LLMs are God’s gift to businesses that want to pretend to care about customers?

by philg

An email from The Google regarding a merchant replying to a review that I left two years ago (pre-ChatGPT):

Here’s the full text of the reply:

Thank you for taking the time to leave us a 5-star review for Calaveras Cantina in Jupiter. We are delighted to hear that you enjoyed our upscale Mexican food and competent service. Our team takes great pride in providing a pleasant dining experience for our guests.

We are glad to know that you found our tableside guacamole to be excellent. We are always looking for ways to enhance our menu and we appreciate your recommendation. We are also happy to hear that you found our location to be kid-friendly with the adjacent marina.

We hope to see you and your family again soon at Calaveras Cantina. Thank you for choosing us for your Mexican restaurant needs.

Best regards,
Calaveras Cantina Team

Pulling out and repeating phrases from my review is something that only a psychotherapist or an LLM would do, so I’m guessing that this restaurant discovered that ChatGPT could be used to generate a personal reply to every customer who left a review.

We were promised flying cars and instead AI gives us fake personal expressions of gratitude.

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Bidenrithmetic Questions

by philg

How did Joe Biden sound today? I didn’t watch the State of the Union address, but I have skimmed the transcript. I think it is fair to say that Joe Biden is the most transformative president in U.S. history because a country is defined by its residents and Joe Biden has done more to change who lives in the U.S. than any other president (at least 7.2 million new neighbors via undocumented migrants plus perhaps 3 million additional immigrants arriving by what used to be called the “legal” process).

An arithmetic question… President Biden said that he wanted “100 more immigration judges to help tackle a backload of 2 million cases.” Isn’t that 20,000 cases per new judge? If each judge handled five cases per day and worked 220 days per year and migrants stopped walking across the southern border, the backlog would be cleared in 18 years?

An unfortunate turn of phrase?

Pass the Equality Act, and my message to transgender Americans: I have your back!

What do the doctors who perform gender affirming surgery say after a “top” or “bottom” surgery? “I have your ….”?

Delusions of grandiosity?

I’m taking the most significant action on climate ever in the history of the world.

If we believe Professor Dr. Greta Thunberg, Ph.D., wouldn’t the most significant actions on climate in world history have been taken by the fossil fuel pioneers? James Young, for example, who distilled paraffin from coal and oil shales. Edwin L. Drake, who pioneered drilling for oil. The scientists and engineers who built the first internal combustion engines and automobile industry. Or, if we want to look at the virtuous side of the equation, how about the engineers and scientists who made photovoltaic solar cells possible, starting with Edmond Becquerel? New York Times, April 26, 1954:

A federal appeals court in California found that it was illegal for Donald Trump to build a wall along our now-fully-open border with Mexico because Congress hadn’t appropriated the funds for this specific purpose (The Hill). The wall would have been within U.S. territory (stolen from Mexico, of course, but that’s another story). Biden seems to have vastly greater powers than Trump:

Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.

Congress never appropriated money for this construction project. The construction will occur in waters and on land that aren’t part of the U.S. How is it possible for Trump’s border wall project to have been illegal while Biden’s “build stuff in Gaza” project is legal?

(Separately, Biden says that a river of free stuff from American taxpayers will “guarantee [that] Palestinians can live with peace and dignity”. But won’t the river of free stuff actually enable Palestinians to stay at war forever and pursue the military goals that the majority agree on? And won’t the U.S. delivery of essentials to Hamas-ruled Gaza help Hamas continue to hold Americans hostage? (Biden explicitly mentions the Americans held hostage by Gazans in the very same speech where he promises to give Gazans everything that they want or need.))

Official Hamas statistics are cited without skepticism by the U.S. president:

More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.

Here’s the stuff that Ron DeSantis should have learned to say…

Above all, I see a future for all Americans!

I see a country for all Americans!

And I will always be a president for all Americans!

Because I believe in America!

I believe in you the American people.

You’re the reason I’ve never been more optimistic about our future!

So let’s build that future together!

Let’s remember who we are!

We are the United States of America.

There is nothing beyond our capacity when we act together!

Note that the above message of solidarity and brotherhood/sisterhood/binary-resisterhood is contradicted just a few lines up:

I see a future where the middle class finally has a fair shot and the wealthy finally have to pay their fair share in taxes.

