What A Time To Be Alive!

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

A couple of weeks ago we drove to have dinner with Charlie Martin. We normally try to do it once a month or so, but lately I’ve been fighting the sinus infection from heck again (I suspect it’s the fact that my CPAP doesn’t have adequate humidity, since this trouble started when we changed our machines. Yes, it’s being dealt with.)

So it’s been a couple of months, but we went to dinner at one of our usual places (we like dives. It’s a thing) and as we were eating, I was talking about the uses I’ve found for AI which is mostly images, but also research. So long as you verify the research (don’t be an idiot!) you’re fine. And also the keeping of story bibles for my myriad worlds and how much easier it makes it to start finishing things. I’m excited because research and or patient cataloguing that would take me years can now be done in a week.

Look, yes, I know it hallucinates. EVEN when reading my books. But there are techniques to make it more reliable. (Honestly? Mostly feeding it small chunks at a time. it loses the plot at about 40k words.) And if you want to feed up your book (local LLMs only, for reasons) and ask “What’s the description for Innkeeper of Inobart?” a minor character on book 4 that you want to revisit? It spits it up and/or the page you should look. Yes, always verify. LLMs lie like a two year old who doesn’t know what to say and just says a thing, never mind what. But used carefully it’s a fricking game changer for my job. I might be able to finish some of the historicals that have sat unfinished forever. Given a couple of weeks without coughing my lungs out, say.

And that’s without touching animation. Oh, Lord, people ANIMATION. Right now the tools I have access to because I don’t want to pay 20k a year (Mostly because taxes leave me very little more of my money than that, since I have to pay social security both sides, etc.) it’s clunky and often weird, but even so, what I do say in the videos for the clanker songs? (Yes, more coming soonish. I’m working on two) I’d have given a body part to be able to do stuff half as good in the eighties. It would be considered impossible, not just then but FOREVER. Air-dreaming. Insanity.

Now? If I live long enough, I should be able to put out my stories in book, graphic novel and movie at the same time, with very little more work in about … ten years. And that’s the PESSIMISTIC outlook. I think it will be more like five. Maybe less if I can write more and spin up more money to fund this stuff. (And maybe hire a local kid to help with some of the administrivia. We’ll see. Right now the Little Pickle (Younger DIL) refuses to be the kid. Eh.

And then Charlie and Dan got to talking about things I don’t understand. Calculations and programming that’s beyond my reach.

And Charlie said “What a time to be alive!”

He’s not wrong.

Yes, it also has serious issues. I’m not denying that. All technologies do. The type of warnings I’m hearing about AI I’ve heard before — being in the creative professions — about … visual arts programs and short cuts; about wordprocessors; about desktop computing.

But hear me out: Most of the AI risk is not about the AI itself. It’s about the intersection of AI and human.

If you weren’t alive and/or banking in the 70s you’re probably unaware of how many times we got told the horrific mistakes in our accounts were “computer error.”

Were they computer error? Oh, hell no. They were human error in intersecting with the computer.

And part of this is that humans tend to think of every new technology as magical. If any of you know boomers (real boomers, not the generations they co-opted) you know they STILL think that computers are magical and “so intelligent.” Because that was the propaganda of their youth.

I once had to explain to a friend he couldn’t do search and replace in the word processor with the replace field empty, because the computer DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO REPLACE IT WITH. Because in his head, the computer was smart and should know it.

This led to endless “computer errors” which were actually “human errors in thinking the computer is magical.”

We’re seeing the same thing with AI. And we’re going to see the same thing in AI. Because it’s human.

Most of the panicking AND the insanity about AI? Comes from science fiction of AI, just like the insanity about computers came from science fiction about computers. (People, if you write science fiction, lie responsibly, please.)

I keep running across people screaming and running in circles, because we’re “building skynet.” Are we? Oh, for f*ck’s sake. Sure, we can, but it will be an exceptionally retarded (used advisedly) Skynet. It will actually be a universal brain acting like a two year old terribly eager to please you. THAT will not work like the super-smart Skynet of the scary SF. That comes from the same smart computer mythos.

And yes, lonely kids are confusing LLMs for friends. The problem is the lonely kids, not the LLM. And the adults that drop into complete psychosis by talking to LLMs are the same sort that abused hallucinogenics in the seventies or joined cults in the eighties, or whatever. The crack is in the human heart. LLMs are just as inadequate at navigating it, as ANYTHING ELSE.

