I've been living for two days in the overlapping area in a Venn diagram of the absolute worst kinds of debugging: network firewall config and Python conda dependency hell. With all the new Apple Health mental health stuff they should add a feature that's like "It looks like this is the third time you've tried to prune the conda base environment, and you're starting to swear in your messages to the LLM. I'm phoning the suicide hotline now."

The whole pre-occupation with consciousness when people talk about AI seems confusing to me. It feels like people talk about whether AI is conscious like it’s an important or meaningful quality to have without ever explaining why consciousness is important in the first place. My personal guess is that consciousness is a psychological quirk of how our minds evolved. I don’t see anything particularly necessary about it. Perhaps a conscious intelligence is useful in some contexts, but it seems possible to have non-conscious intelligence that are just as, or more, powerful than their conscious counterparts.

After trying to cook with Beef Tallow, I now understand why we’ve moved away from cooking with it. Tallow’s smoke point seems really low and I had to open all the windows to avoid setting off the smoke alarms. It also splattered out of the pan all over the kitchen. Health theories aside, I understand the move to seed oils much more. Not only are they cheaper, they’re just better to cook with.

The Dow Jones doesn’t make sense. It’s price weighted, which doesn’t make sense considering a tiny company with a few expensive shares can have more influence than a massive company with lower priced shares. The reason is that the Dow was started in 1896, a time when obviously computers didn’t exist. Getting the data and crunching it every night was a huge computing task, so they had to settle for the price since that was quicker to calculate than multiplying out the total market cap. It’s strange to think that there was a time where the basic task of multiplying a list of numbers was an expensive and time consuming process that required paying a team of people. The assumption that every single person has instant access to a computer capable of processing billions of computations of massive numbers every second is so ingrained into my brain that it’s strange to imagine a time when that didn’t exist.

Random thought, why do we have a sex offender registry for only sex related crimes? I suppose I would want to know if I guy who molested kids moved in next door but I would also want to know if a guy who broke into multiple homes moved in next door. I don’t see what distinguishes sex related crimes from other crimes that warrants only sex crimes getting a registry. We should pick a standard and apply it equally, either every criminal goes on a public registry or no one does.