Sam's L33t Journal

Election time is coming up, so here's what I'm going with this time around:

Elected officials: Straight-ticket Democrats. But surely you could have guessed that. In MA, it's often the Dem primary that's the real election. Governor at least was an exception, but Trump has destroyed the political habitat of the Massachusetts Republican. (So far just metaphorically, despite his best efforts.)

Question 1 - Make public records law apply to the legislature and governor's office: Yes. Most states don't have this exemption, generally I'm in favor of more transparency even if in practice this will lead to a lot of disputes over exactly what is covered.

Question 2 - Allow government-employed public defenders to unionize: Yes. There are surely complicated tradeoffs with public-sector unions, but dealing with it via per-job carve-outs like this seems like not a good way to do things.

Question 3 - Have all-parties "jungle" primary elections: No. This doesn't avoid weird strategic voting, it just results in different weird strategic voting. Also it results in the weird scenario where CA is perpetually worried abut having two Republicans in the general election for governor despite that not representing the preferences of the electorate at all. There's a better solution for this sort of thing, but it failed to pass in 2020.

Question 4 - Allow election day voter registration: Yes. Some states have this, and I don't think there's a good reason for this process to be slow.

Question 5 - Cap tax revenues: No. This is not sound fiscal policy. When growth is high, the desirability of infrastructure spending is higher. This is also intended as a sneaky way to effectively repeal this 2022 measure.

Question 6 - Reserve some sales tax revenue for a nature preservation fund: No. This specifically earmarks sales tax revenue from some categories of goods for nature preservation, but I think splitting sales tax revenue "vertically" this way makes even less sense in terms of tradeoffs than allocating a certain portion of all sales tax revenues to particular purposes.

Question 7 - Allow more single-family homes: Yes. This is a minimal YIMBY bit of legislation that doesn't let towns prohibit even single-family homes on lots at least 5000 sq. ft. The median lot size in my town is 3000 sq. ft. If you own 5000 sq. ft. of land it shouldn't be illegal to build a house there because your neighbors want to impose some kind of a mansions-only policy.

Question 8 - Make marijuana illegal again: No. As much as I dislike having a million dispensaries everywhere.

Question 9 - Uphold a state gun safety law: Yes. The summary of the law seems pretty reasonable. Personally, I think guns should be at least as regulated as cars and wish my polity was like one of the many polities that thinks it's possible to maintain freedom without it being normal for people to routinely carry around firearms at all. But anyways I think MA can safely leave saying we're not allowed to do any of that to the Supreme Court.

I wrote a post on my essay blog last week about AI and philosophy of mind. Don't know if it's a very complete take, but definitely a topic that's been bouncing around my mind alongside news of Anthropic meeting with religious leaders re the moral status of its Claude chatbot.

This Saturday, we went to Boston Festival of Indie Games, which was awesome! Really fun to play some new or pre-release games and talk game design with creators and educators. Some highlights included:

Fight Sequence: A card game about psychics thinking hard about fighting. Stack manipulation the game, with attack and defense modes for each card, and a dynamic tension between hit fast and hit hard. Was really fun! Also, I know the creator, Jamie, from when they worked at Juliet. 

Mimic Meadows: A block-pushing puzzle video game where the key mechanic was copying animal's movement patterns to become what you imitate. Reminiscent of Baba Is You in art-style, structure, and also being really, really clever, though its choice of twist on the Sokoban genre is totally different.

Front Page: A bureaucracy simulator video game about assembling the front page of a newspaper. Missed opportunity to call this one Newspapers Please.

Ultimate Pro: An Ultimate Frisbee board game that made really elegant decisions with its pieces and mechanics to reflect specific concepts in the strategy and tactics of the underlying game. I was surprisingly (given my limited knowledge of Ultimate Frisbee) impressed by this one.

Dying Kings: A competitive push-your-luck card game about hanging on to power. Very fun.

