Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1048
Sam, ugh, Elon, double ugh, greenhouse work, mulching, doctor's visits
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Monday, etc. etc. I am listening to the new André 3000 flute album and it is just great. Sounds like Laraaji. One of those things like when Radiohead made Kid A or Kanye made 808s and Heartbreak where everyone’s like “oh man it’s so innovative” but it’s not really innovative, it is a big step for the artist involved, yes, but they’re leaping into a milleu where many artists have been working for a long time. But that don’t bother me none. When I was a younger man I resented Radiohead for this, but that was dumb. Welcome to the fold of experimental ambient new age, André 3000, we are happy to have you.
Had to stop at the grocery store this morning, my third stop at grocery stores in an endeavor to buy everything I need for Thansksgiving dinner. Everyone has been out of sage. Apparently all the witches are just burning up all the sage and there’s none left for Thanksgiving. Witches, stop witching for a bit couldja?
(That was a joke bah duh bump.)
I did eventually find some sage. I would have, of course, grown my own, and I did, except the squirrels ate it. Ate raw sage right off the plant. They are monsters.
Great weekend on the home improvement front, great weekend on the “Tech is a giant joke” front really can’t go wrong. Apparently the board of the non-profit portion of OpenAI decided that the CEO of the for-profit portion of OpenAI was not living up to their ideals and was also lying about it. So, you know, if this is all true, they gotta fire the dude. So they did. We don’t actually know what he was lying about, so that is frustrating for everyone being a voyeur. And then! Then they got all embarrassed because they did a thing they had every right to do but they did it in that way where you piss a bunch of people off. This is, of course, management 101 — just because you have the power to do something doesn’t mean you should do it in that way. So a bunch of employees got pissed, and the main investor in the for-profit, Microsoft, got pissed. This would be a “so what” kind of thing for the non-profit, but the whole point of the for-profit is to get the non-profit money so it can, you know, pursue its mission, and that money comes from Microsoft and they haven’t given it all to them yet, so they sorta fucked that up in trying to fix it. And the CEO is a petulant man child who is posting “cool” and “edgy” Tweets on Twitter, which, of course, is a whole problem in and of it self and, to me at least, evidence the board probably did the right thing but hey maybe they made up that whole lying to the board thing.
And then everyone makes fun of the board for being so stupid, and the board gets all embarrassed and sorta tries to get him back. But they can’t, can they? I mean, they just fired the dude for being dishonest, and now they’re gonna bring him back? They’d have zero integrity. So this dude is now, like, apparently, asking for more concessions from them, when he was (again, presumably) the one who was being dishonest to his bosses. And they are supposed to resign over it, even though he is the one (again, presumably) who did something wrong.
And everyone has opinions about the whole thing but of course every opinion really hinges upon the facts of whether or not this dude lied to his board, and they are not saying anything other than showing a couple photos of some empty wholes in the ground, oh wait. I mean they’re not saying anything other than it wasn’t malfeasance, which, helpful!
So then Microsoft hires the dude to lead their AI division, which is a good endgame here, and essentially the beginning of the outcome I predicted, which is that the only way out of this for everyone is for Microsoft to buy the for-profit division of OpenAI. And they haven’t done that yet, but they hired the dude, and now they’re gonna need access to the models and IP, so… yeah. Wait and see.
It’s interesting. Sam was, on paper, a very good decision for OpenAI, needing to make a for-profit division to fund its non-profit aspirations. I mean, if you ignore the mysterious circumstances around his departure from YC, and the family drama stuff. It was not a slam dunk that he would take their tech and run with it in a manner that was ham-fisted, fame-seeking, too fast and antithetical to the mission of the non-profit. CEO of YC in a lot of ways shoulda been a logical place from which to source your CEO. But, then, YC was always more entrepreneurial than a non-profit, and this dude has obvious ambition. So much ambition.
It’s been clear for a while now, to me at least, that it was a poor fit. The productization of ChatGPT was fast, and thing makes tons of mistakes and it will always be known, henceforth and forever more, as a thing that makes a ton of mistakes. And sure it thrust them into the “lead” in AI, but not in human-level AI, AGI, which is what they were going for. Just parlor trick AI.
It’s an effective strategy — take our tech, productize it and make some cool parlor tricks and get a bunch of money and fuck up an industry — but literally the whole point of this non-profit is to keep AI from fucking things up, so, yeah. Devil’s in the details.
It was a Faustian bargain from day one and clearly not one the board was comfortable with, at least wasn’t comfortable with anymore (assuming what we know is true man you gotta write this caveat into every paragraph its easy to run away with the bits of info that’s been reported and assume they are true and the whole story but of course they never are). I suspect the board never was comfortable with it. And the longer you go before fixing it, ripping off the Band-Aid is gonna get worse and worse.