I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis and our country from gun violence.

The wealthy are scapegoated despite the fact that if they handed over 100 percent of their wealth it still wouldn’t satisfy Congress’s appetite for deficit spending (i.e., we’d still have a budget deficit and the accompanying inflation). Gun lovers are threatened. Those who work in the fossil fuel industry are targeted for unemployment. In other words, Biden points out that we’re not in this together right before saying that we should “act together”.

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Book recommendation: Cook County ICU

by philg

A well-done Audible recorded book and, probably, a good book in print/Kindle form: Cook County ICU. A few things that I learned from it…

The modern insurance/Medicare/Medicaid system requires that hospitals seeking to get revenue give each patient a concrete diagnosis prior to hospital admission. This results in inferior care because the doctors treating the patient become anchored to the initial diagnosis, which is often merely a guess.

Never agree to be a consultant to Hollywood. The author accepts a request to work as a medical advisor for The Fugitive (Harrison Ford plays a vascular surgeon) and puts in a huge number of hours on the project. Money is never discussed. He eventually gets a check for $1,100 (in pre-Biden money) for his work on a film that earned almost $370 million (pre-Biden dollars) at the box office.

From the author’s point of view, there were huge advances in medical technology over his 40 years of practice. The electronic medical record wasn’t one of them, however. It has delivered few benefits, in his view. The practice of having a physician look at a screen and type at a keyboard while interviewing a patient is particularly harmful.

Being sued for divorce is a common way to transition out of the middle class and into the free clinic where the author worked after retiring from the big hospital.

HIPAA is ridiculous, making it easy for insurers, hackers, and the government to get your medical information, but not you or your family members.

Cold is far more deadly to humans than heat. Although we are assured by Science that a warmer climate will result in near-term extinction of humanity, in Chicago it is the cold winter that kills people, not the hot summer.

Not every anecdote is equally rewarding, of course, but there are a lot of great ones!

Related:

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Using distilled water to wash exterior windows and avoid hard water spots

by philg

Episode #571 of how being a homeowner makes a person stupid and boring…

Our area of Florida is plagued with moderately hard tap water that is packed with dissolved solids. There are professional window washing services that charge about $700 to come over with a hose-fed flow-through reverse osmosis machine (around $4,000) and wash/rinse the windows with pure water that can be allowed to air dry without risk of deposits. The pros don’t like to use squeegees due to the risk of scratching the glass (replacing a hurricane-proof impact window is not simple or cheap!).

Nearly all of the windows and glass doors on our 5,400-square-foot house are readily accessible from the ground or a balcony. A Hungarian au pair across the street wanted to earn some cash for her end-of-year travels. We decided to see how many windows she could wash using distilled water.

The odyssey began at 9 pm in Walmart. Nearly all of the customers were speaking Spanish to each other. A prerecorded announcement in English urged shoppers to buy products from “Black-owned” companies. Distilled water was just $1.26 per gallon in the baby section (and, curiously, $1.34 in the bottled water section). I purchased 8 gallons. Our smaller Walmart doesn’t sell window-cleaning gear, so I stopped next at Home Depot and got a 14″ Unger microfiber scrubber and a dual-compartment Rubbermaid bucket wide enough for the scrubber.

Using a formula that I know is correct because I got it from the Internet (Floridian Bob Vila’s site, actually, so it is also approved by state-sponsored PBS), I mixed a gallon of distilled water with 2 cups of distilled vinegar and one tablespoon of Dawn dishwashing liquid. I filled the other side of the bucket with two gallons of distilled water for rinsing. It takes almost no time to wipe a glass door or big window with the scrubber, first with the cleaning solution and then after the scrubber is dipped in the rinse water (it might be smarter to have two scrubbers, one for each phase). The scrubber holds so much cleaning solution that you can wipe two or three glass doors before dipping into the rinse.

The pros certainly use a lot more water and do a much better job cleaning the dirt around the frames (they also have screen-cleaning brushes), but we were able to get all of the glass acceptably clean using only 6 gallons of distilled water total, without making any serious attempt to conserve (and this is for a 5,400′ house with a lot of glass!). If you don’t feel the need to get every last spot, this can be done in about 3 minutes per window or door.

