OK, so I need to retract something from the previous Roden sent just a couple weeks back. The weather in Japan, in AUGUST, has been … SOMEWHAT SANE? A series of typhoons — some glancing off Japan, others smacking it — has dropped the humidity, made temperatures livable, and cooled the evenings. Well, at least for a few days. We’ll see what torment next week brings. But: just making note of this miraculous Summer Weather Development. (Meanwhile, Europe broils.)
I just published a 4,000-word writeup of what I’ve been up to with LLMs for the last six months. Building software, solving problems, hunting down relatives: “A Swarm of Blood Robots”
A potent excerpt:
Strangely though, the most moving find had nothing to do with blood. It turn sout, the middle name on my original birth certificate comes from a random guy who was murdered at a house party outside of Chicago. Or, more precisely: a car crash outside the party that led to a stabbing. My birth mother claimed on the adoption papers that this person was my birth father. That is, until I met my birth mother and she explained that she had just plucked a dead seventeen-year-old stranger from a newspaper clipping and said: That’s the dad. It simplified things, she said. I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy, desperately wanted to read the article. Well, I found it. The article she saw, that led to that decision, that led to me having “Michael” as a middle name on my original birth certificate. A scan of the newspaper was in some obscure database and Claude ran it down like a pack of bloodhounds digging up a sack of livers in the backyard. Now I’ve printed it out and it hangs on my wall: a dead stranger’s final moments, a totem of the oddness of life.
