Second place ~

As a Christian, I read the Bible. I don't study it the way others seem to study it, but I do devotions and I do read proverbs every day and I go through the Gospels and Acts and the letters of Paul.



One of the things that Jesus taught was to be a servant and not to think more of yourself than that. Paul expanded on the idea and said that as Christians we should be content with second place.



In my life, when I have expressed contentment with less than first place, I have been chastised. I have been encouraged to do better. I have been told my performance was not what it could have been. And I was skipped for rewards.



When I look at news outlets, I don't see any of them celebrating the person who came in second place. Not even any of the Christian news outlets. They all celebrate who won, who came in first, who the supposed best is.



I find it fascinating that we're so caught up in our society with performance and being better than others that people seem to skip right over this teaching in the Bible. In fact, they turn it and say that God made you and loves you more than anything else and you are the best. They say that we are entitled to things as children of God and we can walk into the throne room of heaven and demand things because we're the best of creation. And even if you were the only human being God still would have sent his son to die for you.



That's what they teach. And then I read this little message saying be content with second place and make yourself a servant. Jesus didn't even say anything, he just went and got the wash basin and towels and started washing his disciples feet. And then said go and do as I have done.



Tough lesson, hard to grasp. I'm glad God blesses me in second place.



+++

Not Arby's ~

I survived something recently. After church, my wife and I were driving somewhere. She started talking about something and it was obscure to me what she was talking about. She went on and on for about five minutes.



It was a very in-depth discussion. But it was one-sided because it was just her talking about something I didn't understand. I didn't know what she was talking about. I felt very lost.



But after about five minutes she paused and she kind of turned towards me and she asked me, "what are you thinking?"



Often this question gets me into trouble, especially when I answer it honestly. So I tend to say nothing or grunt politely. Because I was so lost and I didn't really understand what she was asking. I just kind of looked at her quickly and said "not Arby's."



She scrunched up her eyebrows andsaid, "that doesn't make any sense. What do you mean?" And I kind of smiled and said, "exactly." And I lived to tell the tale.



I said it because I was playing off of the old commercial where they would have a Arby's hat floating over somebody's head around lunchtime and say, what are you thinking? And the person would say, "I'm thinking Arby's."



I chuckled about that the rest of the day. I still can't believe I got away with it!



+++

Grew up in fear ~

I grew up in fear. I've talked about it before here but I have a new experience with it.



I grew up being afraid of things. My parents taught me that there were bad people out there waiting to take my stuff as soon as I went out. They wanted to steal my money. They wanted to break into my car and take my stuff. They weren't very afraid of identity theft but I was scared of that.



It's taken me a long time to work through those feelings of fear. And get to where I don't think them as much as I did. But they're still hovering in the back of my mind.



I had an episode of that recently on some travel. My wife and I had gone to see our daughter and son-in-law and granddaughters. We had a great trip! On the way back we stopped to eat at a sit-down restaurant instead of grabbing something fast and driving. And the whole time that I was inside enjoying talking to my wife and the meal I kept thinking "Somebody's going to break into my car."



Did I lock the door? Somebody's gonna steal our suitcases. Somebody's going to steal my computer. Somebody's going to steal my chocolate, whatever. Sad, I know, but that's how I was raised, to be careful so that the bad guys don't get your stuff.



The only way to be careful is to think about it and double check and make sure that they don't have an avenue to steal from you.



Weird.



+++

Manual window cranks ~

I have a pickup truck. It's almost 20 years old. It's red. It has four doors and I enjoy driving it. I bought it so that I could join the ranks of people that could show up somewhere, throw stuff in the bed of the truck, carry it, and then unload it quickly and easily. No muss, no fuss.



The pickup truck has manual windows. Instead of flicking a button, I have to actually turn a crank to turn the windows down and then put it back up. If I'm driving, I'm probably not going to adjust the windows on the passenger side or in the back seat.



But there was frustration there because I have guards over the windows so that I can leave the windows cracked and let the heat out without rain getting in. The truck came with them and they work great.



When driving down the road the window crank was in the right place with the window up, but if I wanted to crack the window and let some air flow without rain coming in, the crank would be right where I put my left knee when I'm driving.



