It always blew my mind when this kid ten years younger than me was cheering about Obama killing bin Laden without producing a body, no arrest or trial… When I pushed him about it he accused me of lacking patriotism.

I’m still buying and holding GME shares. Waiting for UBS to blow up. They hold all the toxic Archegos shorts from January 2021, that later forced Credit Suisse to go under. These shorts will go onto their books on March 21. For his fraud and mismanagement related to January 2021, Archegos founder Bill Hwang was sentenced to prison last year.

What comes next?

Swiss National Bank basically forced UBS to take the bags from Credit Suisse. They refused and so SNB sweetened the deal by giving them hundreds of billions in cash-- twice! Now UBS auditors have seen what’s in the bags and they are panicking behind the scenes

Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities

Basically, people can buy the rights to your loan payments. Maybe they get packaged together with many others’ debts.

SLABSs are quite profitable, obviously. During COVID years there was a freeze on debt payments and holders of SLABS started to feel the squeeze. SLABSs are such a guaranteed return that people/banks/hedge funds can use them as collateral for loans and stuff. So during COVID, SLABSs became a liability. Or so it’s been speculated

If people start defaulting on their debts, SLABSs could be centrally involved in a financial collapse, the first domino to start chain reaction of margin calls

SLABs will tank, someone’s collateral gonna get busted

Obligatory: I’m anti-AI, mostly anti-technology

That said, I can’t say that I mind LLMs using copyrighted materials that it accesses legally/appropriately (lots of copyrighted content may be freely available to some extent, like news articles or song lyrics)

I’m open to arguments correcting me. I’d prefer to have another reason to be against this technology, not arguing on the side of frauds like Sam Altman. Here’s my take:

All content created by humans follows consumption of other content. If I read lots of Vonnegut, I should be able to churn out prose that roughly (or precisely) includes his idiosyncrasies as a writer. We read more than one author; we read dozens or hundreds over our lifetimes. Likewise musicians, film directors, etc etc.

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

I have no good references that aren’t boring propaganda from state media… Search China Daily for stories about ed tech

Or more broadly, search for “Ed tech” or “educational technology”

I think our “AI” was mostly BS, but I guess it had its niche.

Oh that reminds me… When I worked at state media, we ran stories about AI facial recognition at the winter Olympics. The stories claimed that they could identify more than 99 percent of people wearing COVID masks (I suspect this may be an exaggeration, as airport immigration officials and train station officials would make people remove masks and smile for cameras)

Also, just remembered: During my time at state media, I recall reading some Xi Jinping quote along the lines of “Whoever has the best AI will control the future”

My company in China added AI to its products basically to receive government subsidies.

They introduced it into courseware to track student faces and tell parents whether kids were enjoying lessons, paying attention, etc etc. It was weird to see in action. I used the software and acted like a “bad student” to see what it would say about my face and lack of attention.

I’m also a voice actor. They tried to replace me with AI voices but the voices in 2021 were stuck in the uncanny valley and clients complained.

The company pretty much went belly-up when Beijing introduced the Double Reduction policy. I wonder what became of the their software? And I wonder if they ever made an AI version of my voice

Is it OK for me to say that I have violent fantasies about Elon Musk? If I ever met him it would take real self control not to harm him

Because you want ample time to set your pick. Because it’s harder than your way. At such low speeds it takes much more focus and your wrist and hand will be dying to play faster when you can actually relax. (this is a tense exercise at this speed!)

Speed isn’t your friend. If you can’t do it slow then you can’t do it fast. Is it boring as hell? Yep. Do you want to be make progress and be better at your instrument? Then just do it for a few minutes. My teacher says quit any exercise after five minutes if I really can’t stomach it. The key is coming back to it again tomorrow and the next day, not mastering it in one sitting.

This specific exercise will also train your hand for even tone and pick pressure.

This is how bluegrass guitar and mandolin players train from the beginning.

Start slow, metronome at 65bpm. Put your pick on a string and play open string arpeggios, down-up-down-up with the click. Each time, reset your pick on the next string before plucking through. Aim for consistent tone quality and volume.

When you’re satisfied, move up to 75bpm and repeat, moving up in tempo over time. If you make a mistake, restart. If you make two mistakes, back up and do it slower again.

Speed is not the goal. Tone and timing are the goals, training your pick hand to relax and your mind and body to feel the beat.

Once you get to around 90 bpm, go back down to 65 and start playing eighth notes. Follow the steps from above.

This should take you a week or more to complete. Then go up into higher tempos. Every mistake, roll back 5bpm

You can also try various arpeggios patterns and string combinations.

Good luck!