Cobalt: A co-op push-your-luck card game about painting cursed pottery. Also fun, very much in the prototype phase but I'll have to keep an eye out, I'm always looking for good strategic co-op games. Hope they produce a deluxe edition with porcelain tokens, haha.

Super Chonk: A silly secret-choice-simultaneous-reveal resource-collecting game about fat cats, where the fundamental decision is between "choose first" and "take more", with the caveat that "more" is "more if any is left" and making the same decision as an opponent results in disaster.

On Friday, my bite slipped somehow at lunch and came down hard on the fork, necessitating a hasty visit to the dentist. This was actually the second time this month, a few weeks ago one of my back teeth chipped for no apparent reason. So I have a follow-up visit (for that earlier injury, but I hope they can take care of everything) on Tuesday and then my regular cleaning scheduled for Thursday. Which is a lot of time to spend at the dentist. Erica has an appointment at the orthodontist on Tuesday, too, as her retainer stopped being an acceptable fit.

Friday afternoon, went with the whole family for seasonal vaccines, which was, like a blood-draw earlier this year, a struggle for Erica. And thus extremely draining for the both of us. At least she did get it together and get through it eventually, I'm proud of her, but I wish it wasn't such an ordeal.

Today is a very rainy day, though at least not as rainy and windy as originally forecast. And we're all feeling under the weather.

Erica's been very into all things Pokemon lately, and she's making a lot of crafts and jewelry with perler beads. She also finger-knit a hat with some chunky yarn she got from the second-hand craft-supplies store nearby.

I've been playing Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which I am late to playing due to its mixed reviews. I'm having fun with it, but the mixed reviews are deserved. It has some real issues with level design that it papers over in ways that make it even more clunky (e.g. NPCs who are yellow-paint incarnate, there to direct the player in ways that should follow smoothly from context, but don't, or to give Samus assistance that seems like it should be totally unnecessary just to give the player extra reason to backtrack).

Okay I'm double-posting here but talking elections seems more useful before the election.

The primary election is tomorrow, and this is particularly relevant because: 1. There are an unusual number of statewide vacancies in my area this time around. 2. The Democratic primary is basically the election for many of these because it's Somerville, Massachusetts and Republicans would be hard-pressed to win a runoff against burnt toast.

US Senator - Markey: It's a bit aggravating that Markey isn't stepping back at the age of 80 and is instead running for another six-year terms. But he's a staunch progressive and I prefer him over the challenger.

State Senator - Burham Azeem, State Representative - Ben Ewan-Campen: The former is the Vice Mayor of Cambridge, the latter is a Somerville city councilor. Both got Somerville YIMBY's endorsement. Very strong candidates, and I like Azeem's ambition on transit in particular.

Governor's Council - Baylis: The Governor's Council in MA reviews and approves judicial appointments, pardons, and commutations. This year I'm planning to support the challenger. I think her immigration law experience will be valuable, and I'm influenced by the endorsement of Somerville's mayor and the Somerville DCC.

Middlesex DA - Solett: Both candidates seem good, but after looking at discussion and endorsements (Sollett sure has attracted a wide set of endorsements), I think I favor the challenger this time.

 Reading more about the Hugging Face Incident (especially here and in the linked posts) and watching OpenAIs presentation on the incident at Black Hat, it really does seem to me that this is one of the most significant cybersecurity incidents ever. (In terms of how pivotal it was, not in terms of magnitude of immediate damage caused. Luckily.)

Elements of the story include:

• OpenAI disabled safety measures for for testing purposes, before immediately failing to prevent by other means the sort of problem those safety measures guard against.
• After detecting that autonomous systems were behaving in sneaky and criminal ways, OpenAI did the equivalent of shooing them away and locking the door. At which point the same systems almost immediately found a different way to commit the same crimes before proceeding to more serious ones. (Edited to add: Later clarification by OpenAI notes they weren't aware of the first version of this AI scheming "bulletin board" until later, more context here.)
• Misbehaving autonomous systems acted in such a way that they poisoned the training of other autonomous systems, to make those more likely to misbehave in the same sort of way.
• That last point probably applied to the training of OpenAI's latest and most powerful AI model.