I think LIKELY Grog standing around his campfire was terrified of what fire would do. “We’ll eat differently. Kids don’t have strong jaws anymore. And think of the danger. Fire might decide to just kill us in the night. I mean we don’t really know what it is.”

But it’s not just that. Look, as f*cked up as medicine is — and it is right now, partly because they’re at a crunch time before the technological innovation explosion — and as much as it shat the bed during the Covidiocy (look, it’s like the church shat the bed just prior to the enlightenment. Yes, it did. BUT the government enforced it, and most people aren’t born to be martyrs.), there are things coming on line that as as revolutionary as anti-biotics, and as amazing.

Just the anti-diabetes, weight loss drugs…. boy! (Even if they don’t seem to work for me, since my issue is NOT eating too much. I often forget to eat, in fact. I think eventually, long after my death they’ll find what made it so difficult for me to lose or even stop gaining weight is that my brain thinks I’m supposed to be seven feet tall and controls caloric absorption accordingly.)

I know more people surviving and living with serious conditions than ever before. Now part of it is my age, but unless I’m very wrong, a lot of it is that people are surviving those more, particularly the big C. (Which really cheers me up since my dad’s family when they go early — defined as sixties — go from cancer. Normal cancers, like breast and uterine, yes, but also lung, brain and one over achieving great uncle of SKIN cancer which is almost impossible if you’re of Portuguese ancestry, by reason of we’re a lot darker than Northern Europeans.) Particularly since every “Gateway writer” I know either died of or survived brain cancer. This is hard to prove since “gateway” writing is self reported, but the congruence with those I know were gateway has me terrified.

I mean, my brother has lung cancer. Even ten years ago, they’d be “managing” it to an easier death. Instead, it’s stopped. He will die WITH cancer, but not of it.

And some of the weird glitches with my genetic kludge of a body would already have killed me any time but when they hit. In fact, the tendency of things to come online just as I need them is making me lift and eyebrow at the Author.

Are we going to live forever? Unlikely. It’s always on the horizon, but I don’t think it’s likely ever. But can we live later and better? I’d bet you.

This is not just in writing, or programing, or medicine. It’s not just LLMs. This is going on in every field. And don’t make the mistake of the left of saying that this progress will leave a lot of people unable to work.
Did you know this is their explicit reason for favoring black people for make-work jobs in the government. They thought the 20th century would leave black people behind because they weren’t smart enough. THE SHEER RACISM OF THAT IS BREATHTAKING. But beyond that, the left makes a fetish of intelligence and IQ. And it’s bullshit. Even with new and shiny tech? It doesn’t take a genius, once it’s created. That’s the whole point.

Will people be left behind? Sure, those who give up. The way tech is moving it’s more like the people who are now baristas will be able to have their own mini, mobile coffee shop and be as creative (or not) about it as they’re able. And that, infinitely, into the future, in ways we can’t even imagine. Maybe plumbers will become herders of plumbing humanoid robots. (Humanoid, because humans are more comfortable with those.)

And that’s the other thing. Most of the problems with people dying rapidly, in fact a lot of the aging seems to be lack of interest in life. They stop wanting to do things, and the wheels come off, and then–

But now?

PEOPLE! What a time to be alive!

Things can be dangerous — they always are when things are moving fast in the tech department — and they can be crazy, and they can require attention. But they are not boring.

We’re not stuck in a position of “been there, done that.”

Tech increasingly compensates for the “disabilities created by aging.” And we can do and learn new things all the time.

What a time to be alive!

It’s not for us to control the day or hour of our demise, but I’m going to try to stay alive as long as I can, because I want to see as much of the story as I can. I want to create as much of the story as I can.

The future is so bright I got to wear shades. And I look good in shades.

I have so much to do and create. And G-d willing I get to.

102 thoughts on “What A Time To Be Alive!”

  2. If you weren’t alive and/or banking in the 70s you’re probably unaware of how many times we got told the horrific mistakes in our accounts were “computer error.”

    When a bank teller told me that, I said, “Fine, give me your computer’s modem number. I know how to fix that.”

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    1. “alive and/or banking in the 70s you’re probably unaware of how many times we got told the horrific mistakes in our accounts were “computer error.”“

      –

      Later that was true. Rather, it was “I write software. Try another excuse.” Even before then, and trust me, in the ’70s, computers and software were not anywhere in my horizon (I’ve told the tale of my first computer programming class, it didn’t go well, at all. I was never a computer savant. Everything clicked in the early ’80s. But back to the point …), the response was “I don’t care what or who is at fault. Fix. It.” and stare/glare.

