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Essential Advice for At-Risk Seniors

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This came from Quora. My answer follows.

Q. I feel isolated and alone. I’m 67 with no family and no job. What should I do?

A. First priority: make sure you have a roof over your head. Especially in winter. You can die very easily, if you are relying on sleeping in your car or staying in shopping malls. All of these places close. An ice storm, even in a Southern state, could be fatal. Especially because cars do run out of gas. The reason could be as simple as a traffic jam that is unexpected. Gas stations can close or there can be unexpected shortages of fuel. So, if you know of a 24-hour gas station or truck stop and that is your lifeline, it’s just not a good way to go.

Second priority: even though you may not feel like you have a rational reason at every moment of day, make a promise to yourself not to commit suicide. Do not break that promise. Be aware that in some states, including the one where I live, suicide can actually be prosecuted as a crime. This isn’t just an ironic joke! Believe me. It sounds funny, but something that is even perceived as a suicide attempt could make it difficult for you to pass a routine background check.

Third priority: look on the bright side. You have an enormous one. You are past retirement age. You qualify for Social Security and Medicare. I don’t want to say that I’m jealous, but with 17 years to go, I have to conclude that those benefits are worth something.

I can’t solve your dilemmas for you, but there should be resources available in your community. Visiting a public library or even (gasp) a senior center is a great place to start.

I am not going to say anything about that guy in this post.

You know, the one who’s been in the news. Who made all the headlines. I think he made a terrible mistake. He is young, and he is throwing his life away. Whatever the poll numbers say about the surprizing number of Americans who support his actions, he used lethal force. I do not approve.

It does seem tragic to me that we don’t have better support systems in place in the Open Source “Community” for those who are not finding fulfillment in the work world. I will say that depression and suicide are unacknowledged problems in our field. From what I could ascertain in the brief news article I saw, another talented and promising programmer took his own life earlier this fall. He was a former employee of leading San Francisco AI startup, one that you have no doubt heard of. I am glad that his passing was acknowledged, but I think it is really absolutely as dangerous to glamorize suicide as it is to glamorize murder.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to form a community that can provide a support system for people between jobs. It actually may turn out to be a little bit bigger than that, but I don’t want to overpromise. I am lucky enough to be employed but who knows what the future holds. I just know I want and need a part in shaping it. Hey, it’s getting late, even out here on Pacific Time.

I am going to call it a night.

This blog post was hacked. I can’t get quite back to the original version, but I’m going to try to put up a close approximation.Sad that some of the original content is missing, but here is a plaintext approximation:

Ok, so I’m about to finally mail in my ballot. (That’s how we do things in the State of Oregon, remember?)

It’s obvious who the best presidential candidate is, and in fact I did some phone banking for her on Saturday morning — which happened to be my birthday — November 2nd.

People need to be aware that actual Trump voters live nearby me. Here in Lincoln City, Oregon.

Such people also live in Cheshire, Connecticut. Where my parents are. These are Blue states, mind you. Or they were, last I checked.

There’s a huge pickup truck that’s been parked less than a block away from my apartment all week long. It has a sign on it that says, “God, Guns, and Trump.”

Now that is making a statement.

A statement that in fact, is almost meaningless for someone such as yours truly, who cannot legally own a gun. But strangely, I am an actual living person who still makes the not entirely symbolic effort to vote, every now and then.

When I was back in Connecticut the previous fall, before Kamala Harris had even been chosen as the Democratic nominee, I saw a house with a Trump banner covering most of the second story. It was just down the road from Town Hall.

It appeared to be a residential single family home. I did not go inside.

I just observed it quickly. Driving by.

Seems like people like this don’t care much what their neighbors think.

This article can also be found at pdxlocal.net and was originally published in 2022.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Surviving the Surveillance State

December 4, 2022
by Rose C.

Portland ranks among the Top 10 Most Surveilled U.S. Cities, according to Cybernews. Atlanta tops the list.

We live in a world where surveillance is a fact of life. Any encrypted software product may be backdoored, and even if it is not, you have no guarantee that the person on the other end does not have spyware such as keystroke monitoring or screen video capture running on their system. Encryption enthusiasts and amateur hackers, no matter how valiant, simply cannot compete with a nation-state in this game. Cf Pegasus.

