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D.O.P.-T.

More sneezing today. Maybe it'll quit if I buy a 3-pack of boxes of tissues at our next supermarket visit.

I managed to sneeze less today by dint of running a couple of long errands on foot. One of those peach trees suddenly has ripe fruit.

Last night I left the back door open to cool the house off since I'd cooked pasta. The dog had been walked and was sprawled in the hallway, when I looked out the door and there in the dusk was Prudence, sitting on the middle step, staring at me the way her mother stares at me from the flower bed below when I'm refilling the catfood on the porch. So I fed her. And closed the door in case the dog saw her on the way to her waterbowl.

D.O.P.-T.

The weedy privet trees are flowering. Today my existence was a series of sneezing jags.

D.O.P.-T.

I'm noticing more peach trees in people's gardens now. One near us has started casting down unripe peaches on the pavement/sidewalk. Somebody else has a fig tree that basically acts as an unruly hedge. It's been dropping figs, but I'm not familiar enough with figs to know whether they're ripe.

D.O.P.-T.

No cat sighting today, and the dog was back to not wanting to walk. But a squirrel—a black one—came so close in the park, I could have stepped on it if I'd wanted to. Probably one of the ones that people feed at the picnic tables in that corner.

D.O.P.-T.

Saw all three cats today. Mama Violet waited in silence while I took the water bowls away and changed the water, then started efficiently engulfing her breakfast. Monty prevented me from finishing the watering by hosing down near the tall fence. I left him food, which he ate despite hissing at me. I went out again in the evening after walking the dog, and he'd moved enough for me to get to my flowers, but Prudence was also there, as usual panicking and running exactly where I needed to step. I managed the watering and they both emerged and followed me into the back porch room to stare at the door, so I fed them.

The fluffy little trees that were planted along that tall fence all died of neglect, except for a couple where my watering appears to have given them enough water under the fence. The dead ones have been ripped out and replaced with a couple of ornamental trees of a different kind, with little bell-shaped flowers. The switch involved dust clouds rising over the fence from power tools opening up the hard-packed soil. I wish the little trees well; I hope an automatic drip system has been put in.

Happy Birthday

ravan!

D.O.P.-T.

It would have been Wulfy's birthday today. In his honour, when the housemate and I took a walk around the park at 9'ish to beat the heat, hordes of dogs were out.

Ours declined to walk past the end of the front lawn this evening.

D.O.P.-T.

Yesterday after dinner the dog decided she wanted to take a real walkies, and led me around the corner. Then she suddenly stopped dead, turned tail, and towed me all the way home. No idea what spooked her. Today she started off the same way, but stopped and instead demanded to cross the fairly busy road. I managed to effect this without getting us run over. She found a lawn to make a deposit on, I did the pick-up—and almost immediately, she was racing again. But this time continuing away from the house. So we went around the block in good time, including crossing at a crossing this time, and I think she was all calmed down when we got back. If it's a sound, I can't hear it.

D.O.P.-T.

The housemate has periodic social engagements. The other evening, I took advantage to vacuum out the house (she can't stand the noise). The dog has been shedding; I almost broke the vac by over-filling its cylinder beyond the point where the stirrer inside it could move. Fortunately it worked when she went off at short notice for another in-person thing this afternoon and I vacuumed out the back porch room. There was dog hair in there, too, though, mostly from the top step where the dog lolls outside the back door.

And yes, it was hot.

Entry tags:

books_2025

The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

This book was a very well done AI skeptic book that was rooted in deep knowledge of the history of artificial intelligence. It brought to light some interesting points that I had never thought about, and it never descended into a rant.

It gets into the history of AI, and a lot of that discussion is rooted in the type of probabilistic models that I learned about in grad school. It is discussing n-grams, Markov, and so on.

There is a discussion about how AI is an attempt to break labor and gets into a more detailed history of the Luddites. The Luddites were craftsmen, and machines were replacing their hard won skills with an inferior product. The machines that were doing this were also dangerous to their operators.