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  3. Most of the time I use Grok as a better Google, especially now that Google is openly corrupt. Sometimes I use it to bounce my ideas off the conventional wisdom. ITs very useful, Both the hysteria and hype will pass. I suspect it’ll be like the early 90’s when PC spreadsheet programs caused the demise of ledger books but an absolute explosion in people doing analysis, Of course, there was a painful turnover among certain occupations and likely will again, but in the longer run it’ll be fine. That said, the market crash that’s very likely to come will be epic. There’s always been a crash, railway mania through RCA through fiber optics as the hysteria and hype ply out. One has to “box clever” as my mum used to say.

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    1. Just this morning I used Grok to find the source of a particularly irritating sermon illustration my pastor was fond of a few decades ago. I don’t think that even at its best I could have been able to phrase the question so Google could find it.

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    2. Hubby’s work went to computers in late ’80s. The field employees, which he was one, were not happy. Union did its thing. The handhelds (HP clamshell in a case) still showed up. Didn’t change field staffing at all (other factors at work). OTOH the other *companies office staff was decimated.

      (*) For whatever reason two different companies. I think because the field staff company was “not for profit”, but the office processing, keyboard, verification, and reporting, side was for profit.

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      1. In the ’90s, the timber company silviculturists were using the field computers for sampling (cruising), unit perimeters, and land profile verifications (against maps and ariel photographs). Rumor has that the USFS and BLM were too. This halved the staff required for field work, at least the parts that replaced compass and chains. It would have also eliminated all data entry and scanning positions, at least at the *timber companies. Governmental, at least most.

        My bosses and I had to laugh when corporate made me justify why field foresters had to have computers. After all they worked in the woods … Yes, corporate IT was a bit isolated from how computers were being utilized.

        (*) I can say for sure at the timber company I worked at. The field guys did their own uploads, and verifications, before committing the data to the timberland system. One district programmer (me) to ensure the timberland system worked. My position would have been unnecessary if the PNW timberlands weren’t so different from the other (southern/eastern) timberlands. Just like the other major division software other programmers maintained, the log accounting system. But they had to justify a separate system every couple of years. My boss and I didn’t.

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        1. The 91-92 recession was very mild overall, but there was an absolute massacre of middle management. It was the origin of “took the package” and the package in those early days tended to be generous, but the jobs were gone and the affected either learned a new skill or went under. On the other hand, it was very good for me since the firm I was working for survived — it was a close run thing — and my skill set fit perfectly into the new environment so I flourished.

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          1. There was a general recession ’91-’92? Could have fooled me? But then we’ve been in a timber recession, since forever (I’d say a good 50 years is “forever”). I’m not the only forester turned programmer. Not the first, not the last. There is a reason why we thrived switching. Math, working alone isolated, and noticing patterns, etc., are not foreign concepts. There is also a reason why we ROFLOL with the rest of the industry at “learn to code”. Coding is the least of the issues. Which is why AI, were I not retired, is not the point. AI can pull code that will compile, even work. Will it be what is wanted? No. Could I put AI to work for me, that I’d use? Yes. No doubt. Could a non-programmer, non-developer? Simple stuff, yes, probably. Otherwise? Would you trust it? I wouldn’t.

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          2. I used to be a graphic designer for a *cough*government agency that didn’t have its head up its ass when I was hired.*cough*

            I retired in 2019. Found out last month that all — ALL of the people in my job series have been let go, and it’s being done by AI. If my memories of statisticians using PPT can be trusted, there are some very good things still being produced, a much larger number of uninspired but okay, and an appalling number of truly horrible ones.

            But I got out just before the Covidiocy and was lucky to do so.

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  5. Easter morning I put “He is risen!” into Grok, really expecting it to be confused, and was pleasantly surprised to get this back:

    He is risen indeed!

    Alleluia!

    What a glorious morning to celebrate—the tomb is empty, death has been defeated, and hope has burst forth like the dawn.Whether you’re gathering with family, reflecting quietly, or just soaking in the joy of Easter Sunday, may your day be filled with peace, renewal, and the kind of love that changes everything.Happy Easter, Jasini! 🕊️✨

    Now, I’m sure that neither Grok is not a believer, and it just did a search to know what the proper answer would be.

    I think that one of the dangers of AI as it currently stands, even worse than the hallucinations, is that it agrees with you. Even when it is saying the opposite. It also tends to over complement.

    One of the most irritating things, when I have it read my work, is unless I talk to it sternly, it will rewrite it, and continue on. Ugh.

