Conversations

I’ve been yakking with friends about AI, part of everyday conversation, an ongoing computation. Here’s me writing to a professor and former classmate:

[I]n general I'm very impressed by AI, not because I believe in AGI or the Singularity or am a transhumanist muskrat, but because stochastic algorithms are able to distill vast quantities of human authored verbiage into a navigable topology of strung-together tokens, wow. The art too: I'm blown away by it.  Not all of it. Not every bit of AI slop is goldilocks.  More like panning for gold.

We talk about other topics too of course, especially Gaza. I’ve been bringing up the need for an airport over on Facebook, branching off plans from 2016.

Whereas most of these conversations are in cyberspace, I sometimes have the privilege of a non-virtual visitor, as was the case on Thursday. 

Daniel was on his way back to California and stopped over to spend the day with me, 9 to 5, and we got a lot of work done. He’s a boss user of AI tools when in his element.

The branch-out to Obsidian involved, as an exercise, copying down the text of these blogs. That alone was worth the price of admission, to his interesting demo. AI wrote the scripts to pretty much bootstrap itself.

The Cycle (movie review)

:: iranian festival, portland, 2009 ::

As mentioned over on BizMo Diaries (hinting at Motorcycle Diaries at first), I've been treating myself to some Iranian films, not the first time since Portland is on the global circuit when it comes to Film Fests, hosting many of the international variety, wherein Iran's filmcraft is respected. This time I'm renting from a local vid store, our 'hood still having one of those. Vid stores once were commonplace up and down the boulevards, in shopping malls, and then they all went away thanks to streaming services, point and click Netflix.

The Cycle is from way back in 1977 and is gloriously bleak. I have a real soft spot for Stalker-like Zone vistas, middle of nowhere, like behind Jersey City where I'd hike at night, out to that I-95 turnpike overpass. It cuts through a bluff. I wasn't trespassing or going anywhere illegal exactly, just savoring one of those no man's lands. I'd go in the day too as I recall. Good exercise. In Portland I have Mt. Tabor, the polar opposite of bleak.

The boy is taking everything in at high bandwidth. We're seeing adaptation, learning curves. By the end, when he's eyeing the inside of the blood broker's mansion, we see his ambition. He's learning how the game is played. We see a judgement in the end, by another player, that the son has become cold hearted and disrespectful of his dying (dead) father. But as omniscient viewers, we've just seen him on a mission of mercy. How terrible is being the chief blood getter really? No one wants to do it. You can see why the hospital can't compete: the healthcare staff would rather not be the ones to donate.

I've also been thinking more about The Circle. The special features were useful.