Johann Besse, Water reflection from the “Echoes” photography series, 2019
I am a WHORE for “the love is requited, they’re both just idiots”
“They are STUPIDLY competent at EVERYTHING except each other.”
I am a WHORE for “the love is requited, they’re both just idiots”
“They are STUPIDLY competent at EVERYTHING except each other.”
This is basically what my physical therapist had me do for my back problems last year and it helped with the pain so much! Also walk for at least thirty minutes a day, even if it’s just in small chunks throughout the day.
It’s weird here in limbo. When I was originally diagnosed as having HIV in 2004 it was still more of a death sentence than it wasn’t. Hell, we were still doing “don’t take meds until ABSOLUTELY necessary” stage of things. Which, by the way, is what we did for me.
It was this… towering wall of something about to crash down. End of world shit. And having to sit with it is weird. Because it’s not like a wound or a injury people could see. It was… possibility. Inevitability. It was these things that were ideas and abstracts and big giant fucking questions we as a species have been asking since the first moment of our collective existence. And probably will keep asking.
And time passed.
And then there is your 50th birthday and you think shit… how did THIS happen? Were we supposed to get old? What was once old? It doesn’t feel old. Except. Heh. When it does.
And you’re fine. Figuring out retirement and lives without full time work and maybe planning for YOU and your family.
Then someone says congestive heart failure.
The quiet that comes after. The last week of silence. I only really have that sentence to go on. And the limbo now is it could be therapies and pills and regular amount of life. Or. It could be counting sunsets. Making plans.
And in the silence of not knowing you are a pinball bouncing between those two VERY distant extremes of a diagnosis, because you don’t really have one.
And wow. Suddenly.
I can’t breathe, a lot, so I walk slower. I’m walking even slower. I find myself with the usual, daily, ooooh I wanna smell that flower (for real). But I’m not gonn—-why not?
I’m walking slower. Looking at and smelling flowers. Slowly watching crowds in a kind of trance. Looking up, at buildings and skies and clouds.
I’m stopping to smell bbqs being lit up and hamburgers sizzle.
I’m… weirdly in the middle of so much noise of “I’m ok I’m ok I’m ok I’m ok I’m ok” (I’m not)… there is a lot of quiet inside me. I don’t want actually talk that much. I like being alone and just. Watching the world. People peopling.
You know I’ve spent most of my life with this one sided unknown love affair with the world. Y’all are fascinating beings. I don’t do well interacting with you. Being loved or loving you in your own lives. But gods.
The little girl with bubbles at the folk music festival is a daughter I’ll never have but will always always love and remember. The son with two dads who were so proud it was a light that cast shadows. The single mom, soul almost out of her body, just laughing as her kids climb a friend like a jungle gym. The brand new couple on maaaybe the third date, only unsure toward each other and all the rest of us - from the grandmother at the corner to my jaded ass beside them to the waiter at the end of their forever shift- KNOW they are absolutely head over heels about each other. The lesbian couple in matching army boots, no more than 20, who make me smile. The old man swearing at the sky and laughing while his wife almost chokes laughing at him, shoving him on the bench.
Perfect. Little. Wonderful. Absolute. Mercurial. Ineffable. Humanity.
Ordinary.
I have moments. I remember when John died and I moved through a world of sound and motion and light and people that… kept going. A bubble of silence, of him missing in the world, that no one knew about. Just. Watching it all. Keep going.
I have glimpses of that. Mortality is a fickle fucker that likes to from time to time pounce on my brain and give it a good scratch. You can’t live in the middle of it, I certainly can’t. But sometimes there shoves and prods and pokes that make you live closer than normal for a while.
Waiting to know, this limbo right now, means I’m pretty much on the edge of the river of it, up to my ankles in it, tugged and tugged and tugged by it.
And its ok.
It’s not new. It’s not… super scary? Scary enough. But. It’s ok.
I got to meet you. And maybe for a while yet. So.
It’s ok.
“The machines we have now, they’re not conscious,” he says. “When one person teaches another person, that is an interaction between consciousnesses.” Meanwhile, AI models are trained by toggling so-called “weights” or the strength of connections between different variables in the model, in order to get a desired output. “It would be a real mistake to think that when you’re teaching a child, all you are doing is adjusting the weights in a network.”
Chiang’s main objection, a writerly one, is with the words we choose to describe all this. Anthropomorphic language such as “learn”, “understand”, “know” and personal pronouns such as “I” that AI engineers and journalists project on to chatbots such as ChatGPT create an illusion. This hasty shorthand pushes all of us, he says — even those intimately familiar with how these systems work — towards seeing sparks of sentience in AI tools, where there are none.
“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.
“It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.
[…]
Given his fascination with the relationship between language and intelligence, I’m particularly curious about his views on AI writing, the type of text produced by the likes of ChatGPT. How, I ask, will machine-generated words change the type of writing we both do? For the first time in our conversation, I see a flash of irritation. “Do they write things that speak to people? I mean, has there been any ChatGPT-generated essay that actually spoke to people?” he says.
Chiang’s view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. AI-generated text is not delightful, but it could perhaps be useful in those certain areas, he concedes.
“But the fact that LLMs are able to do some of that — that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement of their abilities,” he says. “That’s more a statement about how much bullshit we are required to generate and deal with in our daily lives.”
applied statistics
I hate… fanon archetypes. You know how people sand down their blorbos to fit into the same handful of incorrect quote templates and then they forget their actual canon personalities because they’ve gone too long without engaging with the source material? I hate it. I hate it. He would not fucking say that. The joke was slightly funny when it was on the office or whatever but we’ve all heard it over and over with different characters pasted into it how are you still laughing please let me out
The funny character has no other personality traits. Also he’s incompetent now. The one who’s kind of prickly is just weirdly mean OR sad and did nothing wrong, take your pick. Gotta have the Sunshine Boy. Woman 1 is yass slay badass. Woman 2 is the rest of the cast’s Mother. If there’s only one woman, she can be both. Do you want to kill yourself yet
I didn’t say a fandom but you thought of one, didn’t you? That’s because they all do this. All of them. You search the main tags for the media of your choice and you will find them there. The same incorrect quotes you’ve been hearing for years. It’s like a time loop. It’s my own personal torment nexus