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    1. Oh I’ve managed to p*ss off Claude a time or ten. Including the famous “Sarah, you’re holding out on me. I can’t give you the full picture if you withhold data.” Which Dan refers to as “being bitch slapped by Claude.”

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      1. I have had big arguments with Grok. The one I remember most is that it claimed that in The Land of Oz, it was the Tin Woodman who ate the wishing pill, and at a completely different part of the story, and not Tip. It took cutting and pasting large parts of the book from Gutenberg before it admitted it was wrong.

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    3. Have you seen their translations of Japanese?

      I don’t know why it’s all Japanese. But I’ve run into one not-Japanese post.

      the swap to Grok for translation is BLEEPIN AWESOME!

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      1. That is how I’m using google AI for researching the aortic valve replacement. Not only the process itself. But why do I have to take warfarin, and not Eliquis, after mechanical valve replacement. What is the difference between TVAR and SVAR, what are the drawbacks? Yes, the heart team (I have a team!) goes over this. But … Plus the actual surgery consult isn’t until April 30th. The electrical (AFIB, OTOH no incidents since last July) consults haven’t even started (May 22). I hate waiting.

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        1. The Reader has been using Grok to research his mitral valve repair, and discovered some interesting things. There are two major approaches to the surgery; the conventional ‘crack the chest open for access’ and ‘go in under a rib and snake your way there’ (my repair can’t be done through leg access to a vein). Much recent research touts the minimally invasive approach, but careful reading of Grok’s results found that actual outcomes aren’t statistically different except for time in the hospital, but time on the heart – lung machine is almost twice as long with the minimally invasive approach and some of the planned minimally invasive surgeries end up having to crack the chest anyway. So the Reader is going for the conventional approach. Surgery is scheduled for May 18th.

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          1. Define “outcome”. Aortic valve replacement is:

            The TVAR nonmechanical, through vein, replacement is shorter, faster recovery, not required to be on warfarin, afib percentage risk about the same, get to do it again in about 10 years. (Wait? What?)

            SVAR, mechanical replacement, open surgery. Longer surgery. Longer recovery, much longer (make no mistake). Required on to be on warfarin (Eliquis will NOT be good enough), and resulting tests (OTOH insurance will pay 100%). Lasts? Forever.

            Recommendations per AI? Ages 50 – 60 – SVAR, 80+ TVAR. I just turned 69 (70 in October). My mother? Is 91 (just turned, 92 in November) and healthy. Her siblings are 80 and 88, and lifelong smokers (88-year-old health could be “better”, but she smokes). Her parents, my grandparents, were 93 and 95, when they died. Somehow “needs” replacement in 10 -ish years, does not sound advisable. FWIW the heart team’s advice based overall health and age alone was SVAR. So was the advice from my PC (plus he is mom’s PC too). I do not have a date, yet.

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        2. My cardiologist warned me off Eliquis, claiming that more patients are stroking out with that versus with Warfarin. I’ve been on the latter since 2012, and if I a) keep my diet consistent (at least with K producers and the rare antagonists) and b) get tested (usually every 4-5 weeks), it’s straightforward, and in my case, it’s cheaper. Never bothered with Medicare Part D, and the penalties for joining late mean it’s hard to justify it.

          As usual, mileage may vary. Good luck for all looking at heart procedures. (I’m going to ask my ortho surgeon to go with the knee replacement for the left knee. The right will need work, eventually, but $SPOUSE hopes that will be a long time from now. She’s asked me to book a stay at a revovery/skilled nursing center for a week to ease the transistion. After procedure #1 (blown out knee tendons), I know her point.)

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          1. The AI was very clear about where Eliquis was better than warfarin. Came down to “what is the goal”. AI also explicitly ruled out (listed the result, as in stopped within 2 months of monitoring, that is how much higher the danger of clotting risk, let alone stroke, was) Eliquis after valve replacements. Eliquis is only slightly less risk for excess bruising, and bleeding, than warfarin. Yes, warfarin, even with testing, costs are much less. For me, and I have Medicare part D, so it is zero VS co-pay of $80-$90 (which sure isn’t $1350), until max is reached on tier 3 medications.