It’s probably still worth having the professionals come periodically to clean the surrounding frames and screens thoroughly and/or having the “soft wash” people clean the entire house (they don’t use RO water, however, so probably it would make sense to then rinse with distilled water).

(We also cleaned the interior using microfiber cloths and ammonia-free Windex. That actually took longer than the exterior. The Hungarian gal was meticulous and noticed a fair number of places where the windows still had sticker residue left over from their 2021 installation. I removed these with a razor blade and, in some stubborn cases, Goo Gone.)

I’m writing this up because I’m still shocked at how little water was required!

Example machine that the pros use (1.5 gallons per minute):

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Super Tuesday nostalgia for Ron DeSantis

by philg

Today is Super Tuesday, an important milepost in what is shaping up to be a fight among two guys in Memory Care (and one gal for whom Americans don’t seem to share my own enthusiasm (and even I have been put off by Nikki Haley’s seeming lack of coherent philosophy)).

A bit of nostalgia for Ron DeSantis, then! He lacked the ability to project empathy that Americans cherish, but he was the only candidate in the race with a coherent philosophy of government combined with a reasonable age for handling a demanding job. A mailer we got in November 2022, when Mr. DeSantis was running for reelection as governor:

(I don’t understand how a governor can take credit for having “raised teacher pay”. Counties negotiate with teachers’ unions and the U.S. Congress no doubt did the most to raise teacher pay in nominal dollars by generating raging inflation through deficit spending.)

In other news, let’s check the political diversity in the center of our empire…

There were just over 2,000 people who were willing to identify as Republican and vote in the primary a couple of days ago (total D.C. population is over 700,000; more than 500,000 should be eligible to vote (source, which notes that D.C. has “the most diverse and educated voting population in the U.S.”)).

Finally, what about the project that state-level Democrats have been engaging in around the nation to preserve democracy by preventing their subjects from voting for Donald Trump? The Supreme Court has ruled this was illegal and unconstitutional and not just the Republican-appointed justices who are characterized by Democrats as corrupt and illegitimate. All 9 justices. Will there be any apologies from Democrats for violating the U.S. Constitution? From the Newspaper of Record (TM):

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Temporary Permanent Coronapanic

by philg

From a Bloomingdale’s department store, February 19. 2024 (entering Year 5 of coronapanic):

Temporarily out of service. We’re sorry, this water fountain is not in use, due to enhanced safety measures in place to protect our customers and colleagues!

(Who will protect them against dehydration? This is a store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where daily high temperatures routinely exceed 90 degrees in the summer (possibly lethal, according to the New York Times). Bloomingdale’s is managed from Manhattan so the policy against toxic water fountains may come from the COVID experts of New York.)

What I enjoy here is the use of the term “temporarily” regarding a policy that is likely about to hit its fourth anniversary.

What else did they have in the store? Proof that inflation is a figment of your imagination.

A set of sheets is only $1,100.

Why was I in a department store rather than at Costco or Walmart, you might reasonably ask? I was helping my mother get set up as a Floridian. Mom is devoted to patterned sheets, as celebrated in the groovy 1960s and 70s. The style today, however, seems to be plain sheets and a pattern on the comforter (perfect for Palm Beach County when the overnight lows are in the 50s and the public school teacher serves the children hot chocolate (yes, this happened!)). Compared to pre-2020, the department store experience has been transformed. We couldn’t find any salespeople in Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, or Nordstrom. If we saw something on display we couldn’t find packaged versions nearby in the sizes that we wanted. What we were able to do was take pictures of labels and then find the items online at macys.com. Here’s a fun one that is perfect for South Florida (admittedly, even folks who’ve been here 20 years have never seen an alligator in our neighborhood):

If it is impossible to hire people to sell and stock shelves, should the future department store just be a display of stuff that you order online and receive within a few days? Kind of like an IKEA, but without the attached warehouse?

