The Month That Was - November 2022

Thanks were given.  Whatever griping and sniveling I may do from time to time, I really do understand and appreciate how lucky I am as you can see from my missive below. 

I find I'm busying myself with house stuff.  For the past five or so years I have had a houseguest with a cat.  Now that they're gone, I feel like it's time to get back to some upgrades.  I am also slowly working through a purge of Stuff in anticipation of eventually selling the place.  I realize those two things are at odds.  You should never upgrade in advance of selling because you never make your money back.  We'll see how that develops.

I feel a bit weird not having a writing project active for the first time in a quarter-century. For now I still plan to hold off on the next project until retirement.  Bit by bit, I'm making progress towards that time and the start of the next chapter.

[Travel, Rant] Gratitude Checklist

[Rant] More of the Same

[Roaring 20s] Roaring 20s 2.0: ChatGPT is My Co-pilot

[Travel, Rant] Gratitude Checklist

I drove down to Savannah.  I stayed a couple of weeks (which is why I drove). I will now try to catalog the things I am thankful for from that trip.

• Google Maps/Waze -- miraculous things, really.  Not only do I not need maps, I don't even need to know the directions, they just tell you what to do and when to do it, even routing you around construction and accidents when it is optimal. Young'uns are saying "Yeah, so?" But to anyone old enough to remember cross country trips from the days of yore it's a miracle.  If you had told 10 year old me in the back of the family car, with everyone yelling at everyone else over every wrong turn or missed exit, that in the future you could just give a little machine the address you wanted to get to and it would guide you their effortlessly, I would have said you're reading too much sci-fi.  A lot of modern tech is pointless crap, but mapping apps are a world changer.

• My car works flawlessly -- this was not previously the case.  Prior to the ascendance of Toyota and Honda, all cars were, by current standards, unreliable.  A multi-day road involved a constant low-level dread that your car would simply fail and leave you stranded.  You just prayed that when it happened you were in reach of help, otherwise you were left at the mercy of the road.  Hopefully other drivers might offer a ride to the next exit, or at least not serial kill you.  My car has 140,000 miles on it and it is superior to literally every new car made before 1980, and most before 2000.  Perspective breeds gratitude.

• I'm rich -- OK, I'm not rich.  But by any measure of the expectations of my youth or when compared to 99% of the global population, I am rich.  I have a house in Savannah that I purchased entirely for the sake of convenience of people I love.  Even if I'm not actually rich, I am rich, if you get my meaning.

• Home office technology -- ridiculously, I have a home office in both my homes, each with multiple monitors, and the tech miracles of the day allow me to be in constant face to face contact with people all over the world.  I can work from anywhere, which may sound like hell to a lot of people, but for me it means I only need to use vacation time when I am actually taking vacation.  If I go to Savannah and my loved ones are working I don't have to take time off except when they are free to enjoy it with me.  Not to belabor the point, but thoughtlessly video-conferencing is another sci-fi dream from my youth.

• At least I have my health -- Yeah, it takes a lot of work, and it'll never be what it once was, but the old bones are hanging in there, arthritis notwithstanding. Ands miracle drugs…well, that's a topic for later--

• Loving and Being Loved -- Somebody once said happiness is not the purpose of life.  The purpose of life is to love and be loved and accept the consequences.  Fair.  I think I'm doing OK at both.  But happiness, or at least gratitude, is a nice bonus.  The family that has welcomed me into it are among the most thoughtful and well-adjusted people I have ever known.

I hope your Thanksgiving was as good as mine.

[Rant] More of the Same

Let's start with this article that examines the logos of tech companies and luxury brands and points out that they are evolving to a certain dull minimalist text form. Then there's this article that points out how cars have evolved to a central ur-design in the same manner.  David Perell, a writer I follow, takes the analysis a step further in twitter and summarized here.  You can see this in cities too; whether it's Ann Arbor or Savannah or presumably pretty much anywhere in the world:  there is a core historic area -- the campus and downtown in Ann Arbor, the historic district in Savannah -- but any area developed after, say, 1980, with be strip malls with franchised stores, office parks, or planned housing developments.  From what I read, that is the case all over the developed world.

Most people decry this. Many come to the conclusion that it's a natural result from various homogenizing trends.  For instance, everyone wants their logo easily readable on a phone screen now, so that leads to variations on simple, sans serif text.  For autos, safety regulations have placed a high cost on creative shapes and contours.  In cities, the same forces that influence Ann Arbor or Savannah also influence Turin or Kobe so it makes sense they would converge.

As far as fashion and hairstyles and pop culture and even manners and decor, well it's all shared now right?  There is no opportunity for a pocket of non-conformity to evolve to stand in conflict with the majority because the minute it starts, it's everywhere all at once.  Subcultures are exposed instantaneously, evaluated and judged in the crucible of social media, and either move mainstream or die before they become major enough to offer an optional vision.

Food and music are doing a bit better.  There are still major devotees to pure genre in those categories, although both have legitimized fusion in just about every form.  China Poblano in Vegas is an example.  The Grateful Crow, just down the road from me, specializes in Sushi and Burgers (but not sushi-burgers).  Or check out Ted Gioia's list of best albums of 2020. The one line description of almost all of them indicates some sort of style fusion.

