Oh boy. Today’s the day.

Today is colonoscopy prep day. I’m going to dope myself up with a laxative this morning, and this afternoon I start guzzling another laxative and large quantities of fluids. Also, no solid food. It’s going to be a long, long day.

Then tomorrow I’m scheduled to be rendered unconscious and wheeled into a room where I’m going to get pegged with a camera.

I don’t know whether I’m going to be furiously cranky or exasperatedly fatigued.

Also, damaging the reputation of stupid Americans further. No one if France is going to want to contact Americans after this.

U.S. triathlon Seth Rider has decided to stop washing his hands after going to the bathroom in a bid to increase his resistance to the polluted River Seine.

The men’s individual triathlon race at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games has been postponed as the water quality in the Seine is still below regulatory standards. The race was meant to commence on Tuesday but has now been delayed until Wednesday, although the water could still be harmful to the athletes.

To gain an advantage and avoid potential illness, Rider is taking drastic action by not washing his hands and believes there is science to support his theory. “We know that there’s going to be some E. coli exposure, so I just try to increase my E. coli threshold by exposing myself to a bit of E. coli in day-to-day life,” Rider said.
“And it’s actually backed by science. Proven methods. Just little things throughout your day, like not washing your hands after you go to the bathroom.”

“Backed by science.” What science was that, Seth? Citation please. You’re not evolving resistance to E. coli, and it’s not just one kind of bacterium we’re concerned about. You know, hygiene and cleanliness are generally good ideas.

This is reminding me of those stories of men who don’t wash their asses that were going around before.

It’s near my computer desk. As soon as I sit down, she curls up next to me. If I get up to use the bathroom or get a drink, she’ll follow, and then as soon as I go back, she’s there. For an evil cat, she’s awfully dependent.

I’m about to go into the lab. I’m afraid it will boggle her mind.

She just looks that way. It’s around 30°C here, and every morning the evil cat complains at me — she won’t shut up — until she collapses on an old carpet remnant near a fan I’ve set up in my office. Then she’s immobile most of the day. I’d feel sympathy, except I’m stuck in the same oven with her.

Could be worse. Look at these views of the Park Fire, currently raging in Northern California. The video is especially notable for showing all the different views technology gives us on the fire — satellite, radar, airplane flight maps, etc. — so you can get a multidimensional appreciation of the awfulness.

All I can do is show you a photo of a heat-stressed cat in western Minnesota.

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?