Various people involved in AI feel like there should not be any AI policy until it is thoroughly discussed, but the authors propose that existing laws should be used to limit the use of AI in areas where it can do harm. They quote Michael Atleson, an attorney within the FTC Division of Advertising Practices:

Your therapy bots aren't licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods.

The book was extremely critical about the use of AI in making medical decisions and in law. Law has to do with the nuance of language, and generated language that no human really thinks through does not have the same nuance.

There were also good arguments for limiting the use of AI in education.

In August 2020, thousands of British students, unable to take their A-level exams due to the COVID-19 pandemic, received grades calculated based on an algorithm that took as input, among other things, the grades that other students at their schools received in previous years. After massive public outcry, in which hundreds of students gathered outside the prime minister's residence at 10 Downing Street in London, chanting "Fuck the algorithm!" the grades were retracted and replaced with grades based on teachers' assessments of the student work.

While some technology in education is important, a lot of technology in education is designed to give an inferior education to poor kids and union-bust.

One thing that I did not know was that the little Gemini summary on a Google search uses 10-30 times more energy than search before this feature was added.

The authors see both AI doomers and AI boosters as two sides of the same coin. Both of these groups believe that the AI will become smarter than humans. The outcome is the only thing that they differ on.

The group that wants to consider the data used to train the models and the impacts that AI has on the present really does not want to get lumped in with AI doomers that think that the AI is going to eventually get so smart that it will destroy humanity. They are rooted in reality while the doomers are not. There was some criticism of how Vice President Harris was trying to get the people concerned with the present impact of AI to work with the doomers.

There were a lot of references Karen Hao's work. How has recently released the book "Empire of AI." Hao is an AI journalist specifically focused on OpenAI.

D.O.P.-T.

It got hot, as promised, but not as hot as I'd feared. The dog took me for a long walkies after dinner, all around the block. We twice had to get out of the way of a lady walking with a cane, who I think was amused by my telling the dog to be polite. And we left and came back via the front door, because Prudence brought Monty with her to cadge food by the back door.

D.O.P.-T.

Better on the animals front. When I took out kitty breakfast, Monty was there; he looked under the car, probably checking neither of the calicos was skulking under there, then fitted himself under the front bumper with his tail sticking out. I just got done vacuuming out the house, and when I took the vacuum cleaner out, Prudence was peering at me hopefully from the garden. When I returned with food, she was stropping her claws on the carpeted steps. Like old times. In between, the dog was quite spry about her walk across the street, although she couldn't be persuaded to prolong it past more than 2 front gardens. As we came out, Mama Violet fled from under a bush, but the dog made only a half-hearted attempt at a lunge towards her. And Mama Violet had already licked the wet food bowl clean on the porch.

D.O.P.-T.

We went to Safeway and did the normal fortnightly shop. I bought 2 tubs of peppermint icecream. And some healthy food.

D.O.P.-T.

I disturbed Mama Violet again. This time, watering near where she was invisibly lurking. (Well, I now wear sunglasses, intensifying the gloom of the undergrowth and her face.) However, progress is: I found Monty lying in the corner of the garden and was able to provide him with food, and I walked the dog after dinner and she crossed the street, which is more than twice as far as she went yesterday and the day before.

In other news, we went to Costco. I bought 2 pairs of trousers that should be cooler to wear, but that I won't be able to wear unless I keep on losing weight or at least stay at my current size. I don't like losing weight, but I may as well make use of it to buy trousers I don't have to roll up the legs on.

D.O.P.-T.

The dog refused to walk, again. But I did see Mama Violet, twice. It was Sunday, so after putting down kitty breakfast, I walked down the steps to get the newspaper; she was at the bottom and was vocal in her displeasure. Later I took advantage of what they say will be the last mild day for a while, and continued trimming that privet-like bush in the driveway, since it's finished flowering. After I brought the greenwaste bin over to the debris, she shot out from under the adjacent bush. No sign of either Monty or Prudence.

I collected a lot of plant matter on my clothes (and had to take a break to wash a bit out of my eye). I already had a bug bite on my arse and have likely amassed more in a variety of locations. The bin is almost full, but the bush is by no means fully shorn.