Birthday Reflections

by philg

I’m 61 today, a stereotypical age for a 1950s father to drop dead from a heart attack (that would have been attributed to the stresses of work, adult female supervision, concerns around children, etc.). This post is to reflect on things that I’ve learned in the past year.

From Fort Worth… it turns out that “Brazilian Sugar” is not a doughnut flavor:

From moving my 90-year-old mom out of independent living in Bethesda, Maryland to assisted living here in Jupiter, Florida… nothing in the United States is set up conveniently for old people. Financial services and government agencies require old people people to be competent with smartphones and/or web sites. Being an Internet/email user exposes old people to every kind of fraud (much worse since the lockdowns because old people have been more isolated and, therefore, easier to exploit). We need new structures, such as banking, credit card, and brokerage accounts that can be set up so that a second person’s authorization is required for transactions above a certain size.

From being almost at the end of Year 2 of ChatGPT… LLMs aren’t useful yet for making daily life go more smoothly. LLMs haven’t reduced traffic jams in the U.S. or airline delays and cancellations. LLMs haven’t made it easier to prepare dinner or clean up the house. Maybe LLMs are a game-changer for students assigned to write essays and programmers assigned to write boring code (especially on new-to-them platforms; maybe this explains “Tech Jobs Have Dried Up—and Aren’t Coming Back Soon” (WSJ)), but they haven’t meaningfully touched even a lot of enterprises that are primarily about information processing. For example, I’m an expert witness in an avionics-related case right now. There are more than 25 lawyers and paralegals on each side. Much of what is being done is, in theory, the kind of work that an LLM could do well, e.g., find a relevant document quickly, assemble relevant case law for a dispute that the judge has to settle, etc. Yet no use of LLMs is made at trial.

From Tequesta Indian Village Peace Mound Park, a bit of high ground in the otherwise uninhabitable Everglades that was inhabited prior to the Europeans draining the swamp… a parent was done with his/her/zir/their job when a child turned 13 and heaven was a swamp:

A few things that I’m glad to have done during the year…

  • spend three weeks exploring central and northern Portugal (plus Santiago de Compostela)
  • attend a Formula 1 event in person (not worth a huge amount of time, effort, and money, but the Miami event is well-organized)
  • made it to Oshkosh, as usual
  • saw the second total eclipse of my life
  • take a child on her first visit to the Kennedy Space Center and her first rocket launch
  • get my mother and some of her grandchildren together every 2-3 nights
  • made it to Boston to teach

How am I spending the day? Sadly, there won’t be the kind of theme party that Talulah Riley organized for Elon Musk (source):

For his forty-second birthday, in June 2013, Talulah [Riley] rented an ersatz castle in Tarrytown, New York, just north of New York City, and invited forty friends. The theme this time was Japanese steampunk, and Musk and the other men were dressed as samurai warriors. There was a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, which had been rewritten slightly to feature Musk as the Japanese emperor, and a demonstration by a knife-thrower.

The morning was spent in a 20-year-old Cirrus SR20 with no air conditioning and an intermittent ALT1 failure (a problem that three different Cirrus Service Centers haven’t been able to resolve in nearly two years; this was the first failure after a mid-summer circuit breaker replacement). My 9-year-old copilot suggested Chick-fil-A for lunch. Then we visited my mom. Exciting plans for the rest of the day: Zoom for an expert witness matter; dinner near PBI; pick up the kids’ other grandma at PBI; cake with my mom in her senior fortress.

21 thoughts on “Birthday Reflections”

  1. Happy birthday! I’m three months behind you, and 15 months from full eligibility to collect my two government pensions plus SS! Been looking at 55+ resort-style, gated communities in FL for my post-retirement life. Haven’t been yet for a visit, but seriously considering The Villages.

    I’m going thru the same technological and banking troubles with my 86-y/o father. Last year, he finally opened up his books to me. I was a bit overwhelmed trying to follow and organize his financial affairs – checking & money market accounts, CDs, IRAs, deferred, fixed, and indexed annuities at eight different institutions all over FL. And he’s missed two out of the last four RMDs, and the one’s he has taken were wildly under-miscalculated.

    • Thanks, FUPM. The IRA mandatory distributions are painful and then the pain is multiplied because the 90-year-old is supposed to do his/her/zir/their taxes by assembling information from documents that the government has received.

  4. Happy Birthday Phil. Be glad you aren’t being thrown a Japanese steam punk themed birthday. Elon had one and was left with life altering back pain after an encounter with a sumo wrestler.

    • Thanks, TS. I don’t think that I would have been as bold as Elon when confronted by a professional sumo wrestler.

  5. ChatGPT seems to be hanging on as a programming aid but it’s doing better than video restoration models nowadays. When was the last time anyone cared about a restored video from 1906? The industry requires constantly finding something that looks good enough to get some buyout offers but doesn’t really work.

  6. ChatGPT helped me beat the probate system in the Indian River County Court with the prompt:
    show an example of an order for Summary Administration of Testate Estate in Florida’s 19th circuit court without a hearing

    open sesame, pro se, just sayin’

  11. Happy birthday Philip.

    Of everyone I know who has been a computer architect, pioneering Web developer, travelogue author, entrepreneur, and airline pilot, you’re definitely my favorite!

  13. Happy Birthday! In my, and not only mine, estimate software development jobs are affected by outsourcing much more then by LLM. It seems that for real system development, LLM improves software developer efficiency by about 25%, smaller figure then was driven by use of intellisense in programming editors back in the 1990th

  15. Happy Birthday Phil and many, many returns! I greatly appreciate and enjoy your blog even if I don’t often have much illuminating to add. I can relate to you in many ways since my professional background and many of my interests are very similar to yours and am only a few days younger (we are supposedly boomers but I really feel like a gen Xer). I am glad that you seem to be enjoying lots of time doing great things with your kids since, personally, it is the thing I look back on with the most fondness. I raise my glass to another fine product from time of the Kennedy administration! Cheers!

  17. Happy birthday from a long, long time reader who appreciates your wry and witty commentary on the madness of the times.

  18. Happy belated birthday, Philip! Thank you for providing us with insightful and thought-provoking blogs—something we should be getting from our government, “experts,” and the mainstream media, but instead, they offer empty promises, confusion, and fear.

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