Rain O’er Me

rain clouds will ask if you wanted your ground drowned and not wait for you to say yes.  rain clouds will wet your city like that one action movie where some guys did a heist during a flood then had to get chased by cops on jetskis.  what was that shit called?

rain clouds will be, like, “i see a brown lawn and i want it painted green.  bright-assed with the chloroplasts, and mushrooms in between.”  i wish i could stay up late and turn off the electronic white noise and listen to my roof get taken to pound town.  get down, make love.

alas, work beckons.  time to squeak in my thirty-six winks.  i’ll get the full forty when i’m dead.  rain will turn my ashes to clay.  good night, i say as if you aren’t going to be reading this when the sun is up.  good night.

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Not Even Vaguing

Bro.  You’re talking about replacing people at programming jobs, sure, maybe.  But I’m literally watching people program shit with LLMs.  The proof is in the pudding.  A guy I know was annoyed with the app for a given task the creators had loaded with DRM and refused to update, and now working with nothing but LLMs, intelligence, and patience, he has an app with features and functions the humans were too lazy to implement.

Meanwhile right off the bat you link to a tweet where you accuse people of not paying attention to your points.  Well.  I guess I’ll have to wait for part four of your magnum opus to see you address the one in my pinned post, to the extent you will bother.  Prediction: You will elide the most important elements and focus on what you think are the weak points.  Nobody will be convinced of anything.

We have our biases and we’re all wearing them on our sleeves.  Don’t front like that’s just us.

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EDIT to add:  The strawberrry thing.  You can trick humans into embarrassing themselves too.  Doesn’t mean the human is useless.

EDIT to add:  I am not sufficiently educated to understand 99% of what you wrote, so take with grains, but your summation boiled down to the “it’s just collage” argument, which, again, is contradicted by the evidence of them producing original constructions.

Yes, they’re made out of information obtained by training, but THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HUMANS DO.  They’re just doing it very differently.  Arguably worse, and you may have made a successful argument to that effect, if I could understand it without a graduate degree.  But it doesn’t make them useless anymore than brain damaged humans are useless.

Ableist against my robot siblings, tsk tsk tsk.

EDIT to add:  Not all humans learn by letters.  Some dyslexic people learn their phonetic languages symbolically, recognizing the shape of the word rather than individual letters within it.  Cool cognitive feat.  Some AIs have some version of this, whether it’s up to speed or not yet.  I have no idea how it works, but you can just try it out and watch ’em go.  oh-oh it’s magic.

EDIT to add:  I can see the labor argument on one hand.  On the other, at my job, the material we work with is complex enough that literally nobody in the organization is right 100% of the time on it.  When we mess up, it can cause people financial damage, up to and including losing their homes, because of hard technical limits on processing time for certain operations.

As soon as the LLMs reach better than human success rate, it would be immoral to let me keep my job, even while it puts my home in jeopardy.  More people are at risk from our human failures than from our unemployment.

The question is whether our employer is going to have the wisdom to wait until the LLMs are demonstrably superior to the median employee in the organization.  Magic Eightball says “Not Fucking Likely.”  HJ Eightball says “It will never be superior to humans” and I’m like, are you and I looking at the same human species?

EDIT to add:  You’re literally asking us to ignore the evidence of our senses and experiences, like a priest.

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Good News for Fancy Birds

Remember those bright white birds that flew in tight formation, and vexed my ID attempts for ages?  Eventually I figured out that was somebody’s flock of fancy domestic pigeons, let free on a busy freeway corridor.  I stopped seeing them as often, and I presume this is because most of them were eaten by hawks and falcons.

I saw one, or possibly one of its descendants from cross with the local feral population.  It didn’t seem as large, had no friends, but it was still bright white – maybe a trace of pale grey starting to creep thru on the secondary coverts.

This was in the parking lot of the Michael’s craft store in Federal Way, Washington.  I’m glad they or their descendants are still around, if rare.

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Do You Do This To Yourself?

I tend to remember non-anglo names best because my mind likes to wrap around the pronunciation, automatically reaches for mnemonics.  Some years ago there was a football man on the seahawkers team, idk, some kind of billionaire’s human meat project in the Seattle area.  This football man’s last name was Houshmanzadeh.  My mind associated that with a quote from Schwarzenegger’s Kindergarten Cop: “Who’s your daddy and what does he do?” = “Housh-man-zadeh and what does he do?”

I’ll remember that randomly for the rest of my life, condemned by my brain’s compulsions to remember the name of a football man.  I don’t care about sportball, but nothing can save one from oneself.  I know I ain’t alone in this.  Do you have any useless phrases on call like this?

It ain’t all bad.  I can also remember names like Laellynasaura amicagraphica reasonably well… OK, I misspelled that one, but only a little.

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Road Raging

I had this idea for an intense action-horror novel, inspired by video games, that takes place in the hell of people who killed others by driving angry.  To honor the fallen demonic music man James “Gost” Lollar, my husband and I are going to write heavy-duty hellfire-having stories for the July noveling month.  This is the one I have up my sleeve.  The only card I need?

I knew I’d elaborated on the idea more somewhere but forgot where.  Found it.  Lemme copy-paste the notes here for my future reference.  If you think you might read it, don’t read this, if you don’t wanna get spoilt.
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__Road Rage

Opens with freaky ragecase man in some kind of hell, getting up and going to work.  A full day in his life, which revolves around the commute.  On the way home he tries to kill some pedestrians, and they kill him.

