With the new Matrix movie coming out, I decided to watch the old trilogy with my children. I was excited to share some of the deep philosophical concepts about reality and existence. Instead, I found myself explaining the modem negotiation buzz and how data traveled over voice lines instead of voice traveling over data lines. I was afraid they were going to miss the premise about not knowing what is real, and believing what is put in front of us.
Until they came to the conclusion, it is like being stuck in VR. Then I realized the Matrix is more poignant than ever with its message about digital slavery. The big difference, is that we voluntarily plug in to the Matrix of social media, streaming content, 24-hour news and video games and let it suck the energy out of us.
In the Matrix, Agent Smith tells us that the first Matrix failed because it was too perfect so people rejected it. Facebook and Instagram might be analogous to that Matrix because we post the best of ourselves there which presents a life that is too perfect. Some rejected that world as fake. In its place, Facebook has become a political hotbed of division filled with hate from both sides of every issue. This is the pain and suffering Agent Smith promised.
I guess Neo said it best,
“I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it is going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you dont want them to see.”
If you get a chance rewatch the original Matrix with your loved ones, or even better don’t and just go see the first one in person (the other two are still kind of meh). Be forewarned, you might have to explain to your kids why we say "hang up" the phone.
UPDATE: I still haven't seen the new Matrix, but I have it on good authority that the new Matrix movie was a let down. Evidently, it was shallow and pedantic, while trying to hit us in the head with the meaning to the point it insists on itself. I will see if I can get the kids to wait til it comes out on video, which might be tough because I got them all fired up for the movie.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – FA Hayek
The Chevron CEO spoke yesterday to employees, during which he said that the current inflation isn’t as bad as it was in 1980. This got me thinking and reminded me that it wasn’t just inflation, it was actually stagflation and President Ronald Reagan (whose birthday was last week) was the one who turned it around and created the boom of the 90s. I mention this because we are starting to have many of the same factors. I would argue that “unemployment” is high if we include underemployment and people who have left the workforce (but that is a different Oprah). High unemployment and High Inflation, just need an oil or energy crisis to put us right back to the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency.
With the clouds looming before the coming storm, how do you know when to stay the course and when to bail? When will the bubble burst? I personally believe stocks like Tesla and Facebook have been overinflated for a while and were continuing to rise due to their hype not their business. So when the bottom fell out on Facebook I was not surprised. I am not a bear who is advising you to take your money from the market, but I am advising you to stay out of “tulips”.
In the Fatal Conceit Hayek is speaking about statism, or socialism, but the conceit of believing you know the economy applies to capitalists as well. If you have been investing in the stock market recently, it is hard not to make money. Inflation and the current tech bubble mean that the stock market is rising faster and faster and if you put money in you will profit. The Fatal Conceit is believing you are making profits because you actually understand and not because it is a bull market. The Fatal Conceit is a curse that affects smart people more often because smart people are used to figuring things out and solving problems. I have been told doctors and lawyers lose more on the stock market than the rest of us, and if this is true it aligns with Hayek's logic.
How do I stay out of tulips? Well, I start by acknowledging my emotional bias. Anyone who has had a beer with me and mentioned Warren Buffet or Elon Musk has gotten an ear full, but I also know it is dumb not to invest in winning stocks like theirs, at least some of the time. I enjoy investing, but I do it based on my knowledge and my emotions, my gut feeling if you will. It would be very easy for my ego to let me believe that with two business degrees, I know business. Even if that were true, the stock market measures more than business prowess alone. Not to mention, I still don't understand how Mr. Beast makes money.
FA Hayek gave me the impotus to do something, but my friend Doug and my cousin James led me to what I should do. My cousin James, whose birthday is the day before Reagan's, owned an investment firm. Whenever a family member would come to James, he would give control to his partner so as to remove emotions from the equation, both his and ours. My friend Doug likes to play poker, but he loves his family. In order to get the enjoyment from poker and not put his family at risk, he set aside money every month for his poker fun that he called his "mad money".
I decided to give control of my retirement to someone I trusted to invest, my friend Wes Blackmon, and set aside money for buying toys and for “gambling” in investments like crypto and stocks. Wes focuses on my retirement, not who I don't like. While I generally make a higher percentage than Wes, I have also lost a higher percentage than Wes. My system also has the benefit in that when my attention wavers(squirrel!), I can pull my "gambling" money and buy a 43-inch monitor, a new helium miner, or I can let it ride on MSFT stock. Financial Advisors are focused on the market and spend their day learning about market conditions and the stability of the company not just the CEO. They have access to resources that I don't and those that work for a firm have organizational knowledge and history backing their decisions. Yes, they are much more conservative than I am, but that is what I am paying for.
