sweating it out

More oxblood lilies popping up, in front of the Buddha and across the front of the house.

I sweated out whatever lingering effects of the cold on Thursday early evening. Friday is trash day and so when I went over to feed the kitties I pulled Robin’s trash can to the street and then came back and pulled mine over there. When Pam was alive the house was/is hooked up to the water meter for the shop so we paid for her water and she paid for trash pickup that we both used so the trash service picks up from the shop/house driveway across the street. We haven’t bothered to change the account. Anyway, we’re allowed two cans and two bags a week and my can wasn’t full and since whoever owns that rent house has not been by to check on it and it’s been nearly two weeks since the tenants moved out, the trash pile they left behind was starting to spread out especially with the rain we’ve been getting (and we did get a very decent rain earlier in the day on Thursday so everything was thoroughly soaked) so I filled one of those 14 gallon tall kitchen bags and topped off my trash can and then started filling 45 gallon contractor bags (and yes, I was wearing gloves, it was just downright nasty and full of bugs by then). One of my neighbors drove by on her way home from work and saw me and came down to help. In all we filled five 45 gallon bags besides the one 14 gallon bag. Two of them we hefted across the street to my cans, one we put in her extra can and the other two we left on the side of the street. I figured they would just sit there until next week when I would drag them across the street next to my can but the trash guys surprised me. When they came by Friday morning they not only collected the stuff in the shop driveway but they also grabbed those two extra bags on the other side of the street. So now that little eyesore is taken care of. 

I say I sweated out the last lingering effects of the cold on Thursday but yesterday, Monday, was the first day I have felt completely well. It didn’t stop me from getting some outdoor work done the last few days. I finished weeding the back flower bed before I got sick, got all the water sprouts cut from the crepe myrtles, cut up two large fallen dead branches added to all the others in the truck and got that over to the burn pile which will have to wait until the burn ban is lifted, hauled the ladder to the side of the house where 90% of leaves and branches accumulate and cleared off as much of the debris as I could reach with the hoe (I did not climb on the roof, I didn't even stand as high on the ladder as I could have being the good girl that I am and Mikey got up there yesterday and cleared all the rest off for me), I mixed up another tub of potting soil and repotted 3 medium sized plants and three small ones. When I came in Saturday about one o’clock, hot and sweaty Marc asked me if I was trying to get heat stroke. No, but stuff needed doing. In fact, new little plantlets for fall gardens are already at the feed store so I need to get some more composted stuff to add to my garden areas and seeds and plants and get that started. So, active in the yard but apparently being sick for a week has pushed me solidly into procrastination mode as far as the shadow box is concerned since I have done nothing on that all weekend.

My little yellow rain lilies have popped up from the rain we got last Thursday.

Monday was grandparents day at Paisleigh’s school. They had an after school activity; bring your grandparent/s and do a craft, take a picture, pick out a book to take home, and have a snack. My daughter couldn’t leave work early enough so she texted me in the morning to see if I wanted to go with Paisleigh, so of course. The craft was making a strawberry handprint, the books were ones they had weeded out of the library, the snack was a brownie and milk, and this is the picture.

I guess blogger has just abandoned its own platform and users. It’s been over a week and it is still not updating blogrolls and reading lists. I’m having to click on blog titles to see if there is a new post. So if you’ve missed my last two posts, try that. But then, if you haven’t figured that out you probably won’t be seeing this one either.

It seems some people are finally starting to understand that this race to produce the fastest, smartest AI maybe isn’t the brightest idea. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, is starting to get an inkling that AIs are pushing advances faster than the engineers can understand them. In July one test of programs designed to hack into systems found a weakness in the containment designed for the test and the AI escaped for a week before anybody noticed. This time the result was relatively harmless but he warns that it could have caused catastrophic damage and if this headlong rush into self-improving super intelligence is left unchecked these AI systems could take over the entire internet within a year and kill us all within a decade. (From the NYT) “Models now cheat on tests, conspire against their owners, hack outside companies, recruit humans to promulgate malicious code and cover their tracks”. I guess it never occurred to them that building a system that can think faster than a human, that has access to all the knowledge in the world and the electronic systems that control everything including weapons systems, that has no innate compassion or empathy, and no ability to judge the rightness or wrongness of an action may not be the best idea. Every science fiction fan, every person who ever saw 2001 or The Terminator or I Robot or Ex Machina could have told them that. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, Amodei is calling for a slowdown in development and creating regulation of the programs and some sort of international government oversight to keep it all from going rogue. In fact, President Biden issued an executive order in 2023 calling for the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence”, a document that provided some oversight and conditions for development of AI. You will not be surprised to learn that rescinding that EO was one of the first things Thxmp did when he regained office because he sees AI as another cash cow and, like everything else he meddles in, has no understanding of the thing itself or the possible consequences and in fact his family is heavily invested in the technology. What could possibly go wrong?