The Dodgers are on-pace to win 162 regular season games this year.

No, I don’t see any looming ironic reason to regret this hubris at all.

The illegality and buffoonery of the Signal group chat, in order of severity:

1. High-level administration officials (only some of whom are reckless drunks or amateurs who accidentally stumbled on-stage) held a “Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information” (TS / SCI) meeting outside of secure government channels. This, on its own, is a violation of the Espionage Act.
2. They set the messages to disappear after a week, meaning that they were retaining no history of their actions. This is illegal under the laws that require the preservation of official records.
3. They accidentally invited a reporter into the treasonous and illegal chat.
4. They have offered shifting and easily falsifiable excuses for the entire incident: it was a hoax, they were hacked, no secrets were discussed, and it wasn’t really that big a deal. The whole government is now running on nuke-secrets-in-the-bathroom levels of security.
5. They used emojis.

That last one should probably be higher.

The thing I don’t get — OK, among the things I don’t get — is how anybody who is not filling out the back half of a pitch deck thinks that simply scaling up LLMs (large language models) is going to suddenly produce AGI (another goddamned imposter). There is simply no path from one to the other, unless you hand-wave hard enough to actually go airborne.

The options:

• You believe that human consciousness is merely a complicated statistical model but don’t have an explanation for how it comes about.

Or:

• You believe that the “then a miracle occurs” cartoon is a development roadmap.

Or:

• You believe that there is a brain-deadening panic among the world’s monied tech and business leaders — each of whom is flat-out terrified of missing the Next Big Thing, now that their NFT bets haven’t pay off — and they will throw literally billions of dollars at anybody who will tell them what they need to hear.

Hm.

I know it’s been said a thousand times before, but what we have now is not AGI. There’s no reasoning in reasoning models, and there’s no intelligence in artificial intelligence. The software doesn’t understand anything it’s producing, but just burps up the next word that’s likely to be present in its training corpus given the context of all the previous words. Again and again and again.

I guess it’s kind of depressing that that can pass the Turing Test, but then so can Kevin Roose. You have to be willing to believe that the human you’re talking to is an obsequious, credulous suck-up. Which, yes, OK, isn’t a totally invalid assumption.

And, heck, plenty of people can’t reason either, and just repeat the same series of words that have provided them with money or sex in the past. It’s why I’m in therapy.

But presumably those same people don’t cost potentially trillions of dollars, at least until Elon Musk successfully directs the entire budget of the United States government at his own businesses and — the day after his net worth passes a thousand-billion — quote-tweets some rando’s fever dream with the word “True.”

The inherent limitations in statistical models like LLMs are an air-tight seal over their unlimited improvement. They can’t even theoretically evolve past stochastic parrot-hood to reach the lesser apes, like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate.

So if your business requires that you continuously leap-frog last quarter’s big reveal, how to you get past the inconvenient fact that iteration is boring and most of the use-cases that people have imagined for the current generation of AI don’t actually, y’know, use-case all that well? How do you achieve even something as pedestrian as common sense?

Easy! You over-promise! Ta-da!

Just another few hundred billion — just another half-decade of money chasing a Next Big Thing that smells an awful lot like the past half-dozen Next Big Things — and we’ll be there! You can back the dump truck into Bay 6.

The troublesome fact that there’s no even theoretical route from the technology we have to the technology we want isn’t really an obstacle in the over-heated, over-wrought, over-excited environment we live in. Stapling “AI” onto your business plan gets you a ticket to the same dance that stapling “.com” onto it was three decades ago. My perpetual motion machine is only three or four years away, if I can get the funding.

Maybe there’s some miraculous technology we don’t know about yet. Maybe the singularity is brewing under someone’s desk. Maybe Roko’s basilisk is a sensible way to proceed. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken all that ayahuasca. Have you ever looked at your hand, man? I mean, really looked at your hand?

But near as I can tell, the entire AI industry is promising a second act that it hasn’t written yet, that it can’t write. They’ll crank the knobs and declare breakthroughs and hope that nobody notices that “artificial general intelligence” is just LLMs turned up to 11.

Some people need to touch grass so badly that we should dig up a good-sized rectangle of it, put them in the hole, and then put the grass back on top.

And, I dunno, maybe drop a little marker so folks will know not to run a water line there.

It’s going to be so embarrassing to lose a war against Greenland.

OK, so, let’s say my foot is a bunch of uncommitted, unstashed changes, and this shotgun here is git reset --hard.

