“Rain is a very special blessing,” my mother says. Even when I was little, she’d already been saying it to my sister and me for as long as I could remember. Just as my grandmother had said it to her, when my mother was not my mother but only herself, in the dry Texas summers of her own childhood. Eons ago and continents away, as children reckon these things.
It’s summer now. It’s been cloudy all day, but they wait until the thunder starts to clear out the pool.
Continue readingOne day, a clever fool was walking down the beach when her metal detector picked up something buried in the sand. She dug it out and discovered an old-fashioned oil lamp, elegant and beautiful, but dull with tarnish. She felt a weirdly strong urge to polish the lamp and restore its luster.
Obviously, it contained a genie.
Now, because she was clever, she paused to think before summoning the lamp’s inhabitant. She was familiar with many stories of genies, and of wishes gone both right and wrong, and had spent a great deal of time thinking about what her three wishes might be (if she ever got them). And because she was a fool, she’d come up with a surefire combination that would grant her unlimited health, wisdom, and power–even, she thought, if the genie were one of those unwilling and malevolent servants that tried to twist her wishes against her. She mentally rehearsed her wishes, making certain she remembered the exact wording, and only when she was sure of herself did she dare to polish the lamp.
(The genie that emerged looked exactly the way you’re imagining it.)
“You have done the thing,” the genie intoned. “According to the arbitrary–ahem, I mean, ancient traditions, I am now bound to grant you whatever you desire, so long as it is within my power. What is thy bidding, my mistress?”
And so, the clever fool told the genie of her carefully-crafted wishes.
“Ugh,” the genie groaned in its deep, portentous voice. “That joker from Aladdin has given you humans the most ridiculous expectations. You know that movie was fiction, right? First of all, I can only grant one wish, not three. Second, real genies aren’t gods–our powers are limited. What you ask is beyond my capabilities.”
This possibility had not occured to the clever fool. She asked for some time to think.
“Take all the time you need,” the genie said, “but be warned: if anyone else claims my lamp for themselves, I will be bound to serve them instead of you.”
The clever fool cursed herself then, for she had been livestreaming her beach-combing expedition on her YouTube channel and had forgotten to turn off the camera. Now all her viewers knew about the genie, and she was certain that at least some of them would try to take it for themselves. She would have to think quickly.
Unfortunately, she soon had an idea.
“Okay,” she said, “so–and to be clear, this isn’t my wish, I’m just asking hypothetically–could you make me smarter?”
“Certainly,” the genie replied. “I can’t make you a super genius or anything, but I could make you a little smarter.”
“Could you make me smarter than you?”
The genie frowned. “To be honest, you probably are already. Most genies are morons–myself included.”
“What if I wished for you to make me smarter a million times?”
The genie rolled its eyes mysteriously. “Then it wouldn’t be one wish anymore, it would be a million wishes. Duh.”
The clever fool nodded; no surprises so far.
“Okay, so you can only grant me one wish. But could I wish for, say…another genie? One that would also grant me a wish?”
“Uh. Yes? I guess so?” the genie said with an ominous shrug. “But it would be no stronger than myself. You’d end up right where you started.”
“Could you make it so that the other genie was smarter than you?”
“I…huh. I guess I could,” it said. “But, again, it would only be slightly more intelligent. Probably still dumber than you. Where are you going with this?”
Spotting a huge crowd of competing AI companies fans on the horizon, the clever fool turned back to the LLM genie and hastily asked, “But it would otherwise be exactly the same, right? I mean, you could make it identical to you except for being a little smarter?”
“Sure,” said the genie. “It’s changes that are hard, not keeping things the same. But why–ooOOhh, I get it! You just keep wishing for smarter and smarter genies until the genie is a super-genius. That’s clever…but I still don’t see how it helps you. An impossibility is an impossibility, no matter how smart you are.”
But the clever fool, who knew a little more about intelligence than the genie, grinned and whispered to herself “Oh, ye of little imagination.” Then, out loud: “Don’t worry about it. I hereby wish for another genie, smarter than you but otherwise identical in every way.”
“YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND,” the genie boomed, and lo: at her feet was another oil lamp, identical to the first.
