My dad sent me YouTube videos about how superintelligent AI is going to destroy us or something, and how Elon Musk says we have to get off this planet if we're going to preserve humanity.  I sent the following in response:

I’m far less worried about superintelligent AI than about regular old AI, or as it should be called, Machine Learning, that’s used to disguise the human biases that went into creating and training it and thereby used to perpetuate systems of injustice around the world.  You can ask a person why they made a decision and they may answer, but a ML model is almost completely opaque once it’s been trained.

That’s what I’m worried about: Facebook and YouTube turning people into fascists through machine learning that optimizes engagement with a screen rather than empathy with their fellow humans.  

That’s the real problem of AI.  It’s not a hardware problem, it’s not a software problem, it’s a problem of politics; with business being allowed to set the agenda of what is right and normal.

As for Elon Musk — What if Tom Swift, but a megalomaniac?   Like Amazon guy Jeff Bezos, another one of the richest men in the world, who simply can’t fathom how he could possibly spend all his money — on a planet full of climate change, increasing social inequity, and the re-emergence of fascism, and decides to build rockets instead.  

Fuck ‘em.  

If you have power, you should use it to help those less fortunate.  Noblesse oblige — nobility obliges. "Noblesse oblige is a French expression used in English. It translates as "nobility obliges" and denotes the concept that nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person who holds such a status to fulfill social responsibilities.”

No one does anything alone, we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and if we’re so lucky we get a head start due to wealth or intelligence or race or gender or what country we’re born in, we owe those around us an outstretched hand to help them along. 

That’s the real strength of humanity.  

Not clever white boys who launch sports cars into space for a laugh.

Cheers!

Vince and I were driving home on Kelly Drive. He was driving, I was catching up on email on my phone. 

ME: Hey honey, John Hodgman has a new podcast.

VINCE: Mmhm.

ME: he's recapping and discussing "I, Claudius." 

VINCE: Surprise, surprise.

ME: Guess what it's called.

VINCE: (stops breathing)

ME: "I, Podibus."

VINCE: (Long sigh)

ME: Guess how it's spelled.

VINCE: GET OUT. 

~fin~

Sunday mornings we clean. d has taken on kitchen duties, while I do bathrooms, K sweeps thoroughly, then I damp mop. One or another of us will occasionally go around and dust something, or clean light switches, door jambs, handles, under the oven, whatever sticks out as needing attention. It's a ritual. With the number of users and size of our place, a week is about how long it takes for grime/scum to become visible and the cat hair to start drifting out from the corners. Of course, there's spot cleaning when a cat horks, and frequent counter wipedowns and cutting board swaps. But this level of effort and cleanliness works for us.

Sundays are also pickle inspection, and they're doing fine. I pulled out an XTRA MUSTARD and gave it to d to test, and they said "it's got a long way to go, but I can see where it's going."  I ate the rest: it's got a nice flavour on it but needs more bite. So that's a month of fermentation down.

Questions from a friend's post on an antisocial network. Answers all mine.

1. Do you make your bed every day?
My sweetie does, so I almost never do.

2. How many hours of sleep do you need to be great?
Highly dependent on the environment and context, but average 8-9.

3. What two grocery items do you never run out of?
Peanuts and tea.

4. At what age did you start doing your laundry?
I started helping with household laundry in childhood, and didn't separate my own from the family's until I moved out at twenty-one.

5. If you could, would you go back to high school?
Hell no.

6. Can you parallel park in under three moves?
I doubt it.

7. A job you had which people would be shocked to know you once had?
I'll go with nude model, which seems to surprise most people. Others might find it odd that I was once a Kelly girl (temporary administrative and secretarial help through an agency).

8. Do you think there are aliens?
I think there's intelligent life we will never have contact with.

9. Can you drive a stick shift?
Yes.

10. Guilty TV pleasure?
Haven't watched TV in many years. My guilty movie pleasure is chop-socky.

11. Tattoos?
In the planning stages. I have a studio in mind (three possible artists on their roster) and am working on the design.

12. If the world ends do you want to be one of the survivors?
It would be an interesting challenge to make the best of an entirely changed environment, so yes.

13. Sweet or salty?
Salty. Bitter or sour would be more of a toss up.

14. Do you enjoy soaking in a nice hot bath?
Of course, though only on special occasions to unknot and relax.

15. Do you consider yourself a strong person?
Others consider me a strong person. I consider myself stubborn, which I will grudgingly admit requires a lot of strength. I am also brittle and need friends who help me avoid breaking.

