Automated Archives for May, 7th 2025
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Articles To Read
The following are articles that I saved today. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
- Candidate 1âââAn Exoplanet Around Alpha Centauri A
- What Porn Did to American Culture
- The Not-So-Groovy Side of Woodstock
Blog Posts On This Day
- May 7, 2024 (1 post)
- May 7, 2023 (1 post)
May 6th, 2025
What if 14 years old was the new driving age?
This is an idle thought as I unwind for the night and is not something I am making the case for. This is a complicated issue and there is a lot of stuff to consider and think about.
The driving age was set decades ago when technology and growing up were very different. I wonder what would happen if we dropped the driving age to 14 (using high school as the gate age.) Given the technological development, video gaming, teenagers are much more advanced and cars are (in many ways) antiquated technology compared to computers.
It would result in more fatal crashes both as a simple by-product of more drivers being on the road, and of course of the cultural shift for the younger drivers on the road. Far less important, but an issue to think about none-the-less: school infrastructures are not built for supporting this additional influx of drivers. Heck, I was in high school and the parking spaces on campus couldn't even serve both seniors and juniors. So, adding freshmen and sophomores is not something schools can handle.
As an upside, it enables employment (for those families in desperate need of it but which have excess vehicles). I am not pushing for rollback of child labor protections at all, but acknowledging some kids at 14 years old already do work, and more would if transportation was available. Also the added drivers would stir the economy through additional demand for vehicles. If 1 in 500 of the drivers has the means or family able to purchase a car (new or used), based on an estimate that there are 4 million 14 year olds in the US today, that puts 8,000 additional vehicles on the road.
Anyways, just a rambling thought before I crawl into bed.
May 4th, 2025
The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James Baldwin
"People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies"
So fucking dystopian. It belongs in Broken Mirror, not reality.
The original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model "gives him the answers to the universe." Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was "talking to him as if he is the next messiah." The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.
What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. "He would listen to the bot over me," she says. "He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon," she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as "spiral starchild" and "river walker." "It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking," she says. "Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God...."
Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began "lovebombing him," as she describes it. The bot "said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now," she says. "It gave my husband the title of 'spark bearer' because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him." She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: "Lumina." "I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory," this 38-year-old woman admits. "He's been talking about lightness and dark and how there's a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an 'ancient archive' with information on the builders that created these universes...."
A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, "Why did you come to me in AI form," with the bot replying in part, "I came in this form because you're ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided." The message ends with a question: "Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?" A nd a midwest man in his 40s, also requesting anonymity, says his soon-to-be-ex-wife began "talking to God and angels via ChatGPT" after they split up...
Suzy Eddie Izzard does Hamlet
Back in March Katie saw that tickets for seeing Suzy Izzard perform Hamlet were available at the Seattle Rep. We snagged tickets and today we got to see the show!
We'd never been to the Seattle Rep before today and it's wonderfully located at Seattle Center right next to the Opera house. The theatre for the show was cozy with a few hundred people, and we were seven rows back with an excellent view.
I've never actually seen Hamlet, and early on I was worried we'd have trouble following when Izzard changed roles, but she did a fantastic job. She had good physicality which helped you know who she was moment to moment. The show lasted a little over two hours with a short intermission. So they definitely trimmed down the show. Suzy came out at the end of the show and said a few words, talking about her background as a street performer and feeling it helped her prepare for this sort of show talking to random people, and how that helped her where others learned things getting theater degrees and she was studying to be an accountant.
Anyways, we really enjoyed it and are looking for a good recording of Hamlet to watch so we can learn more about it. If you get a chance, definitely go see this show!
May 3rd, 2025
May 2nd, 2025
Some days your body just decides to wake you up at 4 in the morning. I really wish it wouldn't do that.
May 1st, 2025
Mission Impossible (1996)
Crazy to think this movie is 29 years old. I remember seeing it when it came and even then thinking it was kind of hokey. I was also pissed off they killed Emilio Estevez.
The 'Sinners' Movie's Syllabus
Looks to be an incredible list of resources and things to further research into key areas of the movie, from Jim Crow and the Mississippi Delta, to the blues, the great migration, and more. Wow.
"17 Ways to Cut Your Risk of Stroke, Dementia and Depression All at Once"
The main take aways:
The study, which looked at data from 59 meta-analyses, identified six factors that lower your risk of brain diseases:
- Low to moderate alcohol intake (Consuming one to three drinks a day had a smaller benefit than consuming less than one drink a day.)
- Cognitive activity, meaning regular engagement in mentally stimulating tasks like reading or doing puzzles
- A diet high in vegetables, fruit, dairy, fish and nuts
- Moderate or high levels of physical activity
- A sense of purpose in life
- A large social network
[...]
The study also identified 13 health characteristics and habits that make you more likely to develop dementia, a stroke or late-life depression. (Altogether, the protective and harmful factors add up to 19 factors because two of them, diet and social connections, can increase or decrease risk, depending on their type and quality.)
- High blood pressure
- High body mass index
- High blood sugar
- High total cholesterol
- Depressive symptoms
- A diet high in red meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, sweets and sodium
- Hearing loss
- Kidney disease
- Pain, particularly forms that interfere with activity
- Sleep disturbances (for example, insomnia or poor sleep quality) or sleep periods longer than eight hours
- Smoking history
- Loneliness or isolation
- General stress or stressful life events (as reported by study subjects)
"What makes people flourish?"
A study about what makes people not just survive but flourish. It got answers from over 200k people around the world.
The aspects they asked about:
- Happiness and life satisfaction: how content and fulfilled people feel with their lives.
- Physical and mental health: how healthy people feel, in both body and mind.
- Meaning and purpose: whether people feel their lives are significant and moving in a clear direction.
- Character and virtue: how people act to promote good, even in tough situations.
- Close social relationships: how satisfied people are with their friendships and family ties.
- Financial and material stability: whether people feel secure about their basic needs, including food, housing and money.
Honestly the list above for how they broke it down is the main thing I took away from this article. A lot of the data seemed either things I already believe, or were somewhat expected.
There was one stat about work status leading to people flourishing more, which is pretty obvious. I thought it interest that self-employed people were higher than those who worked for others, but I suspect that is a fair bit of survivorship bias as the people working for themselves are the ones who had "made it" and found it able to fund their life, and thus they were happier, and those who tried who make it but fell short are underrepresented as they probably identified more as "working for someone else."
April 29th, 2025
One person's month-long sleep improvement efforts
From the author's summary at the end, emphasis mine:
Above all, my biggest takeaway from the month was that my sleep will be good if I make it a priority, and that sleeping well is under my control, even if I don’t always get to choose the ideal conditions to make it happen.
I don’t plan to be obsessive about forcing an early bed time on all occasions, especially if that means missing out on opportunities to socialize with people who don’t go to bed at 9:30 p.m. But I do think my decision to cut out screen time after 9 p.m. forced me to realize how much I had been trading off sleep for entertainment of dubious value.
