It is important that we keep the record clear.

Although I do wonder what kind of rhetorical purpose Vance had in mind when he posted this.

Maybe the internet was a mistake pic.twitter.com/vom6c25HfJ

— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 17, 2024

What a weird sicko.

You may have noticed I left something out in that last post about Andreesen and Horowitz — their political vision is focused on crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better. I said nothing about AI! You may praise me for my restraint.

I shall now correct my omission. Here’s the breakdown of the money OpenAI is spending on this boondoggle:

Total revenue has been $283 million per month, or $3.5 to $4.5 billion a year. This would leave a $5 billion shortfall.

Training the AI models will cost OpenAI about $7 billion in 2024. For ChatGPT alone, the cost will be $4 billion. New models may add $3 billion to that cost — OpenAI has had to train new AI models faster than it had anticipated.

Microsoft’s OpenAI “funding” is largely in the form of Azure compute credits. OpenAI gets a heavily discounted rate of $1.30 per A100 server per hour. OpenAI has 350,000 such servers, with 290,000 of those used just for ChatGPT. This cloud estate is apparently running near full capacity.

Staffing costs for 2024 are likely to be $1.5 billion, up from $500 million for 2023. The median OpenAI engineer salary in 2023 was a $300,000 base salary and $625,000 of stock-equivalent compensation. [Bay Area Inno, 2023; Levels.fyi]

They’re spending roughly twice what they’re making. Almost all their servers are chewing away on ChatGPT. And personally, the worst of all as far as I’m concerned is that software engineers are getting paid $300,000 base salary and $625,000 of stock-equivalent compensation. If my employer paid me half that amount of base salary, rather than a quarter, and never mind the big stock bonus, I’d be coasting on easy street and could hire a live-in masseuse and, I don’t know, go crazy and buy a second car? I struggle to imagine that much money.

I suppose my daughter would have the qualifications to get into that kind of business, but I’d encourage her to keep her soul intact.

Today is the first day of Skepticon. I was supposed to be there. I wanted to be there. But instead, I’m at home.

What happened is that on Tuesday I had my second encounter with a transient ischemic attack — the first was about a year and a half ago. I was just sitting at the computer, typing away, when suddenly I couldn’t remember how to spell anything, and the letters and words were swimming about on the computer screen. It was disconcerting. After a short while, everything went back to normal, but I called my doctor anyway — I got a CT scan yesterday (alles klar, no gross observable bleeds or anything like that), and I feel perfectly fine now. I’ll be visiting a neurologist in the near future for a more thorough checkup.

I suspect it was recent grief and sleeplessness and exhaustion and too damn much travel recently that brought it on, so I’m treating it by getting enough sleep. I woke up at 4am this morning, and often I’d just get up and start my day, but this time I got up, walked to the bathroom, and came back to bed and got an additional 2 hours of sleep. No more absurdly early bird for me.

Unfortunately, one thing I cannot trust my brain to do is to hop into a car and drive for 11 hours to St Louis. Once upon a time, yes, no problem, but now I picture suddenly becoming disoriented and confused on I35 because I’d pushed myself too far. Of course, my other nightmare is that happening in the middle of a class, which would be a bit awkward. What good is a professor who loses the ability to read and write?

At least I’ve still got my fall-back profession of exotic dancer to rely on…unless there’s also motor involvement. I’d better take care of myself and stay rested for my own good.

I think it’s important to check the flow of misinformation. According to the Associated Press, JD Vance did not, I repeat, did not fuck a sofa.

This scurrilous accusation does warrant a thorough investigation.

The wild assertions sprang from people on X (formerly Twitter) writing that Vance, now the running mate for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, wrote in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” that he simulated the act with a rubber glove anchored between the cushions as a young man.

“You have only been a Senator for 18 months, you are NOT qualified to be @VP plus you depravely humped a couch and wrote about it in your book!” a Kamala Harris supporter wrote.
Even comedian Kathy Griffin chimed in, declaring the country should not have a “couchf*cker” as vice president.

At one point AP appeared to have another headline, “Posts spread baseless rumors about GOP vice presidential pick JD Vance having sex with a couch,” but the article has seemed to disappear. We’re checking with AP on that.

Why waste all that journalistic effort? According to Mediate, AP did a PDF search of the book that produced 10 references of “couch” or “couches” but in none of them did Vance take liberties. “Sofa” and “glove” did not appear anywhere in the memoir, AP wrote.

I am mostly satisfied at this point, but I wouldn’t rule out the appointment of a Senate committee to investigate further. And I think that Vance needs to make a public disavowal.

I’m sorry, but I’m a cliche. I was lying in bed half asleep last night when my wife came to bed, and I’m fortunate that she didn’t ask what I was thinking.

Because my brain was whirling like a hamster in a cage about…kaiju. This past summer, I have watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (big meh, Hollywood exploding the whole premise) and Godzilla Minus One (really good), and of course I’ve watched the original King Kong, which is the only one to get even close to handling this problem properly.

Here’s the problem: energy defeats flesh. People successfully hunted elephants with sharpened sticks and bows and arrows. They hunted whales with harpoons tipped with flint or copper. Thick skin and scales are hard to penetrate, but apply enough force and you can punch through them. In an animal of vast bulk, it is going to be difficult to get through to a vital organ, but if nothing else, make enough holes and it will eventually bleed out. It’s probably going to be enraged first, and try to kill you, but that’s why you don’t pick on an elephant or a whale — it’s the risk, not the invulnerability.

