A Family of Killers

As a side hustle (though more as a way to explore AI from yet another angle), I have begun rating AI for an online company. For something like $20-$30/hour, they present me with a variety of responses to different prompts, and I then evaluate those responses for what was more effective, ranging in topics from the way it handled complex emotions to simply “did it answer the prompt?” Doing this for a little bit has…

My last relationship with the gym lasted a few weeks a year or two ago. I had this goal of going more regularly, but (like most gym goals across the nation, I imagine) the practice proved to be much more difficult than the theory. I just . . . stopped. I’m good at doing routines. I’m also good at streamlining my life in a way to make things as easy and sustainable as I can….

Years ago, I read a book by Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed it back then (I’m a Stephenson fan in general. His books can get pretty heady at time, but I like the way he explores concepts through his plots.) One of my favorite parts about the book was how it handled artificial intelligence, and I wanted to see if it stood up to how AI seems to be shaking out at…

A friend pointed out to me that it’s been a good long while since I posted a writing update on my blog. He wasn’t wrong, and seeing as how the whole point of this blog started out as a way for me to talk about my writing . . . yeah. I need to do a better job with that. So here I am, trying. I am still writing every day, though at the moment…

Saturday was the big day. Not that I’d been planning it for a long time or anything, but I realized my patience with my long hair was finally getting nearer and nearer its breaking point, so it wasn’t too surprising to me when I woke up Saturday morning and knew enough was enough. Denisa helped me bundle the hair together for donating it, and then we buzzed my head clean. It’s been over two years…

It was Tomas’s 20th birthday yesterday. (How did we celebrate? He’s home (yay!), so we’d planned on doing a bit of a party, but he got sick as soon as he got home, so we’ve pushed that off a bit.) It only occurred to me yesterday that each birthday he has also marks the anniversary of me becoming a father for the first time. 20 years of that? It’s definitely a noteworthy occasion to observe….

A few months ago, Denisa and I were looking for a time to go down to Boston to take Michaela to the temple for her first time. We had hoped to be able to go with a group in January, but that didn’t pan out, so we wanted to be sure to get there soon, since she’d been looking forward to it so much. Of course, “soon” is a very relative term when we’re busy,…

Howdy, folks. I’ve been thinking a lot the past couple of days about Facebook and my mental health. For the past while, I’ve been more and more fed up with the sort of environment Facebook fosters. I have many friends on their whom I really value and enjoy connecting with. And then I have people I know fairly well, people I barely know, and people I don’t know at all. Nine times out of ten,…

This past weekend, I was up in Bangor Saturday and Sunday at Stake Conference. It’s a regional church meeting where members of multiple congregation from the area come together for instruction and a worship service. We had a visiting General Authority (someone from the international leadership level of the church) come to speak to us this time. Saturday evening, he focused on a series of questions Christ asked His followers while He was on the…

I skipped last for reasons, but I’m back this week with some new things I’ve been watching and reading. Let’s cut right to the chase, because I’m short on time. (Story of my life at the moment.) Television: Dark Season 1: This sci-fi show on Apple TV was . . . intriguing. It’s a multiverse show, exploring what the implications would be if you could move at will between different versions of reality. It suffered…