OpenAI really wants to focus on how the thing they did by accident will be undoubtedly done intentionally, and how their sort of product might also be useful at defense. And they say a bit in the presentation about how offensive AI programs might be dissuaded with some additional uncertainty about whether such underhanded measures will succeed and whether they might attract negative consequences. Yes, but also maybe some of that uncertainty, at the very least, should also be faced by OpenAI. "I didn't commit the cybercrime, I just ran the program that committed the crime" is not generally regarded as a defense w/r/t that sort of thing!

On a meta note that literally no one but myself is likely to care about, I'm going to try switching my journaling to the rich text WYSIWYG editor from the old raw HTML editor, which I got used to in the old LJ days and never wanted to change (especially since that came with little inconsistencies in presented style that no one but me was likely to care about). Yes, I've waited all the way until the age of machine intelligence to stop crafting artisanal HTML by hand. I figure if I'm having a hard enough time getting to write as it is, I should try to get rid of any minor inconvenience that gets in the way of that. Which this will, once I stop writing the raw HTML tags out of pure habit. If you see any stray ones, that's why.

Anyways, Erica is off with her maternal grandparents, and Julie was off dropping her off until just now. Gives me a rare quiet time with limited parenting on-call, though that does always come with a bit of a "hurry up and relax" kind of feeling. Also, Erica got homesick and started missing me in particular right away, which is a bit a lot. I'm glad she appreciates me so much, but she's also very capable and I want her to feel like she can manage with different adults for a few weeks, plus I don't want homesickness to mar what seems like an amazing vacation. Julie's parents are taking Erica and her cousin Emilia for a trip to the Pacific Northwest starting today, flying up to Seattle before traveling to British Columbia. (I hear the adults got upgraded and are sticking the cousins back in economy lol. But at least they got to live it up in the airport lounge.)

I finished playing Mina the Hollower over the weekend, which was a really great game. Old-school Zelda meets Dark Souls is a pretty good gist of it, it's a game with high-but-fair difficulty, very interesting combat and exploration, charming pixel art style and a great setting and soundtrack. One way it deviates from the Souls format is that Mina has a "jump up and burrow into the ground" mechanic as the central dodge option, which makes the combat very different than if it had the Souls usual last-second parry or dodge roll. Instead of being about awareness and timing, it's more about awareness and raw reaction time and quick planning; instead of noticing an attack and chaining dodge and counter-attack at just the right minute, it's more about reacting right away while quickly thinking about where you most want to be after the enemy finishes their attack.

I got to the theater for two movies, too. The first was the filmed production of Hadestown, which was about as good as a filmed production of that musical could be (i.e. very good, it's an amazing show, which I regretfully had not managed to see before). The show itself is a hair fourth-wall breaking as it is, with what I'd call a bit of a WMMPWAP structure ("world's most minimal play-within-a-play", that is, "we are going to put on a play now and here it is"). The film leans into this even more by starting backstage and in the wings before the show even starts. One interesting aspect of a "proshot" like this (apparently that bit of jargon distinguishing a film presentation of a play from a film adaptation of a play is well known in the theater world, but I first heard it this weekend in the context of this film) is how you balance missing opportunities to do more with the presentation than planting a static camera in the audience with not losing sight of the fact that you're presenting a play, where a wide perspective of the whole stage (and beyond; one review I read described the movie as "leaning into the proscenium", also a new-to-me word and my new favorite synecdoche) is a key aspect of the experience. The film gets the most out of close-ups and even more creative distinctly-not-in-the-audience angles, while not being afraid to linger on the wide shots.