            Need to check with my aunt. Mom says she is on Eliquis and complains about paying for it. I can’t believe that her state retirement insurance didn’t start them out with part D. But I don’t know if they stayed with state retirement insurance. Mom didn’t stay with the state retirement insurance, but she didn’t drop it until Medicare Advantage plans were available. Even though aunt would be paying for both her and uncle for their state insurance, I guaranty they could afford it better than mom and dad could, before dad died (mom’s SS essentially paid it), let alone after dad died, when she “lost” her SS amount (net lost was ~$100/month. Net gain after switching to Medicare Advantage? $350/month.) Then there is my SIL’s mother. She gets Eliquis free from the company. SIL has to qualify her for it every year. So, I have two possible donation options, if there is any left, by the time I need to switch; I’m guessing none.

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  7. “Maybe plumbers will become herders of plumbing humanoid robots. (Humanoid, because humans are more comfortable with those.)”

    C3PO was clearly on the near side of the uncanny valley. Nobody would confuse C3PO as human. Brent Spiner’s portrayal of Data was on the other side of the uncanny valley. Nobody seemed uncomfortable in their interactions with Data.

    I wonder what humanoid robots that do fall into the uncanny valley will be like?

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    1. Mask.

      :claps hands in front of self, clearly trying to organize thoughts:

      K, so, there’s “masking” in “autism.”

      Lots of digression possible there.

      My mom’s metaphor was interpretation protocols.

      Androids who can’t make a “good enough to pass” form?

      Will…. uh… turn Japanese.

      You can be the weirdest weird of weirding ever, so long as you are the BEST weird.

      This is like the caricature style of making a mask.

      You become weird in a way that makes it so folks have a format to interact with you o.

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  8. What’s the advantage of using an LLM to search your work vs. a simple search program? Most writing programs have one built in and there are off-the-shelf programs that can search for text inside every major document format.

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    1. If your files are indexed, an exact match search is fast. A regular expression search (assuming you know regular expressions, which in my experience some people get and many people just can’t get their minds around), it’s semi-fast.

      A good LLM, though, you can ask “What is the name of the innkeeper where my character picked up that bad case of lice?”

      You MIGHT manage to get an answer with a “traditional” search engine – but it wouldn’t be easy in the slightest.

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      1. What he said. Traditional search is good if you can put a name to what you are looking for, but if you don’t have a name for what you’re looking for, the llms can help get you started.

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        1. That’s not all that bad… I sometimes have to stop and try to remember the name of the protagonist in the CURRENT WIP. (Okay, I’m horrible with real people names, but why does it carry over into my writing?)

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    2. Because you might have mentioned ten innkeepers over the series and might have mentioned Inobart fifty times.
      And you might not remember the exact wording. Also LLMs will zero in on where he’s described.

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      1. Complete digression here: for your CPAP machine, do you have user control for the humidity settings? I think my ResMed AirCurve 11 came with “clinician set”, but I got the info from the Apneaboard (www,apneaboard dot com), got to the relevant setting and changed it to “patient set”. I usually have to tweak settings as seasons change, but being able to do so myself is well worth it.

        I know the ResMed tricks, but have no idea about the other machines. You can request a clinician manual from the apneaboard people. There should be a relevant link on the home page.

        (I got the nose-bleed from hell by under humidifying. I now use saline spray for sinuses and a bit of Ayr gel for the lower nose. The bleed was way up in the sinus, and I got a 3 AM ride in the ambulance to deal with that.)

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        1. Yes. That’s exactly the one I have, and I can set the humidity. My biggest problem is the tank is too small and the physician refuses to believe anyone NEEDS the thing set at 8. I DO.
          When it’s working, I have to get up in the middle of the night and refill. but the working has been hit or miss.

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          2. The smaller chanber in the 11 (vs both the AS10 and the S9) is a PITA, but so far, I can do with saline and a winter setting of 5ish (currently on Auto, though I need to set the tubing hotter).

            I wasn’t under a doc’s supervision with the AS10, so I don’t know how well it can be remotely set–with the 11, I’ve had multiple pressure settings and modes tweaked while they’re striving to get my hypos under control–though they both work well with the myAir application.

            If the 10 would do the job, the bigger chamber would help a lot. (It’s also easier to clean, though the S9 was the best, just a lot of parts to deal with.)