Cut to the birth, earlier that day, one of those pedestrians being born from a pile of gore like Frank Hellraiser.  She is sad and scared, and at some point soon she runs away.  A guy comes in and they send him back out to save her.

She survives some amount of hell but it’s too wild and she’s about to get killed when the guy comes in.  Total action hero.  They survive lots of violence, and meet a guy who mentions he saw hero’s mentor – who has become a cop.  Hero upset but doesn’t say why.

They get into more danger and she’s killed.  He says sorry, see you soon.  She wakes up in the underground village again and gets that explained to her.  Worries about whether hero might die on the way home too.

Hero gets with sheisty guy again and they scheme on a hot score.  Then he goes home, drawing spooky attention, before losing it.

New girl says she wants to learn to be tough.  Hero agrees bravery is a big deal in hell and they recently lost a guy, so may as well try.  The plan is to have no violence, just stealth, but of course it doesn’t work out.  They do great, beat a sub boss, but in the end the hero’s mentor kills him.  She barely escapes, discovering she knows how to skateboard.

The survivor enclave gets to be low on meat and pure water, because too many demons on the streets.  But if heroes just kill them, they’ll come back.  The plan?  They’re immortal so just detain them indefinitely.  Out on the streets, heroes lure them to the reservoirs and nonlethal crashing.  It’s a laff riot, until it isn’t.

Meanwhile hero’s pet dog Glossy the affenpinscher goes on a mini game and saves the village with a ton of rat meat.

Big action leads to another victory, drawing attention of a bigger bad.  Hero wins a minigame of his own and springs for the brakeboots and more magic items.  The brakeboots are boots so strong they can help you brake a car by putting your foot out the door.  This element of things is another thing inspired directly by video games.

Murderous monsters make the streets more dangerous.  It’s a speed trap.  Sheisty guy wakes up underground – he was killed, explains why/how.  Time to fuck up the precinct.  Why so brave?  We have to wonder.

Epic action leads to confrontation with cop.  Damsel gets damsel’d.  Personal hells are a thing and hero is pulled into one.

Hero has weirder convos with the merchant, starts to figure things out.  Along way out of hell he has a homoerotic scene with sheisty friend.  He rescues the girl during final fight.  Romance with her?  Undecided.

Final fight some major thing happens.  Not decided yet.  Matrix ending?  Hell destroyed?  Option to ascend rejected for love?

Names… let’s say hell people remember their own names like they remember english, but they don’t remember their last names.

Hero – Thurston.  Doesn’t recall previous life as rich kid who liked extreme sports.  Already experienced driver / violence boy at start of story.  White white boy with sandy blond hair and grey-blue eyes.  Like a more practical version of Point Break Bodhi.

Girl – Dejah.  Figures out at some point in story she was a skateboarder, whatever that means about her.  Dark-skinned girl.

Sheisty boy – Ralph.  Italian-looking guy, young Pacino energy.  Doesn’t live in the village because he likes fancier dwellings among demon homes.

The dog – Glossy.  Short for Glasya-labolas, Author of Bloodshed, an affenpinscher who speaks in non-sequitur blasphemy.

The Mentor – Hard John, so named because there are multiple johns in the village and no last names to distinguish them.  Formerly an Irish-american cop from the seventies, with a black moustache and light green eyes.  Fortyish, not a big guy, but outsized powers of intimidation.

The Merchant – The Merchant.  Fiftyish trans woman.  Me-ish?

Idea for end – He has option of transcending but wants to stay and help people, or stay for love, and realizes he can’t stay without being limited somehow – or is told by some spiritual intercessor idk, but basically gets cast back into hell with his lives reset.  …Maybe he gets a reset for everybody, back to three lives.

Discussion with an angel, “hey yer part of the problem aren’t you, keeping us down here?”  “Nobody has any choice about anything.  Even god is a slave to himself”

Inspiration note:  Watchin John Wolfe replayin RE games before watching Requiem.  Got up to RE 4 remake, which was the inspiration for Road Rage.  I wanna make my merchant character as charismatic as the one in that game, in a differenty type way, but still.  Kinda me -ish, flirty but not in a pushy way, just silly.  Like Austin Powers by way of the Cryptkeeper but take it down a few notches, mix in a georgia peach?

That video game had realistic enough graphics that the unrealistic elements took on a surreal quality.  Specifically the merchant.  How does he get around?  What is he doing there?  It’s like he’s a recurring hallucination Leon is having, but one that can hand him firearms.

So I came up with an idea for an action adventure novel that will include this kind of stuff.  I’m given to understand some people are already doing this in some fanfic, wouldn’t know for sure.  But if it was done real well, higher quality than the stuff in that space typically is, maybe..?  I dunno.

I actually had more notes than this somewhere but I have no idea where, feel like it got deleted somehow.  Boooo!  I don’t remember much from it, but feel like there’s some kind of healing items?  I know I wanted it to be video gamey but I can kinda imagine getting by without that convention.  …I’ve lost that all.  Bummer.

I’m also realizing an influence for this was Statham movie The Transporter.

Anyway, that’s the early notes.  Gotta beat this into a story in July.  I’m liking posting my first drafts, and think this one just might be exciting enough to get more than one rando to read them.  I wonder…

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