THIS. This is exactly the sort of clusterfuck some people forsee and say “we shouldn’t do that because it’ll be a clusterfuck” but other people foresee the exact same thing, and secretly know and agree it’ll be a clusterfuck, but it’ll also be a cluster fuck that makes a lot of money and fame and PT Barnumesque fun, so they figure the clusterfuck will be worth it and they pooh pooh the other side for being worry worts and, god, it is hell being someone in Silicon Valley who likes to play it safe. And now the board gets all this mockery even though, I’d wager, a bunch of them saw exactly this coming from day one.
Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit and they’re just bumbling doofuses.
And Elon is still being an anti-semite and getting a bit more backlash about it. I mean, not like any other CEO would have gotten. Any other CEO would have been so fired. Man I wish Linda publicly fired him just to see what would happen. Lol. A bunch of advertisers have paused their advertising, but we all know that never lasts because everyone in advertising is terrible (oh wait). And I popped up there to peek and take a temperature and god, it is so depressing to see a bunch of friends still Tweeting away over there. Like cmon man, come on over to Threads, water is fine. Even though it’s just another dumb monopolist at least Zuck hasn’t, you know, affirmatively, explicitly endorsed the Great Replacement Theory. Low bar.
Oh and Elon launched a rocket and it blew up and everyone said that was a success, and it probably was, but you still enjoy seeing his rocket blow up and I feel so bad for all of these people who work with him. He was just standing there in SpaceX mission control in his stupid cowboy hat holding his kid whom he is keeping from her mother, and there are like a hundred people in this room with him and 5ish percent of Americans were raised as Jews so, you know, bunch of jewish people in that room just sitting there with an active anti-semite while they’re just trying to launch some rockets. Super cool must not be humiliating at all.
Went to the orthopeoeidisast (I will never be able to spell that word so why try) and they did an ultrasound on my arm and I have a ripped tendon in my right elbow, so, you know, that is validating. They gave me some exercises until I can get a PT appt in a month, then I do PT for six weeks and then we see if it got better on its own or I need to do some… procedures. I would like to skip straight to the procedures, but I guess we will go through this. Keep at it, don’t stop on your medical journey. They important thing is to do something. They told me to use a can of food for my exercise. I am using golden hominy on the main floor and mung bean sprouts in the basement. I thought you would want to know that, we are all voyeurs in some way.
Also took my mom to the doctor and that was a bunch of BS. The PCP made us come in before my mom could get a referral for an MRI, and they promised that they would be able to get her in for the MRI before she left, but once I got there, they basically laughed at me for thinking that was even possible, and now I am pissed. So not sure what we’re going to do about that. Fun.
So. My new mulcher is just great, I hoovered up all the leaves on the driveway over at the guest house where my mom and aunt are staying. It was very therapeutic and now I have so many leaves to turn into leaf mould compost I am very excited. I’m also gonna hoover up all the leaves on the moss yard facing the pond. Good times. That took the better part of a day.
Greenhouse work proceeds apace I swear we are almost done. Just need to get the roof glass on now. Glass is on the walls. It looks awesome. This thing is going to be so awesome.
I have been shredding tree branches for ages. Was gonna use em for hugelkultur in the bottom of the raised beds in the greenhouse, had about two cubic yards of the mulchy stuff. But Emma has been making amazing progress on the trail between the two houses and needed a bunch of mulch to soak up some water in a swampy portion, so we put all the mulch I’d made — along with a third cubic yard I shredded yesterday — along the path and it looks great and is walkable. Still a little spongy. We’re debating whether to add the gravel to the path as well, but I don’t like gravel paths, I don’t like adding a bunch of rocks to the forest is that weird? That is probably weird. Moss doesn’t grow well on gravel. Will probably just keep dumping wood chips on it until it dries out completely. Anyway, hats off to Emma for her amazing trail blazing, literal trail blazing. Next time you come visit, the trail both houses is now navigable. We will continually work to widen it and smooth it, and very soon I will be running Cat 6 and 12 volt low voltage wire on it for lighting. Okay, maybe not soon. But someday. I kinda want to put one random English lamp post in the middle of the woods that works, I think that would be nice.
Jane was a total pain this weekend, mostly. She was not happy her parents wanted to do outdoor chores. She was good at dinner on Friday with my mom and aunt, though, that was nice. And this morning she did not complain about PE once, though it was 38 degrees out and she refused to wear a coat, that is awesome. I’m sure the whole school thinks I’m a terrible parent. There was one in her backpack, I swear. Dance Party was good, except I tried to play “Blue Flower” by Mazzy Star and she was not having it. Jane is not a fan of Hope Sandoval, alas.
We’ll do an ambient playlist today to, you know, dive home my point about André 3000, but so what, man, all of these artists are rad and I am into his new direction and he obviously has the best song title here, though Mary Lattimore has a close second.
Okay let’s go do our country flash cards and quicken transactions and NAS status check and 750 other words and then do some work. Woo. I did not take Wednesday off.
In hindsight, I regret this.