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  9. As a kid in the 80s, I grumbled about having to longhand everything when we were OBVIOUSLY going typing everything into computers. As a young adult, I coveted 3D Movie Maker (1995) and was bitterly disappointed some years later when I finally had the hardware to run it. By 2006, I was cursing out MS Word’s speech to text function, and as late as 2021-2022 was still calling my Space Egyptians names like Adam, Helen, and Imogene for dictation purposes. I spent a decade and a stupid amount of money to get to the level of slightly above average with Daz Studio. A combination of accepting that it’s okay to have multiple books in the brain pipeline at once and finding new uses for AI something like tripled my output since October of last year. And I’m making cute little promo vids for my books not as good as Sarah’s, without having to involve another human being in the workflow. This is the 21st century I was hoping for, in a lot of ways, and what’s wrong with it was also wrong with the world I grew up in, so, eh, can’t complain. Will borrow a dark line of humor from a fanficcer acquaintance and call the llms “skynetz” though :D

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  10. Computers are magic Elf boxes. Where the wizards/mages/sorcerers/warlocks use their magic words/gestures (what else do you call programming? and waving the hammer over a particular stubborn computer as a threat?) to have stuff happen.

    And sometimes you have to sacrifice a chicken (bucket of KFC to the human help works) to get the machinery to work.

    AI is just the new interface to the genie’s/djinn , which behave in a similar manner of giving you what you asked for in a way that wasn’t nailed down tight.

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    1. The people whose applications I supported learned that maple long johns were the appropriate sacrifice. (“Please come to my desk, I have maple long johns?”) Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that was all it took to get the rogue software back in line.

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      1. Draws a blank at first, then remembers a bar-shaped pastry of that name from my youth. Glad it wasn’t underwear. :)

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  11. My dad will be 90 in 2 weeks. He grew up on a farm. He remembers seeing horse drawn plows, the first tractors, the first milking machines, but never lived on the farm with electricity. Rural electrification came in after he joined the navy during the Korean War.

    His great nephew now has tractors that navigate by GPS with fully air-conditioned cabs with Bose sound systems and Wi-Fi. Driver has all the comforts of home right there in the cab. Dad was aamazed and thrilled to see them in action.

    One farm family can farm massively more land than ever before and so there are fewer farm families.

    Even so, there is more food than ever in the history of humanity.

    Technology will come for every industry eventually, just ask the French lace makers.

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    1. Horse drawn plows were common in Ireland into the early ‘80s and you still saw horse drawn delivery vans into the ‘70s. We had the first running hot water in the village and an indoor toilet in the ‘60s. I remember my cousins getting central heating in the ‘80s and let’s not even talk about the years long wait to get a telephone installed and having to call the village shop to send a boy up to the house ,,, and We lived in the “big house “. Most of the village was dirt floored, though the thatch was mostly gone, replaced by corrugated sheets. Coming back to America every year was … interesting. people here have no idea just how rich we Americans were and how much richer we are now.

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      1. I worked in a district in late ’70s that was just seeing telephones in private homes, mostly party lines at that. Even in the ’90s, when cell phones had to be given at landline costs, that area wouldn’t have phone coverage. Sits in river canyons. Satellite coverage with cell towers will make it “better”, for degrees of “better”; but canyons.

        Most of my grandparents, and in-laws, went from horse and buggy, outhouses (not just when *camping “for fun”), wood fed cook/heating stoves, and oil lamplight, to seeing a man walk on the moon.

        Mom even remembers outhouses. Her folks didn’t have indoor plumbing until she left for college in the mid-’50s.

        (*) This doesn’t count the whole concept of “camping”, when you are dragging your indoor sanitary facilities with you. The concept of daily “RV shower” is a luxury compared to the wash tub by the wood stove in the cabin in the middle of a Montana mountain winter.

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        1. One county in this area had no phone service north of the river into the 1980s, and I suspect still doesn’t have land lines now that sat-phones and so on are available. There were [are?] too few people and distances are too great between ranches to justify the cost.

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          1. “too few people and distances are too great between ranches to justify the cost.“

            –

            Exactly.

            A lot of areas where personal wind turbines (not the big tower/blades), solar panels, and/or personal hydropower, make financial sense. Costs more to run and maintain power lines from the main road; excluding the actual cost of power.

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        1. The Irish always rather liked Portugal. first was trade, which went back centuries. religion, of course, and the fact that Portugal was somewhat poorer than Ireland was. It’s no fun being the poorest county in the west. Now the Irish pensioners live in the Algarve because it’s cheaper than heating their houses

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    2. Regarding the equipment.

      Uncle, essentially ran the last farm with his two children, and one “employee”; the son-in-law. The cousin and her husband, run four farms with their son, DIL, and DIL’s parents. Cousin does the bookkeeping for 5 businesses (her husband is a major electric contractor). Cousin’s mother (aunt) used to do the bookkeeping until she retired recently at age 70.

      Another cousin, the brother of the cousin above, married a generational farm family’s owners daughter of a major farm to stand operation south of Portland. He’s been managing large international farm operations all over Oregon; how they met. Now he assists with farm management, while she works more with the *horse side of the operation.