Sneak and Peek, or “No Knock,” Warrants have been around since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, but they receive scant attention from the media. What they mean is that you may have your home searched, and items removed from your home, without any official notice from law enforcement. Ditto for electronic files. If you file a FOIA request and the investigation in which you are named is still ongoing, you will not receive any confirmation that a warrant exists. (Pat Eddington, Cato Institute)

The most frightening aspect of these warrants is the potential for planting false evidence. The second most frightening aspect is the potential for planting surveillance devices for tracking and listening — as if cell phones were not effective enough.

“Nothing to Hide?”

Like roughly 2/3 of the U.S. population, I reside within the 100-mile “border zone” where Border Patrol agents are granted additional authorities and the Constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment no longer apply. You may think all of this is irrelevant if you are a law-abiding citizen.

The problem is that who you know can get you put on a list. It can also make you a target. To put it another way, we all know somebody who has a cousin who is a drug dealer.

Laws in this country are changing, and not (in my opinion) for the better. Roe v. Wade is gone, and civil rights for gays and lesbians may soon disappear as this country takes a hard shift right. Remember ICE? Children in cages? Forced sterilizations?

Come 2024, they may all be back.

If you don’t feel like being a freedom fighter, if your first priority is keeping your family safe and saving for your children’s college tuition, I am not here to judge. Just remember that in a world where power rules in place of law, abuse of that power is an inevitable consequence.

Get in a traffic accident with somebody employed by the surveillance state? What if one of them rapes your daughter? Or your son? When a large class of individuals are above the law, nothing good will come of it. This is especially true when the same individuals fear consequences from their actions. They tend to lash out and do everything they can to harm and intimidate witnesses and injured parties.

I am not an America-hater. Far from it. The country I grew up in gave me 40+ years of freedom in its purest form: freedom to explore, to create, to love and befriend those I chose, to work as much or as little as I liked. Freedom to just be. I am a GenXer. I don’t mean to talk like a crusty old-timer, but I believe I’ve seen this nation at its absolute best.

Or maybe the best is yet to come.

Nothing is fixed. Nothing is certain.

The combined 2022 budget of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the 17 different United States spying agencies (of which CIA and NSA are only two) is over $150 billion. For comparison, that is roughly one fifth of the Department of Defense 2022 budget of $742B. But remember, the DOD budget covers submarines, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, helicopters, tanks, nuclear weapons, and anti-missile defense systems, not to mention an active network of bases around the world. That’s a lot of people and hardware.

What exactly are we paying for? This remains largely unclear. Marijuana is now legal in 19 out of 50 states, but the DEA’s funding continues to grow. If you were an officer monitoring wiretaps and running undercover operations in Colorado or Washington State, where and to what were you reassigned? And as far as truly terrifying threats to health and safety, the surveillance state could be doing a much better job. We read about mass shootings in the news practically every week. It failed to prevent the violent attempted coup at our nation’s capitol on January 6, 2021.

Your tax dollars at work, my friends.

Government salaries range from $20K (GS-1) to $147K(GS-15) — much less than the equivalent in the private sector. If we assume that wages (including benefits) average $100,000 per year, we would expect that the surveillance states employs as many as 1.5 million people in the United States. Keeping in mind, that is not accounting for slush funds to be distributed overseas, or James Bond style gadgetry, server space, or the cost of buildings and operations. But if we slash that number in half, that is still one federal domestic spy for every 440 U.S. citizens.

And that’s a lot.

Regarding terminology, “federal domestic spy” includes FBI informers, often recruited under duress or experiencing economic hardship. It does not include state or local police forces.

I am an extremely law-abiding citizen. That has protected me to some extent, but not completely. Somebody who has cheated on their taxes or who runs a warez server with their friends is at high risk of being “turned” and pressured by law enforcement to inform on others and further widen the surveillance network.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Got a free pass at the last moment to the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco, found a cheap flight and a cheaper Airbnb. So here I am. Snagged a spot on one of the couches in the Expo Hall… am waiting for the crowd to thin out before I head to the buffet line for dinner.

The fact that they made scholarships to the event available based on need convinced me it would be worthwhile to drop everything and go. But this is still very much an industry event. I’ve had the vendor conversations that I need to have. (And was gifted a pair of branded free smartwool socks!)

The nice thing about deciding to go on such short notice is that I’m not here to pitch. More just to observe and listen.

