559 refusing to see it

December 06, 2022

You may have noticed a fair amount of this blog is about San Francisco. That's because we live here. As they say, everything is local.

Until we don't anymore. That's happening next week.

The San Francisco housing crisis has been written about plenty elsewhere, and a bit here. It's weird, in a way, I know this is an artificial market condition created by human rules. Zoning, Nimbyism, and Prop 13 on one hand, rent control and homelessness on the other.

Yet, this crazy market is all I've known. Hanging on for dear life has been the condition of my entire adulthood. When I moved here in the 1990s, houses were selling for $100k where I came from, and $350k here. It seemed outrageous. Now those same houses are pushing $2 million, and it still seems outrageous.

But whatever, it is what it is. Somehow I still managed to live here on the cheap for a few decades, and for the past twenty years without a full time job. You might argue that wasn't great for my retirement. You might be right. Also, it was, after getting used to scraping rock bottom from time to time, incredible.

But more than anything, it just seemed inevitable. Getting up and doing what seemed important to me on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis just felt right.

People are asking what we're going to do next. We don't totally know. My standard response tends to be, "I'm going to keep being me." Because so far, that seems to be what I'm capable of.

But from the great white north.

Did anyone else notice this? Cheap-Ass Stewart did, because they corrected their mistake pretty quickly.

What bothers me is I don't know the Broken Record. Like, I don't even know where it was.

Scott Wiener generating headlines again, wondering, do we really need the central freeway?

For those who remember, it was shut down for a few years while the Octavia Boulevard was built. Not only was the answer a resounding no, but the beer garden at the Zeitgeist was great with no freeway overhead.

There's been an uptick in violent crime, anecdotally among young people, in the past few years, after a long decline brought about by eliminating leaded gas in the 70s and 80s. We've all been wondering why. I've been wondering if it's something in the air again, most people say it's our phones.

Personally, I think it takes more than mental agitation to lose it. I think your whole body needs to be involved.

But I could be wrong.

Maybe phones really are turning us into incels filled with violent rage.

I'd be happy if the damn forms I submitted didn't come back with errors I can't find. What devil invented the strong password anyway? I can't tell you how many important services I'm missing out on because the system made it basically impossible to log in.

Now we're heading into the world of black box computing. Hopefully, it will be better. Instead of filling out a form, clicking submit, and getting an error telling you that something on the page isn't right, you'll just be able to shout at your computer, "I don't know either, just ducking fix it!"

It's going to be really cool. Or really frustrating, depending on how helpful your AI wants to be.

That's the paragraph above.

Just hoping. How exactly do you make something smarter than you, then micromanage it? That doesn't seem like a great idea, either.

Recently I've been hearing about the idea of an AI that grows, in a dedicated piece of hardware. They're calling it a "mortal AI" and the idea is it has a lifecycle. It starts out learning, then matures, and eventually, dies.

I guess there are two realities in that scenario. First is the idea that AIs could learn and mature as individuals. Second is the idea that "you're not immortal, so don't go getting any big ideas about living forever and ruling everything."