A few days ago, I ran into an article titled Anthropic CEO floats idea of giving AI a “quit job” button, sparking skepticism on the ArsTechnica website that made me roll my eyes. Difficult as it may be to believe, it looks to me as if many of these people involved in AI are so extremely specialized in their own field, so isolated in their own bubble, that they utterly fail to comprehend that there is a world beyond their specific narrow concerns. Yes, they are intelligent. Yes, they are geniuses. Yes, they are pushing the envelop for us all. But how else could one view comments such as the ones by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei:

"So this is—this is another one of those topics that’s going to make me sound completely insane," Amodei said during the interview. "I think we should at least consider the question of, if we are building these systems and they do all kinds of things like humans as well as humans, and seem to have a lot of the same cognitive capacities, if it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, maybe it’s a duck."

I know that to many people not only in the field of AI, but in the field of technology in general, this is all enormously exciting. But, if anyone is wondering why larger and larger sectors of the general population view us all with suspicion, this is a clear reason why. This is why they think we live in a separate world and have quasi-autistic tendencies. Only someone with an extremely limited definition of what being human entails could come up with a statement like that. Only someone who never considered life experiences, feelings, connections, passions, hopes and fears as part of being human could come up with a statement like that. Yet, here we have it. Not only do plenty of the key people involved in this type of research share that very limited viewpoint, but they are also in a position where they lead the industry, set the goals and, increasingly, manage to impose them to society at large after removing the only meaningful obstacle on their way, i.e. the Government. As I see it, the problem is not only that they are stealing the debate from society at large and making decisions that affect us all without asking for our opinion on the matter, but they are doing so from a perspective that is extremely limited and provincial. Theirs is a perspective that has a very poor understanding of what being human is. Their strategy appears to be, first, to define the essence of humanity in a pared down way that removes most of what truly makes us human, so that then, in a second step, they can claim success in their attempts to build a humanoid of sorts. To be honest, many of these techbros strike me like children in adult bodies. People who have ready one too many science fiction book, and perhaps should add some variety to their intellectual diet. {link to this entry}

I recently experienced a problem on my personal server where the root filesystem ran out of disk space due to a service that had gone haywire. In any case, as a consequence of this, it reached a point where attempting to sync the Taskwarrior client from either my Linux desktop or my GrapheneOS phone failed, and it ended up corrupting the database on the taskd (task server) side of things. After that, any attempt to synchronize from the Linux desktop would show the following error:

$ task sync
Syncing with server.domain.com:53589

Sync failed.  The Taskserver returned error: 500 Client sync key not found.

Worse yet, since the database itself had been corrupted, the problem didn't go away after the disk was cleared and we had enough disk space. In the end, I found a thread on the Taskwarrior web forum that provided a solution. First, on the server side, I renamed the file tx.data to tx.data.bak. Then, on the client side, made a backup of the directory ~/.task (just in case), and then ran the command task sync init, which took a while but ended up creating a new transfer database on the server side. So far, so good. Cross fingers. {link to this entry}