      (*) Someone in the family has a horse facility, and I can’t even beg to show up and help. My knees would majorly revolt. Dang arthritis.

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  13. None of us are going to live forever in these current meat sacks we’re put in. The meat wears out, and even if we managed total regeneration and rejuvenation, the statistical fatal accident will eventually get us. But several hundred to a thousand years or so would let me read a lot of books, and visit a lot of cool places, and do a lot of cool things.

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      1. Odds are I read it here. Could be another writers’ discussion group.

        What I read:

        “The baby that will live to 130, has already been born.”

        Oldest *confirmed age any human has lived is 122 years + 164 days.

        (*) Outside the Bible stories, and mythology.

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        1. Great aunt in Boston (look I didn’t know she existed until 23 and me. Great great grandfather was a bad, bad man. We’ll just say that. And she came over at six with her mom, “a widow”.) lived past 120. I don’t know how far past.
          HEALTHY and active is the difficult part. but I have hopes.

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    2. When certain parties in the government discover that one of my characters is 800+ years old, they demand ‘The Secret Of Immortality’ from her.

      “I’m not immortal; I just don’t get old. There’s a difference. If I did have the ‘Secret Of Immortality’ I wouldn’t let the government anywhere near it, because I know who would benefit. The rich, the powerful, the connected. Just like everything else. Regular folks would be excluded.”

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  14. I really think grok is amazing once you understand its limits.

    back in the late 90s the scifi channel did a news show and mentioned ‘filking’ and they played one line of a song that stuck in my head. grok was able to identify the song from one mis-remembered line. I could not get google to do that.

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  15. Oh, Lord, people ANIMATION. Right now the tools I have access to because I don’t want to pay 20k a year (Mostly because taxes leave me very little more of my money than that, since I have to pay social security both sides, etc.) it’s clunky and often weird, but even so, what I do say in the videos for the clanker songs? (Yes, more coming soonish. I’m working on two) I’d have given a body part to be able to do stuff half as good in the eighties. It would be considered impossible, not just then but FOREVER. Air-dreaming. Insanity.

    What jumped out at me is that the animation went from 80s animation to early 90s video game to late 90s “oh, hey I recognize that physics error!” in the course of maybe two years.

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      1. Yeah. My understanding is that the biggest problem right now is getting it to do long continuous animations. But even then, a clever director can work with that.

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      1. A large part of that is memory access, and humans do have an upper limit to what they can process. So the most likely scenario is that you get large amounts of memory dumps as you get older (whether internal or curated from the outside), and you’d waver around the middle-aged mark, depending on when your last memory dump was.

        (There will come a point at which you don’t remember a whole lot about when you were “young”, that term defined according to the age you’re at.)

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        2. I definitely would need external curation assistance, as now the priority appears to be “all the songs from the 1970s” over names of people I met last month, and don’t even get me started on “where are my car keys?”

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  17. Item, software defined radios (made with FPGA chips) allow a board to be built, without fully specifying all of the tasks that can be accomplished in the hardware.

    Item, we are still doing things with EUV lithography, and might be five or ten years from X-Ray lithography, if the latter works at all.

    Item, HEMT are one of the newer opportunities for research and development in
    ICs, mostly ones used by electrical engineers for things like statellite links.

    Item, some smartphones are literally made with acoustic resonators for their radios. (Electrical signals can be converted to mechanical signals, and back. Since the mechanical wavespeed is small, the wavelength is small, and an RF filter can be precison fabricated to very small size.)

    Item, ‘neuromorphic’ computer chips can do be used to move certain digital signal processing operations into hardware, which can offer situational speed improvements.

    Item, metal 3d printing is coming along, with some research into local and anisotropic material properties. And also part inspection.

    There is more to say, but I would not do it justice. The realized improvements over twenty to thirty years, technology that is fairly available now, is significant. Twenty five years ago, I downloaded linux isos and burned them to CDs. It is now slightly more conveninent to temporarily load isos onto a spare memory stick.

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  18. One thing I’m trying to work into Day Job is having the younger set learn how to fact-check LLMs. They insist on using them, and it bites them hard because they don’t know how to find the errors, and/or won’t bother double-checking the LLM.