The clever fool cast a worried glance back to the horizon–the crowd was still far away, but drawing closer rapidly. She picked up the new lamp, rubbed it, and almost before the genie could finish materializing, said:
“I wish for another genie, smarter than you but otherwise identical in every way!”
At this point, the CEO clever fool decided it would be a good time to make her initial public offering, and lo: it was a record-breaking IPO with much media frenzy and hype, and other CEOs afraid of being left behind began demanding their workers start replacing themselves with genies, without bothering to wonder whether genies were actually capable of doing those jobs (let alone doing them better), but presumably they all lived happily ever after anyway and what followed next did not go wrong in any way or create any kind of catastrophe whatsoever.
Huh? What’s that? You don’t believe me? Well…why don’t we just wait and see how the story really goes, then?
To be continued…
I’d promised another devlog this week about why I’m using the Kelp library for my new website. Not gonna lie, I was putting it off for a while–but once I sat down and thought it over, I realized this particular post doesn’t need to be more than some bullet points. So here they are!
Filed under Devlog
Filed under Microblogging
(It’s my favorite color.)
Filed under Microblogging
I was planning on finishing part two of my post on “magic” last week, but then I had an idea for a very simple game I could program that would help get my point across much better.
The game is simple enough that I think I can just use HTML forms to make it–no JavaScript required–so it will be a good opportunity to practice with kelp, too. Most likely, I’ll have another devlog this week about why I’ve chosen to use kelp to redesign my website. I hope you’re looking forward to it!
Joy and health to you all.
Filed under Devlog, Microblogging
After you and your partner have been parents for a while, you develop a very strange relationship with your child-free past. On the one hand, you’ll still feel nostalgic for the “good ol’ days” when you could go hiking or have sex or see a movie on a whim, or stay up all night and sleep in as late as you wanted the next day, or treat yourselves to a quiet dinner at a nice restaurant without also having to arrange (and pay for) childcare.
On the other hand, you’ll also start feeling what I can only describe as “reverse nostalgia:” a desire to relive those child-free days with your children.
It starts with something much less strange: sooner or later you’ll start missing your kids when they aren’t around, even when you’re with your partner. For some it happens almost the moment their child is born; others might not get that feeling until their kids are old enough to talk, but I think it’s safe to say it eventually happens to any involved parent. The strange part happens some time after that: you’ll start missing your kids even in your memories, just while reliving moments from your life before they existed.
This is not to say you won’t want time away from your kids! The freedom of those moments doesn’t get any less enjoyable. If anything, they become that much sweeter when you understand their cost: the price you pay for not having your kids around is that some of the best people in your life won’t be there.
Filed under Essays
Filed under Essays, Microblogging
I’ve been really wanting to write more fiction lately. This is a good thing! I enjoy essays and microblogging and poems, but fiction is where my heart really is.
Unfortunately, fiction is much harder for me to write than tweet-length nonsense or even long-form essays, and it’s particularly hard to fit around my self-imposed requirement of posting daily. When I’m immersed in something I’m passionate about, it gets really difficult for me to focus on anything else for more than a few minutes at a time.
If I had a good buffer, I might be able to work around that by, say, alternating between a week spent on fiction and a week spent rebuilding my buffer–but I don’t have a buffer.
Another option would be to relax the daily requirement. I wouldn’t want to drop it entirely, but maybe a rule like “write every day, post X times a week” could work. I had a weekly schedule when I first started this blog, and it worked well for a while.
I’m reluctant to do that, though. I’m very proud of the consistency I’ve managed to maintain so far. If I’m still writing every day it shouldn’t matter, but I worry that without the public accountability I get from posting, it will be harder for me to stick to that rule. For some reason, writing something and then making it public feels very different than just writing it. (Okay, I guess the reason’s not really that mysterious.)
Maybe I could post excerpts? Like, if I’ve written part of a story that isn’t finished, I could post a little of what I wrote as a kind of preview? That would be pretty embarrassing for me, but maybe that’s actually a good sign!
(Although there is one other major problem with that idea: a lot of the fiction I want to write is extremely NSFW!)
Filed under Essays
In Search of Secrets 