Many investors, especially younger investors, don’t have the experience with losing money on a down market. They weren’t invested during the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble. I am sure with enough training and experience, those young investors and I could make our investments sing all of the time. Unfortunately, I have to work or practice baseball with my kids or watch the Book of Boba Fett or set up my new helium miner.
My youngest son had some math homework to do and so I told him to get it done quickly and then he was free to go. This didn’t work. He spent nearly 4 hours for what amounted to 10 minutes worth of work. I was the dutiful parent and had him sit there and “work” on it. Well at least as long as I could be bothered to pay attention to him trying to pay attention. It got to the point where he wouldn’t recall basic math operations I have seen him do several times before.
I can’t blame him, really. I struggle to pay attention and with varying degrees so do his mother, his brother and his sister too. I can’t recall if I was better or worse when I was his age, but I would like to think I have improved. My mind wandering or being distracted has led me to finish many things at the last minute and is probably why I can be very good at dealing with this kind of pressure.
To combat my struggle to focus and complete things, I have spent a good chunk of my life trying to figure out how to become more productive. I studied time management when I was younger, thinking the issue was I needed to organize how I spent my time. In the Army, I learned to do prioritization of work. This means you clean your weapon before you eat and you eat before you sleep. If there isn’t enough time to sleep, at least your weapon still works. During my masters, I learned to focus on those things I am good at, and was pretty sure focus was not one of those things.
I was listening to Daniel Goleman’s book, Focus, and he talks about cognitive fatigue due to prolonged or intense focus. This cognitive fatigue occurs because your brain is short on glucose, similar to physical fatigue. People with ADHD could be experiencing a mental fatigue which makes it difficult to focus. When given drugs that force focus, it makes sense that someone with ADHD feels extremely tired after a full day of intense focus, but their energy is boundless when they aren’t forced to focus. Stress, depression and anxiety, more often than not, manifest as a form of hyperfocus. We are caught up thinking and awfulizing about something until we are mentally worn out. I guess I am good at focusing after all, just not the best at focusing on the right things.
Attempting to restore mental fatigue due to hyperfocus could explain many common negative behaviors, like overeating, excessive sleeping, drinking or watching bad TV. Now we can think of overeating as an attempt by our body to replace the glucose it believes is missing, whether or not it actually is. Having a glass of wine, both lowers your ability to focus and gives you a temporary rise in blood sugar similar to overeating. Watching a mindless TV show or movie gives our brain something to focus on that isn’t whatever it is that wore us out in the first place.
Unfortunately, these things don’t do a good job of restoring our ability to pay attention. In fact, some behaviors like video games, emails, texts or facebook, actually lower our ability to pay attention because we are now focusing on those activities and possibly inviting new stressors and draining more glucose from our already starved brain.
Physical activities like, sex and exercise are good ways to restore your ability to focus. I would assume this is because while they require increased focus, much of that focus is handled by our lower brain instead of the areas of our brain that are affected by cognitive fatigue due to increased focus.
Goleman’s book goes on to talk about Attention Restoration Theory. The authors of this theory believe that time spent in nature is one of the best ways to restore our ability to pay attention. They believe that relaxing environments can help recharge your brain and that nature is one of the most relaxing places for our minds.
Next time my son has homework, I am going to send him outside to run around for a bit or go for a walk with him around the neighborhood before having him sit down and try to finish his work. In fact, after typing all of this I am going to need that walk now.
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Howdy,
It has been a very busy year. With as busy as life has been, maybe I should tell you when it isn’t busy.
This year I put together our Christmas Card using Generative AI. I used a couple of different techniques and a couple of different tools to get the job done. The first tool I attempted to use was gpt-4 via chat.openai.com. I have a subscription which I use for research and for tax purposes, let’s say this work counts as research.
Initially I gave gpt-4 the image of the kids and I, standing near the Arizona sign and asked it to create avatars of us. This continuously failed, and eventually I was able to figure out that it can’t do this. I suspect the reason being is that we could make a deep fake. I then asked it to describe the kids and me “in great detail”. It gave me this:
This is an image of a family of four standing in front of a 'Welcome to Arizona' sign on a roadside. The family consists of a father, a daughter, and two sons.
Starting from the left, the father is taking a selfie of the group. He has a beard and is wearing a blue polo shirt with a dark and light blue stripe across the chest. He has sunglasses perched on his head and is smiling at the camera.
Next to the father is the younger son, who is in front of the group and slightly crouched. He has short brown hair, is squinting slightly, and is wearing a black t-shirt with a white cartoonish dog design.
Behind the younger son is the daughter. She has long brown hair, parted in the middle, and is smiling warmly. She is wearing a blue t-shirt.
On the right is the older son, who stands with a relaxed expression. He has curly blond hair and is wearing a grey t-shirt that features a cartoon skull wearing headphones, and a light-colored beaded necklace.
