FWIW I always felt my contribution would have been towards “real” AI rather than the current pseudo-AI stuff that is all the rage. In addition to being a programmer, I also have a background in evolutionary biology and neuroanatomy. The “neural networks” that are part of current AI were originally based on the understanding of how neurons function that existed in the 1970s, and they were (and are still) a poor implementation of that level of knowledge. IMHO true AI can be achieved by more accurate simulation of how real neurons and real neural networks function and how they have come about in the real world through hundreds of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.

That being said, “real” AI is probably going to be even worse for humanity than this current stuff is, so at least I’m glad that blood won’t be on my hands.

need drugs to help?

Probably so. I also haven’t smoked weed since 2021, and I never coded sober.

I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I have an old iOS project that I want to revive, but I genuinely wonder if I still have the ability to do anything with it. Fortunately, my motivation has tanked even harder than my programming skills.

I was a programmer for 25 years. I always figured I could have made a contribution to AI research, but the opportunity never came up (I was too busy writing Skype clones for cable companies and ISPs that were never used by anyone). I regretted this for a long time, but not any more. I never imagined AI would be this fucking bad, “bad” in the sense of bad for humanity and just plain bad as a product.

My brother’s in-laws last winter were paying almost $2000 a month to heat their (overly large and mostly uninsulated) old house with oil. I can’t even imagine how crushing this winter is going to be for them.

My grocery bills are double what they were in 2019 now

Rocket Mortgage has a commercial that shows some schlub walking into his house with his groceries while the voiceover says something about how those three bags of groceries used to be six. Then the house starts talking to him, reminding him that he can cash in the tiny amount of equity he has in the house with a second mortgage and use the money to buy groceries. Happy schlub dances the rest of the way into the house.

It must be hundreds of thousands of people that have been conned by this one commercial alone into thinking that going into debt to buy groceries is a solution to their problems.

I quit smoking pot five years ago. Altman’s not wrong re: me.

I bonesaw what you did there.

Natural gas … although that’s not exactly “diversification” from oil.

The Untied Snakes of Vespucciland

Hey, we did get the moon landing out of it.

Idi Amin spent the last couple of decades of his life in Saudi Arabia. I can’t think of anything that Saudi Arabia has in common with Russia …

I “retired” (fancy way of saying “was laid off”) from programming seven years ago and I haven’t written a line of code since. I’m happy to have completely missed out on the AI experience, although since I spent the last few years of my career mostly managing a team of offshore developers, I feel like I got close enough. Now I own my own small house and I drive a school bus and I couldn’t be happier. At some point AI will be driving the school buses (so that the kids can still go to school and have AI do all their work for them) but hopefully I will have died a painless death by then.

Do they matter to cops? If they get paid, they get paid by tax money, no?

As I mentioned in another comment, apparently the PD splits the ticket revenue with the school district after the camera company gets their installation and profit margin covered. Cops get paid their salaries from the PD budget which is mostly from tax revenues but also from other sources like tickets and these cameras. A higher PD budget means more perks including higher salaries and paid overtime and more benefits, so while they can’t just stuff the money in their pockets (usually) they do benefit from these alternative revenue sources.

does that make you a roving part of the survailance system, too?

Probably. There’s nothing I can do about this without losing my job.

The cameras are from a company named Bus Patrol. They haven’t really told us much about how the program works, but as I understand it the district pays nothing in upfront costs. Supposedly Bus Patrol pays for the installation and then they get all the revenue up to the point where the cameras and their profit margin are covered; after that the ticket revenues are split evenly between the local police department and the school district. A figure of a million dollars as the cost for installing cameras on our 40 buses was thrown up by somebody, but that seems a bit unlikely as that means the cameras cost $25,000 per bus. Maybe that’s correct, I dunno.

I have nearly no info about the legality of this, but they’re pretty common at this point. I know one difference is that if you’re caught by an actual cop speeding past a bus’ red lights you get a fine and points on your license, but if you get a mailed ticket from one of these cameras it’s just a fine. Presumably it’s because they can’t always tell who was actually driving the vehicle. It might be a case where they can’t really take any action if a person just refuses to pay the fine, and they just send out tickets because some or most people will just pay it.

I’m a school bus driver and a few years ago I had a cop pass me while my red flashers were on and the stop sign was out and kids were about to get off the bus and cross the street. He was driving with one hand and looking at his phone in the other hand. He could have easily run a kid over. And then they probably would have found some way to blame me for it.

We have cameras now that automatically detect this and send out tickets, but we didn’t at the time. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway since the cops have to review the footage before any ticket goes out.

We had a meeting with my mom’s broker and my brother and I brought up the AI bubble. The broker responded with the most ridiculous nonsense. He basically said that corporate CEOs are smart people with a legal responsibility to keep their companies financially healthy and so they wouldn’t be using AI if it weren’t viable. It sounded like something handed down to him from Raymond James HQ which I’m sure it was, and it was surely written by AI in the first place.

My preparer randomly told me that he had invested money with a guy who was developing a “reactionless space drive”. He then mentioned that the guy had solved all the problems he was having with it by asking ChatGPT about it. I asked him if the guy had a working prototype yet and he said no but it was sure to work.

Time to find a new tax preparer.

I had a coworker go on an insane rant about his hatred of EVs after somebody mentioned Teslas. I wound him up even more by saying I’m fine with EVs just not ones built by Nazis.

I’ve recently started having fast food occasionally after not touching it since before COVID. It really is fucking terrible and absurdly expensive. Except Taco Bell, which is also fucking terrible but at least it’s relatively cheap still.