16. Something people do that drives you nuts?
Judge (look down on) people based on their appearance. I know I do this myself, albeit with different parameters.

17. Do you have any birthmarks?
Yep.

18. Favourite childhood game?
Kick the can.

19. Do you talk to yourself?
Not out loud (usually). I do some of my blog and speech writing by talking to myself in my inside-my-head voice.

20. Do you like doing jigsaw puzzles?
Have enjoyed them in the past. It's been a few years.

21. Tea or coffee?
Tea first thing in the morning, coffee mid morning, then tea. I'm mostly a tea person.

22. First thing you remember wanting to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an astronaut.

Random thought:

I was thinking about all the people who have played The Stage Manager in Our Town. Fred Gwynne, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, that gangly, folksy archetype. Then I thought, yeah, like James Comey. 

Holy shit. What if we’re all extras in an Our Towniverse, a Thornton Wilderness, and the Stage Manager is James Comey? 

I thought, this is a thought for Brett Heller.  He said, “can we go back and look at a single day in our lives? Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” 

If we’re living in the Thornton Wilderness, I guess I have to start liking Hello, Dolly. 

I bought a 2l jar of Bick's pickles at costco, mostly for the jar, for later use with our own pickles. 

I'm having one of these store-bought pickles with lunch. Man, these are some weak-ass pickles. Decently crispy but they just don't taste like much of anything. I like a pickle that will fight back. Like if you drew a mascot for the kind of pickles I like, it would be like one of those "fighting Irish" things but it would be a pickle with a mean jaw, furrowed brow and angrily cocked hat. 

Fortunately, the pickles we're making are all still coming along just fine. About half of the bins have settled down into just fermentation, the other half still have a bit of residual nonsense on the surface to be spooned off. I believe we're through most of the dangerous period where infection might have set in so confidence is pretty high that they'll all turn out just fine. 

I'll keep checking them every week or so and we'll do an initial taste test at the beginning of October. (Sorry, no photos, they look the same as last week.) 

A local store was having a sale on Roma tomatos, $7 for a 25lbs, half bushel. Like, fuck yeah. d went out with the wagon. Except they had none. Produce guy says when they put them out on the floor, they disappear right away. Well, of course! 

Other store was having red peppers for $8 also for a half bushel. Which, holy shit. So, okay, fine, we can do that. d brought home a box and cored them and cut them up into half inch strips and we put them in the dehydrator, where they'll sit on the balcony overnight at 130F. And in the morning they'll be crisp.  

Yes, a dehydrator is a thing we have! The tomatoes would have gone into the dehydrator too, sliced into 1/2" thick discs. Maybe we'll get lucky tomorrow. We forgot pictures. Maybe pictures of the dried peppers tomorrow.

So it looks like I may get a new P/T job to supplement my job at TomTom. It’s still a bit of a long shot, but my buddy Brad said there might be an option where he works. We were talking about it last night, and I said that I would love to get some hours there if they would be understanding about my weird “it would have to be on rainy days” thing.

He apparently had some turmoil there this morning including the firing of a beloved coworker. They were already understaffed. They normally have paid interns, but those positions had been frozen until recently which threw them out of the school seasonal hiring schedule.

So we will see. I’m hopeful. I could use the extra hours and the extra money. What’s more, the position, while not anything like any ‘illustration’ gig I would ever think of, does have the word illustrator in the title, so it might be a bit of a resume builder. What’s even more, I know that I will learn a lot - which is enough to be enticing all by itself. I’ve been so stagnant in recent years when it comes to learning anything. I feel like my brain is turning to mush.

Anyway - this all has me looking at my resume and touching it up / adding the TomTom relevant information. That, in turn, had me wandering down my work history in my head. I’ve long thought I need to better document the jobs I’ve done in my past. It’s a pretty broad spectrum and it would be nice to reference them.

Keep your fingers crossed for me and the potential new side gig!

[ x - posted this to my DW account ]

Our small green children are doing fine. 

We’ll look in on them again next week!

Apple changed the way it categorizes its podcasts. Instead of audio fiction/audio drama being buried in "personal journals" or "performing arts," it now has a category, Fiction. It even has subcategories: Fiction>Drama, Fiction>Sci-Fi or Fiction> Comedy. 

WELL, LOOKIE HERE:

At 5:53 pm on August 21, 2019, Jarnsaxa Rising is 58 out of 60 on the Fiction>Drama chart for Apple Podcasts. 

I know it's highly subjective, but after not being visible among my peers for so long, this is flippin' HUGE. 

Here's another thing that's cuckoo-bananas. Last week we were the #3 podcast in Fiction in South Korea.