So I would end up rolling the window down on just a little bit further, get rain on my face or the side of my head and be aggravated. I finally made a note to look up how to change the position of the hand crank on my truck's window.



I found a YouTube video that made it very clear how to use a piece of paracord to pop a little clip on the window crank and then I could put it wherever I wanted and put the window crank back in as if it had been there the entire time.





The trick worked! The clip popped. I didn't lose the clip, and I got the window crank exactly where I wanted it.



I love YouTube. I love learning little tricks like that and then using them successfully.



Woohoo!



+++

Please be rude ~

I read an article this past week about how one of the big AI companies encourages people not to be polite to their AI because of the extra cycles it takes to process the please add thank you. Their reasoning was that we're already using gobs of electricity on everything else, Please cut it out so that we don't get into trouble for destroying the planet.



A computer processing company wants you to be rude or not polite in order to save the planet.



The urgency being driven there is so subtle and yet I can see where the people that are joked about as our tech overlords are trying to drive a certain behavior which is reduce consumption in order to quote unquote reduce the use of limited resources because we're going to use all the resources to dominate you.



Pretty funny.

Talking with my aunt ~

I remember being in the little house and talking to my aunt when I was a boy I don't remember what year it was, but I remember being in the kitchen of the little one-bedroom house that my aunt and uncle had built on an acre of property that my grandfather gave them.



My uncle divorced my aunt at some point. And she ended up living in that little house again for a little while. But because it was so far from the main house and because of her nervousness she didn't stay there for very long alone.



But I remember being in the kitchen of the little house with her. There was a radio playing and the song "Rhinestone Cowboy" was playing. It was in the 1970s, so that was a hot song.



I think she was talking about her husband and other things going on. And because I had learned to comment on things from my parents I made some sort of comment. I was 13 years old and so that means it would have been 1977.



I remember my aunt telling me that I was wise for my age. And that I knew a lot of good stuff.



In the mid-1980s I got to stay in that little house while I went to the University of Central Florida. Even later in my life that little house became mine.



Now I enjoy staying in the little house whenever my wife and I get an opportunity. I enjoy the rustic nature of it and the fun that we've had there. And I look forward to future fun and my children having fun there.



Good stuff!



+++

Sucked in by AI ~

I'm reading more and more stories about how people are using the so-called "artificial intelligence" services to plan their lives and do all sorts of things. I hear a lot of good things about how people use it to generate letters and crank out reports.



But I'm also reading disturbing stories of people talking to these things and breaking with reality because they're believing that they're talking to a higher intelligence.



I'm shocked because this is kind of what happened before with computers. Salespeople would go around and if a salesperson had just papers and charts you weren't very impressed. But if a salesperson pulled out a screen and they showed the same sorts of things on a screen and used a keyboard to move through the pictures all of a sudden you felt like were dealing with somebody that was so much better and this was modern and much better than anything else.



I'm seeing similar things with the large language model artificial intelligences that are being marketed today. It's scary.



And then I'm reading stories about people as they use these things, starting to ask existential questions about spiritual things and life guidance and all that sort of stuff. And they lose their minds because they think that they're finally connected to the "higher consciousness" that New Agers have been selling all this time.



I do have some hope because I have started seeing stories about how people are pointing out that these things are probably just really fast pattern matchers, and it's not really intelligence, it's just really fast language matching.



And that's what computers do. We make decisions based on a lot of inputs that we don't even understand are happening in our own brains. We're basing them on smells and nerve endings that we don't even realize are feeding us data and we're fast.



And then when a machine is demonstrated to be able to make a yes or no decision a million times faster than we can, at least we think it can, all of a sudden we want to let it tell us how to run our lives and run our operations and do everything for us so that we can go and do other things.



But it's a computer. I'm a human. The computer doesn't rule me. Some people would argue about that too, but that's a different subject.



Large language model artificial intelligences are cool tools that are being adapted and used by early adopters and the rest of us are just kind of trailing along behind going, wow, how did they do that? And why did they do that?



Be careful out there. Remember what you're dealing with.



+++