Ramblings of an Odd Person

Collin Kennedy died in 2018, just two years after this video was taken. What would anonymity have achieved for him in those last two years? Avoiding punishment? His whole point was that these parking fees are already a punishment on the sick.

Is public protest dangerous? Sure. Is it more dangerous than merely existing as a sick or disabled person navigating a hostile healthcare system? I think that is for every individual experiencing it to decide for themselves.

Collin Kennedy, 50, lived with multiple myeloma — a type of blood cancer — for 19 years.

He invited media to watch him fill a parking meter with spray foam to raise awareness about the high costs of parking for cancer patients and other sick people getting treatment. Video of Kennedy vandalizing the meter was widely shared on social media. It led to a Canada-wide petition to end the practice of charging for parking near hospitals.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

Food: southern-style collard greens

Everyone else seems to really like their houses though, and you can’t see inside of them, so you just assume that you’re being weird.

And then you hear about the construction project that’s happening down the road. And you didn’t know that was an option. You can just…fix your house? It can be better? You don’t have to live with the horrible lighting and weird furniture?

But other people scoff at the construction. They complain about the noise. “Why can’t they just be happy? The plumbing is great and the furniture is so comfortable! Why would you change it? And why do we have to deal with all their issues anyways? They could just do it quietly, away from us!” And you thought everyone hated their houses, at least a little. And it’s so much work to renovate. It’s fine in your house. It sucks, but it’s fine.

Then one day you try putting up a new painting. Something small. Just for you. Just to try it. And it feels like you. It feels right. And you didn’t know anything felt that good, ever. So you start to do more. And more. And eventually you might even start construction. And it’s inconvenient, and loud, and people complain, but you didn’t know that it could feel good to go home.

And then, one day, your renovations are done. And you get to have a home like everyone else. And that joy you felt looking at that painting? It’s everywhere now. And it’s normal.

I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I'm feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.

All the book really does is [I'm pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I've read no more than 5 pages] "discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help."

But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I'm compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it's saved my life at least a few times now.

"That's my neighbor!

I don't even know you!"