Related:

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Maskachusetts spends 6.5X to feed the undocumented compared to what the native-born receive

by philg

A little Migrithmetic today…

A Maskachusetts resident with no W-2 or 1099 income gets $291 per month in SNAP/EBT (“food stamps”). Someone who walked across the border recently gets $1920/month in taxpayer-funded meals ($64/day). “How much is Massachusetts spending to shelter and feed migrants and homeless? I-Team obtains vendor contracts” (CBS):

Massachusetts has not been shy about how much money the shelter and migrant crisis is costing taxpayers. The I-Team looked into where some of the money is being spent, obtaining vendor contracts for services and hotels, including a no-bid contract for $10 million for a company providing meals.

WBZ first reported finding dozens of migrant families sleeping at Logan Airport, and the state is housing hundreds of others in overflow shelters like the one at Melnea Cass Recreation Complex.

But these locations do not include the thousands of homeless and migrants living in hotels and motels. So just how much money is the state paying for lodging?

Records obtained by the I-Team show the state has 17 contracts for housing totaling more than $116 million. Those contracts are only for fiscal year 2024 and end in June.

In some cases, the hotels are collecting money from the state for three meals a day, $16 for breakfast, $17 for lunch and $31 for dinner. That means $64 dollars a day per person.

Also covered by the Deplorables at the Daily Mail under the headline “Boston’s migrant shelter luxury: State pays $16 for breakfast, $17 for lunch and $31 for dinner as they live in hotels for free after entering the US illegally”. (A headline that will brighten any hotel owner’s day! You can choose 100 percent occupancy with migrants or raise your rates as former competitor hotels remove their inventory from hotels.com and similar.)

Meanwhile, state-sponsored media says that Texas has unwisely spent $1,450 per migrant to send them to Democrat-run cities and that it is “inhumane” to send a human to where he/she/ze/they can get weekly abortion care and gender affirming surgery. (If an all-Democrat state or city is a model society, second in virtue only to Hamas-run Gaza, why is helping someone to relocate there “inhumane”?)

It is tough to get an all-in number for what Massachusetts spends on migrants’ housing, health care, and food, but the estimated cost is $400 per day per migrant in New York City (source). In other words, after four days, taxpayers in NYC have spent more on each of their new neighbors than Texas spent to send them to NYC. (We are informed that migrants reduce crime and enrich host cities and countries economically and culturally, so NYC will ultimately come out ahead on its $146,000/year investment in each migrant.) Presumably the costs are similar in the Boston area.

A friend who likes to take full advantage of the McDonald’s app and refuses to spend more than about $5 per meal showed me a typical receipt:

In other words, a Migrant family of three could have enjoyed a delicious lunch for less than $1.50 per person had they been willing to walk through the miserable Boston weather to the nearest Scottish restaurant.

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UN: Women and girls are the primary victims of the Russian-Ukraine war

by philg

When a World War I-style trench warfare stalemate develops, the real victims are those who never go anywhere near the trenches and who, in fact, are able to go to mostly peaceful Germany and marry the German taxpayer.

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Could Dune be improved if Godzilla joined?

by philg

I enjoyed the special effects in the Dune 2021 movie, but the plot seemed overly serious and challenging to follow. For the strike-delayed second part, I’m hoping that Godzilla will join the mix. Who agrees with me that Godzilla v. a sandworm would spice things up?

(Side note: I would be willing to pay 15 Bidies to see the Barbie movie if Godzilla were included.)

Here’s an April 2023 effort by DALL-E to illustrate the concept:

For reference, a photograph of the real Godzilla:

What about the plot? Is my lack of imagination an obstacle to a successful career as a screenwriter? GPT-4 to the rescue! The prompt:

Write a story in the style of the novel Dune in which Godzilla arrives on Arrakis and fights the sandworms.

The script (note that ChatGPT was smart enough to realize that Godzilla must win at the end of the movie):

In the vast expanse of the desert planet Arrakis, where the great sandworms roamed, a new force would soon join the eternal dance of predator and prey. The Fremen, people of the desert, had long revered the sandworms, creatures that were essential to the production of the most precious substance in the universe: the spice melange. But as whispers spread among the sietches, they could hardly imagine what was about to happen on their sacred home.

As the suns set over the horizon, their path illuminated by the dust and sand of the desert, a storm approached. Fremen gathered in the caves and shelters, readying themselves for the fury of the winds. The sandworms, though, reveled in the chaos, emerging from the depths to feel the storm’s might.

