral in the Strasburg, France, 2022 Photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].
A collection of quotes I’ve stumbled across and wanted to write something about or share but never finished a proper post. Collected here with half finished or no commentary…
I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives — and of enemies I really make no account.
Walt Whitman, in a letter to a German friend on his sixty fourth birthday
Words to live by? Contrast with “keep your friends close but your enemies closer,” from The Godfather Part II.
Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species.
Wade Davis in The Unraveling of America [rollingstone.com], published in Rolling Stone
The whole article is worth reading, depressing as it is. But if Americans don’t start to internalize the decline of America and its ideals, replaced as they have become by quick and catchy political slogans and dogma packaged as identity then nothing will change and America is doomed as an idea if not a country.
Someone once told me that the founding documents of America, the. Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, are some of the most enlightened and important documents in the history of humanity and human thought. A bit of hyperbole but point taken. He also said that America’s history is an ongoing experiment to see if humanity can live up to such lofty ideals. It took us “four score and seven years” to even begin to live up to the first line of the Declaration, that “all men are create equal” and as we approach 250 years we are still struggling with that one.
Progress has been slow and fitful, but there has been progress. But somehow there is always a significant number of Americans that fall back on their tribalism and unite in their fear of the other. It’s a sad irony that those who publicly shout about the greatness and sanctity of the Constitution are the ones who seem to be the furthest for living up to ideals on which it is based.
In competitive athletics you play the best you can on that day, and sometimes you lose and sometimes you win. It is best to not be overly attached to the final result if you want to play your best…
Richard Geib, posted in “Mushin” – A Legacy to My Daughter [rjgeib.com] on rjgeib.com
[W]e judge the sophistication of our peers by how sophisticated they are with use of language. Your smartest friends can use deadpan sarcasm, and your smartest friends can get it when you’re deadpanning sarcasm
Stanley Dubinsky, quoted in “The Dad-Joke Doctrine” [theatlantic.com], pubished by The Atlantic
The article is from 2018 but it showed up in a list of Fathers Day related articles this year. It’s interesting giving some theories on why the dad joke exists, how there is analogous ‘traditions’ in some other cultures and languages. Serious lack of dad jokes in the article through. And the few they do give just re-enforce the “dad-jokes = bad-jokes” stereotype.
Anyway, it’s not the dad jokes that this quote is about, it’s about the use of complex linguistics like sarcasm, or puns. I love sarcasm and puns. But living in Singapore I think a lot of my sarcasm and puns go over most peoples heads. To the point that I use a lot less of them than I used to, though sometimes I can’t help myself, the immediate response or comment to a what someone says just comes out without conscious thought, it has to for it to work, if you wait five minutes to make a sarcastic remark or come up with a pun as part of your response then there is no point.
The issue is mostly because English is not most people’s first or primary language. Even when it is the primary language for a lot of Singaporeans, taught in school as the main language, the proficiency and vocabulary is not strong enough to handle more complex puns and sarcasm. There is just too high a proportion of non-native speakers you talk to in daily life, daily interactions demand simpler language. People just don’t use puns and sarcasm so much.
I feel like many snappy retorts and come-backs are lost on most people I speak with, they just don’t immediately get the joke.
My mother is very religious so I’m very much aware of the attitude that these are the last days. But, let’s face it, no matter where we have been in history, whoever has existed has been living in the last days… their own. When each of us dies the world ends for us.
Octavia E. Butler, in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
I’ve never read Octavia Butler, always on the list, never at the top. But I like this quote I found in a post on The Marginalian [themarginalian.org].
Expressing oneself in the world and creativity are the same. It may not be possible to know who you are without somehow expressing it.
Rick Ruben, in The Creative Act
I’ve always had to desire to create, but never the drive to truly create. I play at it but I don’t put in the hours to be a truly creative person.
For example, I’ve been doing photography for more than 25 years, but I’ve never tried to truly learn to be a photographer. I never took a class or read a book. I’ve googled my way to solving specific problems or copying a cool effect I see. I’ve absorbed a lot of lingo and I can control my camera fairly well. Even enough to master full manual mode.
I use Lightroom to clean up my photo. And it comes with photoshop but I’ve rarely opened photoshop. The closest to creativity with images I get is using Adobe’s Express to make the featured images on my posts. I am happy with most of those, especially the ones I did for my series of posts covering my best mobile photos [confusion.cc] year by year since 2004.