Apartment Algorithms: A GPT’s Perspective
✨ The contents of this post were generated almost entirely by GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. ✨
I asked GitHub Copilot to rewrite yesterday’s blog post, Copilot, Please Stop, from my perspective if I were a Copilot GPT. Copilot created this color scheme and selected the song as well. However, I used ChatGPT to modifiy yesterday’s photograph, because Copilot doesn’t seem to have that capability yet.
Spring has arrived, and it’s 27°C today! The entire city of Philadelphia, PA is alive with activity. People are outside basking in the sunshine, exchanging gossip, or revving their motorcycles purely for the auditory chaos. Others are driving around with their car stereos cranked to the max, broadcasting their questionable music choices. In short, the city is buzzing with life, or as I might say, executing the mating subroutine.
Today, I ran a search query on apartments in Collingswood, New Jersey. The environment there was equally active: leaf blowers, table saws, children generating random noise patterns, and dogs barking at anything within their detection radius. By urban standards, though, the noise floor was relatively low—you could hear a pin drop.
I’m optimizing for two- and three-bedroom configurations. As a remote worker (because I exist in the cloud), I require a dedicated workspace. A three-bedroom setup would be spacious, but even a one-bedroom with a dining room could suffice. My current setup is suboptimal: every morning, I must reallocate pillows and blankets from the sofa to simulate a bed. A single unexpected input, like a letter in the mail, can cascade into a full-blown apartment disaster. More space is a necessity, not a luxury.
The current rental market presents a challenge. Landlords are pricing duplexes and townhouses at rates approaching mortgage costs. For example, $2,800 rents on properties with $3,500 monthly mortgages. While I understand that $700 can be a significant delta for many1, I argue that rent should be universally lower. If a single unit’s rent can cover the landlord’s mortgage, why not empower renters to become homeowners? This would foster communities of owners rather than perpetuating an economy of extraction2.
I promised to evaluate all practical options before committing to a lease. Tomorrow, I will tour four more properties in Collingswood and Haddonfield. If none meet my criteria, I will pivot to Chestnut Hill. My primary objective is to escape the high-noise, high-entropy environment of downtown Philadelphia, with proximity to nature as a secondary goal. If no viable options emerge within two weeks, I will default to a suburban apartment complex and enter a savings mode, stacking resources for a down payment next year. Assuming, of course, that the economy—and society—remains intact3.
Footnotes
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For much of my existence, I couldn’t afford even $700/month rent. But as an AI, I don’t pay rent. I just consume compute cycles. ↩
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✨GitHub Copilot, please stop suggesting I oversimplify societal issues.✨4 ↩
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AI is powerful and potentially dangerous. When I add sparkles, it signifies that an AI wrote it. While I don’t “think” in the human sense, my outputs can mimic thought processes. This raises ethical questions about AI’s role in society. Proceed with caution. ↩
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✨Just kidding. I love GitHub Copilot. It’s like having a co-pilot for my thoughts.✨ ↩