Short story – “A Collapse We Can Dance To”

“A Collapse We Can Dance To”

In the disturbingly near future

Jodi stopped her cart and listened for a few moments.  Turning to her wife Emily, she asked, “Did this song just have something about ‘sledding pine trees?’ As if the trees were on sleds going downhill?”

Emily dropped a bag of carrots into the cart.  She shrugged and said, “Hey, if you tell AI to write a new Christmas song, it just grabs everything – snowmen, presents, reindeer, mistletoe, and, um, a partridge in a pear tree – and jams it all together.  Resulting in an incoherent mess where pine trees enjoy sledding.”

Jodi sighed, and starting walking again.

“I’ll say this,” Emily said, “at least it’s different.  You’ve never had to work some place like this where you want to blow your brains out after listening to different versions of the same ten songs hour after hour after hour.” Emily listened for a moment and started swaying.  “At least it’s got a good beat.”

Jodi snorted.  “It heralds the collapse of society, but at least we can dance to it.”

Ads for AI

I watch a probably unhealthy amount of YouTube.  And since YouTube likes to put fourteen ad breaks in a twenty-minute video, I see lots of ads.  The vast majority of these ads are for things I have no interest in, or no use for, or are just stupid.  So I do my best to ignore them.  I would skip all that I could, but I do try to watch some so the creators get some revenue. 

A month or so ago, it seemed to me like I was seeing a lot of ads for some AI thing or another.  To the point it felt like a third of the ads were for AI.  So I decided to keep track of what I saw in the next 100 ads.  Out of those 100 ads, twenty-six were for random things like furniture stores or whatever.  Nineteen were for cars, while only ten were specifically for AI, although there were seven more for other tech stuff that might have had some AI in them.  It wasn’t a third, but it did seem like that night when I was tracking ads there was a lull in the AI ads.  Because in the weeks after I tracked the ads, it seems like it’s back to a quarter, at least. 

One of the new AI ads I’ve seen, is something I can’t get my head around.  Apparently, there’s now a washer-dryer that’s AI powered, or something.  Why?  The only thing I can think of, is they have sensors in the machine that allow you to basically hit a button and it will wash your clothes until they are clean, and then dry them until they are dry.  Instead of having a standard wash-dry cycle that you hope gets them clean and dries them completely, this washes and dries only as long as necessary.  That makes sense because that can save water/electricity/time.  If they called this IntelliWash, that would be great.  But since everything now has to be AI, they have to call it AI Wash, or whatever.  Now I know that there are some cases where “some type of AI” is just the right tool for the job.  The problem is, 99% of the stories we hear about AI is the “stolen hammer being used to pound in a screw” stories, so why would you want to call your fancy computer algorithm AI?  Can’t we find some other term for the good AI usages?

The other type of AI ads I’ve been noticing lately, have some business person in a meeting or whatever going, “Me no understand me job.  What me do?” And their AI assistant or whatever goes, “You should buy at $47.” And the person parrots back, “Me buy forty-seven.” I don’t know if it’s a devious scheme by the AI companies to try to tell other companies that “Your employees are complete morons who can’t do anything without AI.  You should just have AI do everything.” Because they hope that eventually AI will run everything, and when AI runs everything, those who control the AIs will control everything.  It’s either that or as an AI company, they don’t understand how businesses … business. 

Random Story – Where’s the fire?

This is just an odd little story from my life.

I work until 10 at night, so I drive home in the dark.  And I go on windy back roads that go through a bunch of woods.  And I rarely see other cars, but I usually see a few deer.

A couple years ago, I was going home when I saw something through the trees.  It was this triangular, reddish shape that seemed to waver.  I only saw it for a second or two before it was obscured by trees, but my brain figured it must be a house on fire up ahead and I was seeing the flames reflecting off the smoke.  This concerned me for several reasons.  First off, I didn’t want anyone to lose their house.  Also, a few miles ahead was this small village I went through where a couple of my uncles live.  So I hoped it wasn’t one of their houses.  But I also worried that the road might be blocked by firetrucks, and depending on where they were, I might have to backtrack several miles to find a way around them. 

All these thoughts hit me in that first second or two, and in the next few minutes – as I caught further quick glimpses of this thing – I grew even more concerned.  Because I hadn’t come to a massive house fire yet, meaning for me to see it from so far away it must be multiple houses on fire, but then why hadn’t any firetrucks come up behind me?  For such a huge fire, they would have called out several companies, and I’m pretty sure the way I was going was the fastest way for some of them to get there.

And then, I couldn’t see it any more.  I caught a glimpse of it through the trees, but then I went through a very windy part thick with trees, and when I came out, I couldn’t see it.  I get to the little village, looking all around but not seeing any fire, or firetrucks or anything out of the ordinary.  Wondering how I could have missed something that big.  I go through the village, and I’m a mile or two down the road – trying to figure out what I had seen – when I see it again.  Only this time, I can see it’s … the moon.