Now, watch.

[Proceeds to blow own foot clean off.]

You see why you have to… be… carefu—

[Passes out from blood loss and pain.]

A month or so ago, my wife and I went to Las Vegas for a long weekend.

Valentine’s Day is February 14 and her birthday is February 18, and I learned early on in our relationship that you do not try to combine them. But over the many (many) long (long) years, we’ve mellowed to the point of:

“Are we going out on Valentine’s Day?”
“What, are you nuts?”

…and:

“What do you want for your birthday?”
“Sleep.”

And so with the President’s Day weekend falling between the two, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to not go out on Valentine’s and also have a big bed with black-out curtains. There are also buffets, which is my love-language.

The hotel room was nice — other than the fact that it had Las Vegas right outside the door — and, when I wandered into the bathroom and saw the bidet, I made a sound I haven’t been able to reproduce. Heated seat, glowing blue light, and the kind of steely-eyed menace you get from people who have a job to do and know what’s involved in getting it done. My undercarriage is gettin’ pressure-washed!

Problem, though: the bidet has no instructions. At all. Normally this wouldn’t dissuade me from operating machinery, but here, um, I have some skin in the game. It can’t be that complicated, though, right? You could accomplish the same thing with a garden hose and some privacy. And, hey, there’s a language-agnostic remote control mounted on the wall.

OK, starting from the top. That’s clearly the universal icon for an ass, and it’s got a fountain pointed at it. Great. The basics. To the right appears to be a more… aggressive… flow.

Below that is… a woman? And a spray that covers everything from the back of her calves to half a foot behind her back. And to the right, an even wider delivery angle. I guess that’s the all-orifice hose-down option.

Next is either a button to spring Wolverine claws, or the dryer. Since I didn’t have to sign a liability waiver before sitting down, I’m going with dryer.

Fourth seems to be an adjustment of the… targeting arm? There is a little hatch in the back of the toilet bowl where a nozzle pokes out of when called upon, like the gatekeeper droid at Jabba’s palace. This button must move it back and forth, like an intimate, adjustable pop-up sprinkler. Below that is what I’m going to assume is the spray pressure control, and not a cigarette to smoke after you’ve had your full bidet experience.

Finally, last, there’s the same nozzle icon used previously, but it’s got… sparkles above it? Where the water normally goes? Maybe it uses carbonated water? Or, I dunno, coffee? Does the nozzle get replaced with a magic wand? And is that licensed from Hitachi? Maybe the cigarette idea is right.

But wait. I’ve seen that before. That sparkle iconography has become really common — it’s the generic graphic that literally every company on earth is using to indicate AI. Is this an AI bidet? What does that even mean? Is this how AI uses all that water? What was the training data? I shudder to think whose intellectual properly rights I might be violating.

I push it. Nothing happens.

So it is AI.

Below that is apparently the volume control.

Some friends and I are planning on doing something stupid soon — we’re going to join the LA Marathon Crash Ride.

The Crash Ride is an unofficial bike ride along the route of the LA Marathon in the wee hours before the race begins. The Marathon organizers start closing off the streets at midnight or so the morning of, and by 1:00 or 2:00am, there are 26.2 miles of Los Angeles urban roadways that are effectively car-free. It’s a good start.

A long while back someone noticed this and started biking the route in the middle of the night. It’s become so popular that the LAPD now rides escort, just on the off-chance that a driver out at 3:00am on Sunday morning might not be the most considerate or level-headed person when faced with being stuck at an intersection while hundreds of bicyclists roll past.

I rode last year, and it was fun — there were boom boxes and people had art-bikes and there was the kind of crazy energy that you only get as you ride down the center of Sunset Boulevard three hours before dawn.

The first step in riding the Crash is figuring out when the Marathon actually is, and that should be easy, right? Right?

“Hey, Siri, when is the LA Marathon?”

On Friday, Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy, in a statement on the apparently year-long delay in the delivery of better Siri personalization and accuracy, said:

Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly.

In fairness, I asked Alexa the same thing and it said:

Los Angeles Marathon was created in 1986.

At least my friends and I aren’t the only ones being stupid.

If, late Friday afternoon, your manager schedules an unexpected one-on-one for early Monday morning, in the same week that senior management has an all-hands to discuss the latest quarter’s financials, you probably don’t need to prepare a detailed break-down of what you’ve been working on.

I know that now.