@Taffeta we do get flooding here. we get more droughts here but we can also get heavy rain too. the rain tends to come all at once. i do worry about drainage with DIY projects. i know that was a big reason I read that astroturf grass (which some people have ) can cause drainage issues. i'm not interested in that at all. it also looks weird when the "grass" is bright green while everyone else's is brown.

i mainly want to get rid of grass because it didn't grow in well to begin with since it was put in right before we went into a drought. it's a lot like what you described, BC. mostly thin and prickly with lots of weeds. there are a lot of areas where the grass didn't take at all. the side yards get muddy when it rains and we track in a lot of dirt. i would like to create a shade garden with a bench. it might be our backyard project for next spring. changes will be slow because we're doing it ourselves

i really hate when people put meetings on my calendar and don't provide an agenda or reason for the meeting. it makes me anxious when i don't know what these mysterious meetings are about.

i'm glad things are going well at the job and driving too

Great pics Beth.    I love the rock garden.  Do the rocks take any special care to keep them bright white?

Ponyfan

Thanks Ponyfan

The bright white ones are new  i bought the faded ones about a year ago to make sure they were the ones we wanted. then we had to spend on other stuff and we're just getting back to the garden projects.

This one is not an 'in the future' thing. It's literally right down the road, and honestly, it's terrifying.

yeah a lot of this is already here. and a lot of the negative consequences are kind of boring. no robots taking over the world. they affect marginalized people or few enough people that the problems can fly under the radar. no one cares until it hits them negatively or it's just "the cost of progress." but we obviously know that denying people benefits because of bogus "fraud" detection is devastating. but people selling the software get rich and budgets are brought inline. so nothing changes and this junk proliferates. stuff like this article about business law in NYC (https://themarkup.org/news/2024/03/29/nycs-ai-chatbot-tells-businesses-to-break-the-law). it's boring but has real consequences for people impacted by business owners running with bad information. no one is going to do follow up research. that's why they want a chatbot to just tell them an answer.

I saw the video/stuff on the news about the bridge incident, sounds like a technology fail. So sorry for the families of those affected. It must've been terrifying to be caught up in that :/

I agree that the news these days is often scary and negative. I think what scares me most is the amount of news generated by something not quite true or how stories get twisted into something else - whether by media or social media or whatever. I always read multiple sources to get a good grasp on what is going on, but some of the ways in which things are interpreted worries me...

yeah i feel like i'm in this weird place where I do still look at mainstream news but i feel uneasy. i try to avoid the opinion columns. especially with the way the NYTimes covers trans issues and the "both sides" coverage. i'm sorry if you're view is that some people don't deserve equal rights i don't care what you have to say. i have specific columnists and reporters who work in areas i care about. but when it comes to breaking news it seems like the news gets a lot wrong. especially when stuff just happened. i try to give it a few days and then read up. it makes me feel almost conspiratorial sometimes to say i don't really trust the press. i do to a point but there's really no such thing as objective coverage. nothing is completely objective. i don't blame people for disengaging when its so much work to sort out what really happened. even events back in the 90s and aughts were covered so poorly IMO. later when events are revisited we get to find out all of the shenanigans that influenced coverage.

as far as AI goes i'm very very skeptical. i think it's something that could be beneficial if it worked well and could do mundane tasks. the problem is so much of LLM type AI doesn't work well. that's the kind of AI that takes in a bunch of data and provides output. ChatGPT, Diffusion, etc. i'm not super familiar with the generative AI for art. it seems like it could be cool for creative artists but i do think there should be some kind of compensation/opt out for artists who's work is used to train the AI. do these companies even know who's art was used thought? i doubt it. and the idea of people selling AI generated art doesn't sit well with me.

i'm not an artist but i am a web developer and the code hosting services i use have rolled out AI coding assistants that learn off code that people store on their hosting services. there is no compensation for using people's code to train the AIs. in fact they charge you to use the AI and your code helped train. there is also no guarantee that the code training the AI is good, working code either. the results based on my personal testing are hit or miss. it's nice for repetitive stuff. but as far as anything challenging i find the results disappointing based on the hype.

i could go on and on about AI and how much i don't like it. i would never think it's bad to play around with for fun. I've done this myself with ChatGPT. my real worry is jobs lost and poor quality output. there are already a bunch of junk AI books on Amazon put out by scammers trying to make money for nothing. i also worry that companies with greedy leadership who don't care about quality and want to increase profit will try to replace employees with AI. there isn't much regulation yet and the people who run the leading AI tech companies suck and don't care about people. TBH i think they're a bit out of their minds. replacing humans with bad AI is bad for employees who lose jobs and customers who have to deal with a poor experience. there isn't a vision from these people to make the world better. to have everyone do less work and live in abundance. in it's current form AI is a hype bubble and a grift. like crypto and the metaverse was/still is. even the commercials promoting AI in software and devices don't really say much about what the AI will actually do. it's just "hey we added AI. give us more money!"

and yeah the "deepfake" videos terrify me. especially since so many people believe that if it's on video, it must be real. also i've read that a lot of it is porn so that's horrifying for people who may end up in a video without consent.

like most stuff that comes out of big tech, AI could be cool. but not in it's current form.

that's horrible Beldarna that sounds really traumatizing.

BC, i think it's hard on purpose so people give up and don't seek out benefits you're eligible for. i agree it seems like something that should be very simple or something they should be able to validate without having you jump through hoops.

today is adding up to be a cursed day. bridge collapse, SCOTUS awfulness most likely. also my dogs aren't getting along today.  yesterday they were snuggling together. Luna has an upset tummy so i think that's the issue. i want to crawl back in bed and restart. i feel so awful for the people who were on that bridge. it's terrifying.

I hate my head sometimes.

the weather here is weird too. it's cool and windy today. but not sunny so it feels cold. not ideal weather for working outside. also tonight it's supposed to storm so i'm hoping the plants will be ok.