So, it was like a quarter moon that was still rising when I first saw it, which is why I only saw it as a triangular thing.  When the moon is on the horizon, it can be rather reddish, and this was a few years ago when Canada was on fire, so there was a lot of smoke in the air to make it even redder.  And then there were clouds.  It must have been a thin layer of clouds that blocked enough of the moonness to make it not obviously the moon.  Also, the different thicknesses moving in front of it gave it a wavering effect you’d expect from smoke billowing from a huge fire.  But this layer of clouds thickened to the point it blocked out all the moonlight – or at least enough that I couldn’t see it over my headlights – which is why I didn’t see anything for a couple of miles.  But then the clouds cleared enough for me to see that the reason there weren’t any firetrucks is because I confused the moon for a housefire.

My Trump Ballroom prediction

If the monstrosity is actually built, I’m betting that it will only be used a few times.  And someone at one of these events will report some of the issues with the building.  Given that it’s Trump, it will be hideously gaudy.  But there will also be odd things wrong with it.  Like, for some reason there will only be one bathroom and the gold-plated toilets clog every other use.  And half the building will be freezing while the other half is sweltering, and the only thing that can be done is to alternate which half is doing what. 

Come January 2029 when – hopefully – a Democrat is sworn in, they will have 8,000 other Trump fuckups to fix, so this ballroom will probably just be used for storage for six months or so.  Eventually, they’ll get a reliable building inspector in, who will almost immediately condemn it.  Like they’ll discover that these load bearing “marble” columns are just plywood with some cheap marble pattern stickers.  Given the shoddy construction, the only way it could cost $300 million is if the people building it were paid $20 a minute, or half the money for it “mysteriously disappeared.”

So this Democrat President will – after going through proper channels – have the building torn down.  The Republicans in Congress will decry the destruction of this “Wonder of the World,” but the President will hopefully utterly ignore them.  Once it is gone, they’ll dust off the blueprints of the East Wing – give it some updates – and build a New East Wing.  And hopefully it – and a new garden – will be ready for the President’s second inauguration in January 2033.

That’s one possibility of what will happen to the trump ballroom.  The other is that when – take your pick of any 100 impeachment worthy scandals – finally takes hold and it looks like he’ll finally be held accountable, Trump will “have a stroke” and will resign for his health.  And the first thing President Vance will do is pardon him, not because he did anything wrong, but to stop the meanie democrats from tormenting this sick, old man who, by the grace of God, is out playing golf just days after he was on his death bed.  But Vance is not Trump, and I’m betting that whatever corrupt schemes are involved with the ballroom won’t immediately transfer over, so it might not even get built and will just remain this blot on the landscape until the Democrat elected in 2028 eventually has the time to just build a new and improved East Wing.

Personally, I’m hoping for that second option, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Code Autopsy

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the new computer system we got at work.  Since the post was titled New and … worsened, you can probably guess that I had issues with it.  It seems that for every one thing the new system does better than the old, it does like ten worse.  And some of the worse things it does is, kind of odd.  Which is nice since it gave me another idea for a post.

To begin, I have to describe two things the new system does.  The first is it counts the money in the till.  This is pretty straightforward.  At the beginning of each shift we enter the amount of money in the till, and it just has to add on whatever we take in and subtract whatever we give out.  And when we get to a point, say twice what we started with, it pops up a message saying we have to do a drop.  To start the next transaction, we have to tap “Okay.” (An example of how the new system is worse, in the old system to do a drop I just had to hit like two buttons and enter a four digit code.  Now I have to hit like five buttons, and enter a dozen digit manager code.  So instead of doing three or four drops a night, now I just do one when I go on break.)

The second thing I have to describe, is we print a coupon on each receipt.  But instead of just having one coupon code THAT WOULD MAKE THINGS SO MUCH EASIER, each coupon has to be unique.  Meaning, for each transaction, our system has to call up the corporate system and ask for a unique code that will be recognized at every one of the thousand or so stores across the nation.  But sometimes, there’s a bit of a glitch somewhere in the system.  Either the corporate system is down, or there’s some communications issue, or whatever.  So the system will wait five seconds or so to see if it clears up, but if it doesn’t it will just print the receipt without the coupon.  Which makes sense since you don’t want the customer to just wait there for five minutes waiting for the problem to fix itself.

So those are the two issues I want to discuss.  Now, you’re probably thinking these have nothing to do with one another.  And you’d be right, except there’s something weird with our system.  See, if the communication system is down for whatever reason and the coupon isn’t printed, the “You have to do a drop” message won’t show up.  The first few times it happened, I figured I was missing something.  But communication glitches seem to happen two or three times each shift, so it wasn’t long before I noticed that these two things were somehow connected.  It took me a while to work out how they were connected, but I think what happens is there is a series of things the computer does after a transaction to set things up for the next.  And I think one of the last ones it does is to see if it needs to put up the “You have to do a drop” message.  But for some reason, when there’s a communications glitch, it ends up skipping the “Drop_Check_SubRoutine” or whatever.  It’s probably just one line of code that needs added, or fixed, that whoever designed the code never noticed because it worked 99.999% of the time.