I also saw Arco, which I really enjoyed, being at the intersection of so many things I like (weird French anime, time travel stories, strange futurism, oddly personal-scale conflicts). I saw the dubbed version, since that was what was in theaters at the time I could see it, and it was great. One interesting decision in the dub specifically was to have both Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman voice Iris's caretaker robot, Mikki, overlaying the two reads of the same lines to create a voice effect that was distinctly uncanny but very different from more usual robot voice effects. (Portman and Ruffalo voice Iris's mother and father, respectively, so it also adds a bit of implication that the parents customized the robot to speak in a way that reflects their own voices.) Portman was one of the producers, and I guess she was able to pull in a very high-profile voice cast for a dub of an animated sci-fi indie film. (Recent years really do seem like a golden age for sci-fi animation!)

Boston is enshrouded in a thick haze the last two days. It's dim at midday, and the sun in the late afternoon looks ominous, muted and red. At least the haze seems to be high up, the air quality at ground level isn't noticeably uncomfortable, though there is perhaps a faint aroma of woodsmoke.

The World Cup happenings in Boston have been great. Made especially so by the Scots who showed up in numbers, were very friendly, engaged in mostly mild mischief despite some intense partying (several downtown bars ran out of beer some days, apparently some saw sales three times St. Patrick's Day levels), and seemed to really appreciate all there is to appreciate about Boston. With all the visitors and fans there was a real feeling of amity and international friendship. I'm glad Boston bowed out of it's 2024 Olympic bid, we weren't ready, but this makes me hope that we are up for that eventually. Somerville and Cambridge have been hosting a lot of World Cup events, there was a big watch party and street fair on the main block of Inman Square last Friday that was a ton of fun.

I took Erica to Foss Park Pool this Sunday, only to find it closed. It was supposed to open this weekend. We wound up making it to family swim at the Y instead.

Erica has climbing camp this week. Next week my family is in town, then Sandy Island Camp.

Summer is starting. World is still crazy. What's new.

S&S Deli closed last week, after 107 years in business at the heart of Inman Square. It's really going to live a hole. Though people were already a bit mad at them for putting deed restrictions on the property that used to hold Ryles Jazz Club (their other Inman Square venue) when that closed, which resulted in the ground-floor retail there not being able to host another restaurant and thus becoming a comically oversized ATM lobby (and one with limited hours at that, despite being unstaffed). It's a real gap in the neighborhood, especially with (much newer, but also fairly nearby deli) Mamaleh's no longer being a full-service, sit-down restaurant ever since the pandemic.

(Edited to add: I got the timing wrong, they closed June 7, not May 31.)

Clover also went out of business, closing all locations. It's tragic, I'm going to miss that so much.

This weekend, we went to Jersey City to play some Ingress, an odd trip because we never went across the river to New York (Saturday was busy with the game, and Erica's Sunday morning activity choice was Liberty Science Center). It was fun getting back to an Ingress event after a long break in that (those stopped for a while during the pandemic, then I kept having schedule conflicts with nearby ones for one reason or another). Tagging along with the team took more effort from Erica than last time, when she was still riding in a stroller, but she kept up without too much complaint, despite some very heavy winds. Also, our team won!

Since we were out of town, we missed the other neighborhood event of the weekend, a meteor exploding over Cape Code Bay. Our neighbors definitely noticed, though. Apparently, the boom was heard for quite some distance, including as far north as Nova Scotia.

I don't write and then what I have to say is a complete grab-bag. I'm up too late and my thoughts are scattered.

It seems that awareness of the latest legs of the AI stock bubble has increased. I wasn't really paying attention to it before, and now it makes me feel crazy. Hindsight bias (and hubris) always makes me feel like the last thing should have been easy (for me) to predict, but now that I'm paying attention of course I have no idea what's next. Meanwhile, everything seems to be priced as if the Iran war is already over, or will be yesterday.

The weekends was nice. Somerville Porchfest was very rained on but people still had a great time, and I caught some of the start of it. The weather on Sunday was great. Took Julie out for a nice dinner for Mother's Day.

A gunman shot people at random on Memorial Drive in Cambridge today, seriously injuring two. Madness.