Does anyone really want or need a robot barista? Microsoft appears to think so.

What I am mostly observing is a bad case of tunnel vision. People outside Wall Street and the AI industry itself don’t really understand how much negativity and mistrust exists around these technologies. Activists tend to call for regulation — and while this is needed, it will also put these tools out of reach for independent developers and small startups like my own.

But it hasn’t happened yet.

I am tempted to just put my head down and use Claude Sonnet to build as much high-quality algorithmic generated code as I can, while the getting is good. In all likelihood, that is exactly what I will be doing for the rest of the summer. But I would also like to outline a few ways in which AI can be used to solve problems that are otherwise intractable.

I have identified six:

Accessibility, Community Moderation, Content Curation, Consensus Building, Education, and Employment

(A3C2E, if you need a really clunky acronym.)

• Accessibility. Voice recognition is almost to the point of being usable in place of keyboard and mouse, but not quite. As somebody who lives daily with constant physical pain from repetitive strain injury, the evolution of this technology to allow hands-free coding and web browsing on a range of devices would be night-and-day. It isn’t there yet. But it certainly could be.
• Community Moderation, Content Curation, and Consensus Building. We don’t need more generated artwork, writing, and music. We are drowning in high-quality information already. What we need are ways to make sense of the incredible richness of artistic output already available online, and connect creators with patrons and enthusiasts. Ditto for online communities of all types, and for any type of process that seeks to identify shared opinions and experiences — rather than upvoting the most extreme and polarizing opinions (something that social media algorithms appear to have encouraged, even before the advent of AI). Full disclosure: consensus building through textual analysis is what my recent work centers on.
• Employment and Education. We need AI that creates jobs, and not just for the most highly skilled echelon of engineers. LLM’s are at a really interesting phase in their evolution right now. The best of them are at a level where they can mimic the output of an actual human. That is to say, they can respond in real time to questions and unique inputs, and generating meaningful replies. But they make mistakes. Organizations have a choice: build oversight and review into their AI workflows, or relegate AI’s to low value interactions — users who can’t afford personalized support — and leave them to deal with the consequences. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Could job descriptions emerge along the lines of “AI Supervisor?” Would it be possible to build marketplaces and add-ons that specialize in matching human editors and graphic artists to put the finishing touches on generated AI content that is “almost but not quite” good enough?Yes, and yes. This is a different set of priorities than the current shibboleth of “AGI / Nobel Prize Level Intelligence” but it could be applied in practice with genuine and immediate results.

As remote learning becomes more commonplace, the most valuable role of AI may not be as a search engine that provides results in complete sentences. Rather than an “encyclopedia-on-demand,” correctly trained and tuned models could function as a source of input, guidance, and feedback for students working independently, particularly adult learners and those re-skilling. Yes, in an ideal world most of us would like a human tutor or mentor to work with us, but for people who cannot afford to take time off or take out many thousands of dollars in loans to pursue job training, one-on-one AI training could become a valuable counterpart to video lectures and online multiple-choice quizzes.

The challenge is that none of the six categories above are easily monetizable. We are talking about meeting needs that are currently going unmet — rather than using AI to slash costs (in other words, eliminate jobs).

Given the timetable and realities of grant-based funding, charities and the public sector are extremely unlikely to lead this charge.

So what is to be done? I would advocate that it’s time for the industry itself to step up and invest in social impact projects.

This is not an exhaustive list. Other people may be able to dream up further use cases that are equally valid. But it will take more than a hack-a-thon or a single afternoon to generate meaningful results. As a coder who hails from a UX background, I am a firm advocate of user research. Don’t build vanity projects. Instead, find partners and stakeholders.

Without visible evidence that AI is contributing something positive to our world, public retribution will be swift and absolute. Regulation won’t end inequity or violations of privacy from AI, although it may curtail the worst abuses. It will lead to something more like a guild economy, and render another sector of software (like cryptocurrency and healthcare before them) off-limits to those without professional degrees and licensure, as well as a budget that includes full-time legal counsel on staff.

In the United States, we still have a window of time to build things that are meaningful and cool.

I don’t know how long it will last. Maybe six months? Maybe one year?

I took two days off to take the pulse of the AI industry, and see what I could learn firsthand. Now it’s time to get back to work.