Amidst the swirling sands, a great roar echoed, carried by the gales. It was a sound unlike any the Fremen had ever heard, a resonance that shook the very core of their being. The sandworms, too, sensed this new presence, and for the first time in their long history, they felt unease.

From within the storm, a titanic figure emerged: Godzilla. The King of the Monsters had found his way to Arrakis, and with each thunderous step, the desert trembled. Though not one to shy away from conflict, Godzilla’s primal instincts urged him to survey this new land.

As the storm settled, the Fremen cautiously emerged from their shelters. They spoke of the great beast that had appeared, their eyes wide with awe and fear. Muad’Dib, their leader and messiah, listened to their accounts and pondered the significance of this event.

Meanwhile, Godzilla continued to roam the desert, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. The sandworms, feeling the tremors of his steps, were drawn to the surface in search of the source. The air was thick with tension as these ancient creatures neared the mighty behemoth.

When the first sandworm burst forth from the sands, its colossal maw gaping wide, Godzilla turned to face it. His primal instincts ignited, and the beast within him awakened. As the sandworm lunged, Godzilla let loose a torrent of atomic breath, engulfing the creature in a searing inferno.

The Fremen, observing from afar, gasped in astonishment. They had never before witnessed a being capable of felling a sandworm so effortlessly. Muad’Dib, his mind racing with the implications, knew that this force had the potential to change the course of their history.

One by one, the sandworms emerged to challenge the intruder, and one by one, they fell to Godzilla’s might. The Fremen watched as their world was transformed, their reverence for the sandworms now tinged with uncertainty.

But even in the midst of this titanic struggle, the desert had more secrets to reveal. From deep beneath the sands, a new presence stirred. It was the Maker of the Makers, the worm that had birthed all other sandworms. It was ancient and powerful, and it sensed the threat Godzilla posed to its progeny.

As the behemoth and the Maker of the Makers clashed, the sands of Arrakis were sundered. The Fremen could only look on as the two titans battled for supremacy, each vying to prove their place atop the hierarchy of the desert.

The battle raged for days, their roars echoing across the dunes like thunder. The sands ran red with the blood of the combatants, and the very air seemed to tremble with the force of their strikes.

Eventually, the impossible happened. The Maker of the Makers, weakened and battered, fell before Godzilla.

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Why is the Btrfs file system as implemented by Synology so fragile?

by philg

We had a few seconds of power loss the other day. Everything in the house, including a Windows machine using NTFS, came back to life without any issues. A Synology DS720+, however, became a useless brick, claiming to have suffered unrecoverable file system damage while the underlying two hard drives and two SSDs are in perfect condition. It’s two mirrored drives using the Btrfs file system (the Synology default, though ext4 is also available as an option). Btrfs is supposedly a journaling file system, which should make this kind of corruption impossible. Yet searching the Internet reveals that Synology suicides are commonplace. Here’s one example that pins the blame on the SSDs being enabled as read/write caches (but given that the SSDs are non-volatile why isn’t the Synology software smart enough to deal with the possibility of a power outage even when read/write caching (seems to be the default) is enabled? The Synology web page on the subject says you need two SSDs (which I have) for “fault tolerance” and doesn’t mention that the entire NAS can become a brick after losing power for a few seconds).

Given that Synology has only one job, i.e., the secure storage of data, this strikes me as a spectacular failure of corporate mission.

Readers: Have you seen this kind of failure before? NTFS was introduced by Microsoft in 1993 and I’ve never seen it completely destroyed by a power interruption. Oracle, IBM’s DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server use similar journaling techniques and they never become useless after a power interruption.

Separately, what are some alternatives to Synology for a home NAS? I find their admin interface to be much more complicated than it needs to be and their defaults are also unsuitable for home use, e.g., it won’t automatically restart by default after a power failure.

Finally, if I decide that I do want to rebuild this Synology NAS, which will almost certainly involve wiping all of the data and starting over (I mostly use it as a backup for my Windows machine, so losing 100 percent of the data that I paid Synology to keep isn’t the end of the world) and want to take the InterWeb’s advice to get a UPS with a USB output to smooth out the Synology’s power availability and give it a signal via USB to shut down, what is the smallest, quietest, and cheapest UPS that will do the job?

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