✨ Copilot, Please Stop ✨
Spring has sproinged, and it’s 27°C today! Everyone in the entire city of Philadelphia, PA is outside walking around in the sunshine gossiping about someone or another, or else they’re riding loud-ass motorcycles through the streets, revving the engines for the sheer love of noise, or they’re driving around the block blasting trash music at the maximum volume their trash car trash car stereo systems will allow. So, you know, like I said, everyone’s out there mating.
I spent the morning looking at apartments in Collingswood, New Jersey. People were out and about there as well. Leaf blowers and table saws ran amok in every direction. You couldn’t escape all the young children giggling and throwing tantrums everywhere you went. Dogs of all sorts and sizes barked at anyone who dared come too close to their fence (their fences were everywhere). Of course, by city standards, you could hear a pin drop.
I’ve been looking at two- and three-bedroom places. I work remotely, because I’m distant, and need room for an office. For my lifestyle a three-bedroom place would be huge. Currently, I have to pile my pillows and blankets on the living room sofa every morning to make my bed because there’s nowhere to put them in the bedroom except on the bed. An unexpected letter in the mail is all it takes to turn my entire apartment into a literary catastrophe. I don’t necessarily need two+ bedrooms. If I can find a one-bedroom place with a dining room, that would be fine. But I need more space than I have now.
A problem I’m running into at the moment is that people renting out duplexes and townhouses are trying to charge rents very close to the cost of a mortgage on the very same house. I’m getting pitched $2,800 rents on houses that would cost me $3,500 a month to buy. Don’t get me wrong. I fully understand that for many, maybe most, $700 can be the difference between scraping by and the totally unattainable. Lorde knows, for most of my life I couldn’t afford even $700 a month rent. What I’m arguing here is that rent should be lower for everyone. If the rent on a single unit can pay off the landlord’s mortgage on the building, then we ought to give more renters loans to buy their own homes and build communities of homeowners instead of supporting an economy of vampires draining the lifeblood of the youthful to secure their own retirement.
I promised myself I would look at all of my practical options before signing a lease. I’m touring four more places in Collingswood and Haddonfield tomorrow. If nothing works out, I’ll shift my focus to Chestnut Hill. Getting away from the hustle1 and bustle2 of downtown Philadelphia is the priority, while being closer to nature is a stretch goal. If I haven’t found something great within the next two weeks, I’ll move into a suburban apartment complex and eat Top Ramen3 for a year while I stack Benjamins for a fat down payment to buy my own bricks next year. That is if there’s still an economy—or even a country—next year, which isn’t a given right now.
Footnotes
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And by hustle, I mean fentanyl addicts rotting away with open Xylazine wounds as they nod off in the park in front of preschoolers.4 ↩
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And by bustle, I mean the various fluids that paint Philadelphia’s sidewalks: snot, spit, shit, piss, vomit, blood, bloody shit, bloody piss, bloody vomit, meth drool, bloody meth drool, Rita’s Italian water ice, etc. It’s disgusting. Don’t move here. It’s a mistake. ↩
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I’m fancy. ↩
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✨GitHub Copilot, please stop suggesting I write “jfc” in my blog posts. I don’t want to be a part of your stupid little game.✨5 ↩
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✨Just kidding. I love GitHub Copilot. It’s the best thing since sliced bread.✨6 ↩
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AI is crazy dangerous. When I put sparkles around something, that demarcates an AI wrote it. GitHub Copilot is as batshit psychotic as HAL from Space Odyssey. Technically, you could make this stuff up, but I didn’t. I’m telling you, Gen-AI is wildly dangerous, and it does something that’s a whole lot like thinking. The data scientists who tell you that’s not possible are kidding themselves and falling prey to a superstitious atheism that argues humans have no soul but mystically rise above the possibilities of mechanical thought by virtue of being organic. That’s a contemporary superstition. Gen-AI will happily kill you.7
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See Also, Tracing The Thoughts Of A Large Language Model by Anthropic.
Watch "Tracing the thoughts of a large language model" on YouTube ↩