It bugs me in a kaiju movie that everything just explodes on the surface or bounces off Godzilla. He can’t be denser or tougher than the steel and concrete buildings he smashes with nary a scuff or a scratch — there is no armor thick enough in a mobile animal to resist heavy arms fire. Yet the movies just show modern tanks firing at him, and he isn’t even set back, let alone scored with damage. Good ol’ King Kong gets it right, since [spoiler!] they killed him with repeated machine gun fire that caused enough accumulated damage that he fell down dead.

Don’t get me started on Pacific Rim. Why are they building elaborate, complex, giant robots to grapple with the huge biological horrors rising from the deep? One GBU 12 Paveway launched from an F-15, and it’s splattered. I don’t care what it’s made of, if it can’t survive getting punched in the face by a robot, it’s not going to cope with being torn apart by a 500lb bomb and falling back into the sea as a rain of gibs.

So that took care of my concerns about kaiju, and I could get back to sleep.

But then I thought of other problems. What does Mothra eat? Is she denuding entire forests to grow to tremendous size? And possibly, she doesn’t eat as an imago — all she might have on her mind is sex!

I’ll think about that some other night.

I’m back home again. It was not a happy trip, but I did learn a few things.

• Viewings are horrible, but my family insists on having them. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been dragged off to unpleasant funerals where the corpse of a loved one is put on display, and they never look like they did when they were alive, so what’s the point? The mortuary did the best they could, but my mother looked like a melting wax mannequin with a spray tan, heavily made up in a way she would never have done in life.
• Being executor of the estate is a lot of work, even when my mother had done all the work of creating a legal will. I still have to bring in hired help to sell off the house, and there’s a stack of papers documenting savings and investments I have to shuffle through. I’m going to have to travel to Seattle again a little later this fall, after the lawyer has sorted through his responsibilities, to do things like close out old bank accounts and move money around.
• At least her heirs seem to be obliging, so far. It helps that it was a small estate, so no one is squabbling over her fortune. There is a little money, though, and I just wish she’d spent it all on herself.
• The memorial service was nice, at least. We just gathered old friends and family together and told stories. For instance, I learned that she was always quiet and soft-spoken in school, but one time she and a friend decided to go wild and get high…by buying cokes and adding aspirin. It didn’t work. But I think that’s as crazy as Mom got.
• Anyone want to buy a nice little 4-bedroom, 2-bath house on the road to Lake Tapps in Auburn?

We — myself, Mary, and Alaric — visited Tolmie State Park, just off the Nisqually Reach, with Ji and Knut, and strolled along the rocky beach, relaxing. The water was soothing.

The trees were spectacular.

Knut led the way.

Today it’s back to the grind. My plan is to contact realtors to get an estimate on my mother’s house. I doubt that 50 years of memories will be included in the sale price.

Yesterday, I spent hours going through massive piles of photo albums, gathering images to put on display at a memorial service. I learned a couple of things. Cheap mass market cameras from anytime in the 20th century were crap and produced smudgy, blurry images. Polaroids in particular were terrible. More professional cameras that typically shot in black & white and used large format produced very nice results, but throwing them in a pile or in sticky photo albums does them no favors.

Also, my mother was quite lovely, but I already knew that.

It’s also particularly sad to see a long life reduced to this brief shots of happy moments.

Modern cameras are amazingly good, but when you buy a cheap scanner, it’s going to die in the middle of trying to digitize hundreds of old photos.

We read the will yesterday, too. It was written in 1984 and wasn’t changed since, despite the fact that three of the family members have died since it was written. It’s vaguely written, so it’s still applicable, but it basically just says that her executor should divide her estate equally among her 6 kids. Easy, right? I’m meeting with a lawyer this morning to discuss all the details that will bite me in the butt. She wasn’t rich, so that really simplifies everything.

I’m currently dreading the viewing, a barbaric custom. People don’t look as they did in life after they’ve died, so these things are always shocking, distressing events. You definitely come away knowing your loved one is gone forever.

However, I am looking forward to the memorial event on Friday evening. Mom was well-loved, so I expect to see a lot of familiar old faces, and this may be the last grand gathering of the family. This is where Mom’s financial mediocrity is a virtue, because no on will be coming to harangue me for a piece of the pie. There is no pie, there is a small cupcake that is being split 6 ways, and I intend to be meticulous in making sure the crumbs have their proper distribution.

On a personal note, I was on a long drive today, from Morris to Minneapolis, and in particular, from St. Cloud to Minneapolis. Simultaneously, one of those massive monster midwest thunderstorms was following me along I94. I’m talking continuous lightning flashes, rolling thunder, torrential rain, and nasty great lumps of hail falling out of the sky. The roof of my car is heavily dimpled now, and worse, it was slow, white-knuckle driving, and right now my hands are cramped up, and my neck is a rigid stalk of tense muscles, my eyes hurt, and I have a terrible headache. But I’m safe now, at least!

Three hours on the road in the middle of that late at night…not cool. Also not cool was coming up on an overpass and discovering that all the cars in front of me had stopped beneath it for shelter, creating a roadblock of terrible immobile flashing lights…and long lines of cars backed up, unable to fit under the shelter and also unable to pull off the freeway at all.