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!



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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.



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Button batteries ~

Button batteries must be one of the biggest scams running in department stores ever. They charge huge amounts for these, but if you go online you can find the same exact batteries for five and ten packs that are half the price of a one or two pack in a department store.





Paying half price for three to five times more just makes economic sense. I actually buy button batteries in bulk and I keep them in a zip bag in my closet so that when my smart devices or my watches run out of battery every once in a while instead of going and paying outrageous prices I just pull out my pouch replace the battery and keep rolling.





Just search Amazon or any of the other online stores for the button battery that you need and you'll be amazed at the price savings you'll get. Check it out!

Plants on the deck~

This is my third year having the same plants on the deck. I have two pots of lemongrass that I rooted from lemongrass that I bought at a local Asian market. I have two flower box things with basil and rosemary in them. I tried cilantro in one and it did okay for about three weeks but the cilantro gave out and withered and died.



This is my third year of having a flower box of petunias right outside the kitchen window on the deck. They're red petunias and this time I bought jumbo red petunias. They're taller and the flowers are bigger. They get beat down by the sun so I water them and the basil and lemongrass every day. And then when the afternoon thunderstorms come the petunias get beat down by the rain and the blooms look terrible for a day and then they start blooming again and they look beautiful.



I have a grapevine in a pot that I started four five years ago now. I was so excited to try to grow a grapevine. I thought about the Bible and all the talk about grapes and grapevines and all that. The first year it did nothing. Then the second year it actually had grapes on it. They went full-term and we got nice purple grapes. When I bought the vine it didn't say muscadine, I don't know if it got cross-pollinated with muscadine grapes locally or if that's what they were to start. But I was so disappointed that they were that weird musty muscadine flavor grapes. I put it back up in its spot and I water it every day. I don't really get very many grapes off of it but it's fun to see the grape leaves and think about Greek dishes where rice is wrapped in grape leaves.



This year I'm trying a hydroponics experiment in 5-gallon buckets on the deck again. I put two cherry tomato plants in hydroponics buckets. No pumps, no fancy things, just nutrients in water and plants poking out of the side of buckets. They did well last year, we'll see how it goes this time.



I'm enjoying my plants on the deck. Fun!



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Email subject lines ~

There's so much spam email flying around it's incredible. It's kind of sad and disappointing to watch email have descended so far, but I get it. It's easy to automate and easy to flood people with useless information trying to part their dollars from them.



Distractions, grabbing that attention, pulling us away from what we thought we were going to go and do or look at or read.



I remember I had a manager at work who was big on the military method of subject lines. Every subject line had to have a prefix in front of it followed by a colon and he wanted only four prefixes. INFO, COORD, ACTION, and a couple of others that I don't even remember.



What was funny is I had read articles about that method years before. I really liked r concept but nobody used it outside of the military and I didn't get very many military emails so I didn't know if they even used it. But he told us to go forth and use it.



Nobody else on the team did except for me. I loved it. Now I had a way to tell people very clearly about my email. This email is just information. This email is calling for some sort of action. This email is coordinating something with you.



It didn't go over very well when I started sending the manager emails with those prefixes. He did not like being told he needed to take action on something. But I was right and he did.



I have a friend who, when things are leading up to a big event, he starts putting "please read" as the prefix to his email subject. The first couple that I got I just deleted. I finally opened one up and it really didn't have anything that pertained to me in it. I told my wife this guy needs to understand. I automatically filter anything that says "please read" as nothing I need to read.



She and I talked about it. She didn't understand. So I told her if someone has to beg me to read their email then all of their other emails I don't have to read. I probably don't have to read this one either.



Clogging the system with useless information. What's funny is another person on the same staff that my friend is on sends out very meaningful emails full of information about the entire year of events. Not just tidbits of information shared one at a time with a subject line of please read.



One benefit is any email that starts with "please read" usually gets filtered by my systems and put in a folder where I never see it.



But anything that starts with INFO: or COORD: or ACTION: ends up marked as important and right in front of me.



Hilarious.



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Meat run ~

I recently went on a meat run to Walmart. It's funny to go into the chest freezer out in the garage and find it almost empty. We don't eat as much meat as we used to, but we do like to buy it and cook it.



In summertime I like to grill chicken and pork. We don't get steak very much, but we enjoy ground beef in the form of hamburgers quite often. Although we have been enjoying ground turkey and turkey burgers more often than beef.



But I went out to the chest freezer this week and found that we were almost out of stuff. So I made a Walmart run. I went in the morning. My hope was to find some discounted things with the yellow tags on them. And I saw quite a few of those. Steak is still outrageous and so I didn't buy any of that. But I bought a bunch of other things.



I remember growing up when we would have the very occasional time of going and eating dinner at Grandma and Grandpa's house next door.



Grandpa would brag about how he had pulled steaks out of the freezer. I always wondered about that freezer and how he had so many steaks in there. And the steak always tasted good!



But I like keeping meat in the freezer so that when we want to have something we just go to the garage, open up the chest freezer, and pull some meat out and defrost it, and have at it.



Good stuff.



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