A cynic would say that this is all happening because it benefits our corporate overlords (it probably does).  A universalist might suggest that it's because, on average, people are the same all over and value the same things (likely true also, see The Median Voter Theorem).  An old fogey would say these kids have no imagination; they're too conformist.  As a certified Old Fogey I have a certain sympathy for this, but it's not really as cranky an opinion as it sounds.  I have highlighted before how the decade by decade changes in culture pretty much stopped in the 90s.  It's been said (correctly) that apart from the absence of cell phones, you could walk around in the 90s and not realize you'd slipped back 30 years.  Combine that with the trend towards valuing your group identity as the primary source of self-definition, and you end up with a formula for conformity -- where creativity is costly and even risky.

I don't like it, but then, the world is not here for me to like.  My guess is that the monoculture is here to stay and creativity, especially aesthetic creativity, will be the exception rather than the rule for many years to come.

Addendum: a lovely related rant on ugliness.

[Roaring 20s] Roaring 20s 2.0: ChatGPT is My Co-pilot

In contrast to aesthetics, the functional world will likely be regularly turned upside down.  Happenings:

Item 1 - The world of crypto seems to be falling apart.  Crypto coins and tokens and what-have-you are dropping like flies and losing people billions of dollars in the process.  You may have heard about Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and his FTX crypto exchange and related Alameda hedge fund and all the financial shenanigans that went on around them.  If not, to put it succinctly, SBF set up a crypto token and an exchange for trading it and convinced people that it was safe and backed up by actual assets of value except it kind of wasn't and as soon as people started to suspect that it everything went boom.  Now he's trying to convince everyone that it was all an accident and an oversight and he never intended to defraud anyone.  The story has been given a boost by lurid tales of polyamorous relationships among the principal players. 

The best in-depth and ongoing analysis is coming from Twitter user Autism Capital if you have the time and stomach to wade through it.  There are a bunch of great summaries in Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter.  There is little of value at traditional news sites -- maybe this interview with SBF at Vox.

You needn't concern yourself with the details.  The point is suspicion and cynicism is rising in the crypto community and this especially high profile crash is dragging a lot of folks down with it, the bulk of them deservedly.  This is a huge come-to-Jesus moment for crypto.  The above mentioned Levine believes that cryptos are painfully relearning lessons that traditional finance learned and codified long ago.  This aligns with my view.  My guess is that whatever is left standing after the shakeout might be stuff of enduring value.  But the truly wacko stuff peaked a while back and will likely turn to dust -- poor Justin Beiber's $1.3M bored ape NFT was recently valued at $70K.

The alternate view is that crypto and blockchain technologies are, and always have been, a solution in search of a problem, and the whole thing is just the madness of crowds; a modern-day tulip mania. 

A third view is that crypto has real value, but only to secretive, nefarious activities.

I still don't own any.  I once tried to set up an account on the biggest, most reliable crypto exchange and I was stymied by their buggy software.  I'm grateful for that now, but once the shakeout is over I will likely try again.

Item 2 - How about ChatGPT, have you heard of that?  ChatGPT is a chatbot.  You know what a chatbot is, right?  ChatGPT however, is not your run-of-the-mill brain-dead customer support bot.  It is backed by a super-sophisticated artificial intelligence.  You can ask it remarkably complex questions and it will respond with coherent and relevant answers -- mostly.  Here is a twitter thread with some of the most interesting results and commentary.  People have speculated this as the thing that puts Google out of business.  That's highly unlikely, Google is well aware that this sort of thing is coming.  That said, asking a question of ChatGPT will very often give you better results than a Google search.  It does best in areas where it has been trained on a large body of work, or where there is a clear objective answer.  

For example, let's say I needed to file paperwork for a building permit in Washtenaw County.  A question to ChatGPT would probably give me a fairly comprehensive answer with the names and contact information for agencies, the names of the forms, the expected time involved, and even share common experiences of others.  Google would give me links to uncountable sites where if I was diligent enough I could get that information.  Also lots of ads.  Similarly, if I was to ask ChatGPT "I am a 62 year old man who is 5'10 and 180 lbs., give me a diet that will help me lose 10 pounds in three months." It would do exactly that, based on its reading of nutritional and fitness information.  One software developer has made the statement that he intends to pair-program with ChatGPT from now on.  This has implications for many careers and industries.  Can I ask it for weekly workouts and dump my personal trainer?  Can I ask it how to sue somebody and skip the lawyer?

ChatGPT does less well on more nebulous topics, occasionally outright failing.  Still, it's a huge step forward, with the potential to disrupt a lot of stuff.

ChatGPT is available to anyone…in theory.  You can set up an account at the above website, if you time it right.  Every time I've visited I've been told it's too busy, please try again later.  You can experience the future, but you'll need to wait in line. 

Item 3 - related to both the above, Tyler Cowen laments that Twitter is now the best place for news.  He's not wrong.  Twitter is great, but you have to carefully manage it.

Item 4 - More artificial intelligence in images.  Stable Diffusion is an AI product that will accept a written prompt from you and create an image.  Here are some samples. Truly remarkable and fascinating, if not quite so disruptive.