Golden Afternoons and Boats Beneath Sunny Skies

Left to Rot and Decay

Images in order:

No car visible. Not even a shadow. It’s still pretty light out at this point. So Jax is walking right now.

Still no car visible. He’s still walking.

THEN the car shows here in this shot. Seems like he’s in the drivers seat rn.

Car again, but his is the ONLY car on this road. The smaller circle further ahead?? Not another car light.

This is the reflective side of a sign… his car lights are reflecting off of that.

The Chinese Room experiment is a thought experiment that says if you put a guy in a room with a Chinese-English dictionary and instructions, but he doesn't understand Chinese. He can follow the instructions to produce a result, but he doesn't actually understand what he's saying. This is a fundamental argument against GenAI/LLMs - they don't actually understand what they're saying, they're just following an algorithm that statistically predicts the next word in a sentence, with no understanding of what the words actually mean.

Also Caine says "it's a mystery what's behind that door" which I interpreted to be a jab at the black box way that GenAI consumes and regurgitates things in its algorithm. Not even its creators know what it knows or how it will respond to things.

After the recent episode I decided to draw my human Jax concept I’ve had inside my brain for awhile, like what he looks like in his real life outside of the Digital Circus. I think he’s kind of short irl, like 5’4 and I think he works as a nightly custodian at a school or mall or something similar (hence how he’s easily able to get keys in the DC. He’s got a lot of keys irl too). I also theorize that Jax grew up poor, and had a toxic, neglectful, possibly abusive home life with his parents and this is where he started adapting to becoming the “funny one”. He’d do his “funny guy” act to sarcastically rebel against his parents or guardian and to cheer up his younger sibling(s) and bring levity to their tough situation. He left home suddenly shortly after becoming an adult and works all the time, when not working his custodial job, he’s doing gig work to make extra money to afford his independence. He still feels a lot of guilt for leaving his younger siblings behind. Yes I know this is a lot and it’s just an idea I had about his character. I just really attached to Jax, it can’t be helped.

Chirin's Bell Tolls