In the background, the 'Welcome to Arizona' sign is prominently displayed with a desert landscape behind it, featuring scrub vegetation and a cloudy sky. On the left side of the road, there's a blue truck passing by.
I took this description and made some slight modifications, you know, for holiday purposes.
Create an image with a post-apocalyptic theme of a family of four standing in front of a 'Happy Holidays' sign on a roadside. The family consists of a father, a daughter, and two sons.
Starting from the left, the father is taking a selfie of the group. He has a beard with a small gray patch on his chin and is wearing a blue polo shirt with a dark and light blue stripe across the chest. He has green eyes and is smiling at the camera.
Next to the father is the younger son, who is in front of the group and slightly crouched. He has short brown hair, is squinting slightly, and is wearing a black t-shirt with a white cartoonish dog design. He is about eleven years old.
Behind the younger son is the daughter. She has long brown hair, parted in the middle, and is smiling warmly. She is wearing a blue t-shirt. She is about 13 years old.
On the right is the older son, who stands with a relaxed expression. He has curly blond hair and is wearing a grey t-shirt that features a cartoon skull wearing headphones, and a light-colored beaded necklace. He is almost as tall as his father and is about 15 years old.
In the background, the 'Happy Holidays' sign is prominently displayed with a desert landscape behind it, featuring scrub vegetation and a cloudy sky.
The images it came back with were okay, but there wasn’t much of a difference in the kids’ look, height and age. I tried to adjust the image by adding in their ages, but it couldn’t grasp how old people are. I get it gpt-4, I struggle with that too. I added in our heights and I asked gpt-4, in another window, to describe our facial expressions. I took that information and added it to the prompt:
Create an image with a post-apocalyptic theme of a family of four standing in front of a 'Happy Holidays' sign on a roadside. The family consists of a father, a daughter, and two sons.
Starting from the left, the father is taking a selfie of the group. He has a brown hair and brown beard with a small gray patch on his chin. He is wearing a blue polo shirt with a dark and light blue stripe across the chest. He has green eyes is about 74 inches tall and is smiling at the camera.
The younger son is to the right of the father with the father’s arm around him. He has short brown hair, is squinting slightly, and is wearing a black t-shirt with a white cartoonish dog design. He is about eleven years old and 62 inches tall.
Behind the younger son to the right of the father is the daughter. She has long brown hair, parted in the middle, and is smiling warmly. She is wearing a blue t-shirt. She is about 13 years old and 68 inches tall.
On the right is the older son, who stands with a relaxed expression. He has curly dirty blond hair and is wearing a grey t-shirt that features a cartoon skull orbited by rockets, and a light-colored beaded necklace. He is about 71 inches tall and is about 15 years old.
In the background, the 'Happy Holidays' sign is prominently displayed with a desert landscape behind it, featuring scrub vegetation and a cloudy sky.
If you are thinking to yourself, there is no way James is 5’11”, surprise. I guessed on Oliver and Fiona’s height and I think I was close on Fiona but way off on Oliver. It gave me this image:
This one is Fiona’s favorite. I wasn’t happy because Oliver looked so young and I started to get a complex about the red nose thing.
Also of note, James’s headphone cable also does something fun with his shirt’s headphone cable. This is something Generative AI does. It isn’t a great explanation, but the best way to think about it is that there are many artists(transformers) making things in each part of the image and one trying to coordinate. Sometimes the signal can get a little mixed between artists working on different sections. The headphone artist in one section says here is a headphone cable and the artist in the other part assumes it is the headphone on the shirt not on the kid.
From here I won’t bore you with the details, but I change the prompt in different ways to put us at the North Pole, Santa’s Workshop and in Fortnite (The family that slays together stays together). I would then tweak the conversation to say, make the son taller. It would get it right or we would try again. Sometimes it went way off the tracks. I will tell you this, once it gets confused it is hard to get it to go back and it is best to just start over. For example, periodically it would decide James needed a beard. Once it added it, I couldn’t convince it to remove it from James’s face so I just had to start over.
And here is us in Fortnite:
I wanted to use Stable Diffusion and since I have hardware that can run it, I thought awesome. Ever the time optimist, this proved more difficult to set up than I hoped, so in order to make the deadline I had to abandon this track. I tried to get some decent stable diffusion images using ClipDrop, but I could only get one before my free trial expired. The result is a balance of pretty hilarious and utterly ridiculous:
Once the kids realize that the AI doing the face swap made all of us look outrageous, they were much more okay about it.
I tried a few other things, but I had more than I needed so a lot ended on the cutting room floor. For example (below), I took the description and added James and this is what came out.
I tried pica-ai and got this:
All in all, it was a fun and successful experiment. I hope you enjoyed it too.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Church Family... and our AI too.