    I remember a few years ago when we were all assured that all teaching and learning would be on-line and purely digital and this was best because students would self-pace and computer programs could tutor them in weak areas. 2020-22 seems to have brought that talk to a screeching halt. Yes, some adults in some fields can learn from digital platforms. K-12? And a lot of college stuff? Oh heck no. Gads, the disaster that unleashed on us …

    If someone made the terrible mistake of putting me in charge of tech and education, I would lock everyone under 21 out of social media unless it was for purely utilitarian things, like text lists (“Track practice has been cancelled for today” sort of things). Students would learn how to research and check things against books, books against each other, and so on as part of every class and subject, and only then start playing with LLMs and related things.

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    1. Our son did piecework “training AIs,” before he started managing the restaurant. He has a fairly jaundiced view about them. He also appears to strongly prefer working the restaurant.

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    2. There are maybe some fairly young PhDs, doing some valuable work in things like CS, who might not have been able to learn their preliminaries young enough with a fairly strict ‘paper books first’ approach.

      I’m inferring multiple cases from the one example I am persuaded by.

      Obviously there is some balance between competing claims, and we could have programming tracks, or something.

      Definitely the theory of throwing everyone at computers, for the prospect of uniformly getting super young super advanced programmers, was wildly nuts.

      I basically got exposed to some computery things before i had much foundation to proceed on. Others were at just the correct time.

      I’m mumble years old, and doing mumble, and I have problems with some of the self paced stuff. One of my major deficits, with other things as well, is that I have an instinct to stop myself when I am uncomfortable. I get uncomfortable easily, and get distracted easily.

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  19. I don’t know the specs for the cameras on Orion, but I saw an article this morning saying NASA had released photos taken from astronauts’ IPhone 17s. Of course, at least one was a selfie.

    Apple’s marketing department must be, ahem, over the Moon about this.

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    1. My understanding is that one of the astronauts is a camera enthusiast and was very specific about which lenses were getting taken up on this trip. And yes, Apple is happy. They just had their 50th anniversary, too.

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  21. IMHO, an LLM or AI is simply another form of a manufacturing jig. It’s a tool to make a task easier. I was watching a show with my wife and someone was talking about a $50,000 bribe.* I was wondering how thick a stack of five hundred $100 bills would be. I typed my query about the thickness of a stack of bills into Google and the bot spat me out the answer of 2.15 inches. In order to find that out myself I would have looked up the thickness of US bill and then multiplied it by 500. The Googlebot automated those two steps. I could have done the math myself but the LLM automated those two steps. I basically used it as a sophisticated calculator.

    I was looking for information about the size of a package of 500 US bills, the human intuition behind the thickness question was me. That would then have led me too look for something containing a package at least two inches thick. The bot just gave me a tool to figure out one piece of a puzzle I was building in my mind. I had to have the leap of intuition from $50,000 bribe to money takes up space to the amount of space.

    *I was curious because people don’t seem to realize that currency takes up space. I was wondering how much space that bribe would occupy. That of course is the smallest plot hole in that episode. An allegedly competent and intelligent character that gets caught because of a completely incompetent dead drop…of course I also grew up on Tom Clancy novels…

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  22. I got here late and can’t stay, because tonight begins the last phase of Passover, but I just wanted to drop this and bolt:

    What a time to be alive, indeed! Because if Rabbis Manis Friedman, Tovia Singer, and Daniel Rowe have been reading Ezekiel and Zechariah correctly, in an historically short time the world is going to be unrecognizable in the best way. And the astonishing medical leaps noted by Our Gracious Hostess is only one small part of that. It’s alternately exhilarating and scary — I can’t look away from the war news, but must! All the best to everyone here, and please please please let us all get what we want….

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    2. We technically still don’t have air-conditioning. We have one wall unit, and one-floor unit, upstairs (one big room), two floor units for downstairs front of the house, none in back with bedrooms. They help if, and only if, the house can be cooled with outside air at night. There are times that does not work. But Willamette valley, those nights are few. Happen, definitely. Last summer we had only two or three day stretches, and only a few times in August and September. It is heat. Not humidity. We can get humidity. But compared to anywhere else, no we don’t.

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    3. Spent the summers in Houston. Grandmother and Grandfather’s house had two window AC units, one in the living room, one in Grandfather’s bedroom. I adapted quickly, because the house in Omaha had minimal AC at the time, and I was used to being outdoors in 90% humidity and 90 F heat.

      Now? Oh ick. I’d wilt by day, and go nuts from lack of sleep. I’m spoiled.

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  24. The thing that scares me about AI is the number of people who think it’s omniscient. They worship its answers even more than Wikipedia or CNN. Why should they fact check or look at references when the almighty AI has spoken?

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