All of this brings me to the idea behind the title of this post: Code Autopsy.  I’m sure that every corporation that has proprietary code for their stores/restaurants/warehouses whatever, there are lines of bad code that lead to weird/annoying/stupid problems that employees have just had to learn to live with.  Code Autopsy would be a show where a group of experienced coders are told of these problems, and then they go through the code to see what causes them.  And then, they see how to fix them.  Like I imagine the coupon/drop issue our system has could be fixed with one or two lines of code.  That’s probably all it would take.

Of course, there are several problems with this idea.  First off, few companies would be willing to have their code issues discussed in public.  They’d probably claim “proprietary” reasons, but really it would be the PR black eye of letting the world know they have “bad code.” Secondly, while this is my idea, I’d likely only watch the episode for the company where I work.  It’s an interesting idea, but not one I’d really be invested in.  Unless there’s a really big company with really fucked up code, it wouldn’t be a huge draw.

Random Story – Interesting driving instruction

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Way back when I was learning to drive, there was some deal that if you took lessons from the school’s driving instructor, your parents would get a discount when you got your insurance.  I don’t know what the policy is these days.  So I was signed up to drive for four or five days during the summer.  The instructor drove out to our house out in the boonies, and then I’d drive back to town to show I knew what I was doing.  Every now and then he’d point to a parking spot and have me parallel park into it.  We’d find a quiet side street and he’d have me do a 3 Point Turn.  After about an hour, he’d direct me to the house of the next kid, who would then drive me back home as the first part of his driving lesson.

The last day I had to drive, at the end I had to go to a new house to pick up a new kid.  So the instructor sent me out some road I’d never been on before, and we soon came to some construction.  The traffic was backed up pretty far, and it looked like we’d be there for some time slowly inching forward.  Well, we were stopped right at a restaurant, or something, so he had me pull in to the parking lot.  Fortunately, there were three or four random businesses that shared this parking lot, so I drove from before the restaurant’s area of the lot, through the dry cleaner’s section, to the gun store section.  But that was where the lot ended.  If I had gotten back on the road, we would have passed twenty or so cars.  But we would still have been backed up.

The next business was a liquor store, or whatever, and their parking lot was separated from the one we were in by three-foot-wide patch of grass.  I don’t remember if there was a curb, but if there was it was only an inch or so.  The instructor told me to drive over the grass into the liquor store parking lot.  I don’t know what exactly I was thinking, but I think I was just too scared to say anything, so I drove into the liquor store parking lot.

But then, on the other side of the liquor store parking lot, there was a hedge row, or a stone wall that almost reached the road.  I think the reason it didn’t go all the way to the road was because there was a telephone pole there, and there’s probably some statute about how much space needs to be around a telephone pole.  The distance from the pole to the hedge was probably about six inches wider than the car, so the instructor told me to drive through it.  Fortunately, the gas station or whatever parking lot we were in now, was either beyond the construction area, or was at an intersection where we could continue on to the new kid’s house. 

Once my nerves settled, I had to admit the whole thing was pretty funny.  I can only imagine what the other drivers, or the construction workers thought as they saw a Student Driver Car off-roading to get around them.  But I do wonder if I had shown myself to be an okay enough driver that he wasn’t worried, or did the instructor just hate being stuck in traffic that much.

An idea for flag burners

 

Twenty-some years ago, I wrote a couple of stories about how stupid it was to try to ban flag burning.  At the time, there were people trying to make an Amendment to ban it, but after some time the issue kind of died away because anyone with half-a-braincell knows there are 8,000 other, more important problems facing America.  That’s how things stood until Dipshit signed an Executive Order. 

I figured I should dig those stories out and post them, and that’s what I did with “Star-Spangled Ploy.” But the other story, I read through it for the first time in over a decade, and realized it had some problems.  Basically, it was written with only the most basic legal knowledge gleaned from TV and movies.  Reading through it now, I was like, “The judge wouldn’t allow that,” and, “Oh, all of that would be revealed in discovery.” So instead of trying to rewrite the story to be more realistic, I figured I’d just post the idea.  If you do try this, just know, THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE.

The story was about a guy who burns a “flag” on the steps of the Supreme Court and is arrested.  But at his trial, he produces two pieces of evidence.  The first is a receipt from a custom flags company for two, not real American flags with fourteen stripes and fifty-one stars.  The second piece of evidence is one of these “flags.” The point being that the state could not prove that the item he burned was an actual American flag and not one of these fake “flags.”

I’m sure a real lawyer could find holes in this approach, so again, THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE.

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Image from Pixabay.