This post won’t be very interesting to those that aren’t Rush fans. And if you are a Rush fan, you have already seen this.

Part of the reason that everyone is excited about the Rush tour is that (1) Geddy and Alex are good people, (2) they have dealt with a lot of crap with grace, (3) Anika is an amazing drummer and also seems like a nice person. Therefore, everyone was rooting for her to succeed. And she has.

Most of these clips are of the end of Tom Sawyer when that amazing drum fill comes in. After she nails it, the crowd cheers for her and Geddy & Alex are smiling.

It is a good story about good people and I smile every time I watch it. Sometimes there are happy tears.

Short answer: we don’t know and it seems really challenging that we will, at least in the near term.

LLMs are black boxes and we don’t know how they work. We can’t follow and explain the logic like we have been able to in all software since the dawn of computers. Machine learning started us down this trail and LLMs have made it common. You can’t even get the same answer if you send in the same prompt twice.

I find this a bit concerning. I am not a AI doomer as I don’t think AIs will cause human extinction. I do think that AIs will significant change human culture across the planet. It is the agricultural, industrial, and computer revolution all wrapped up and amplified.

But not understanding how it works is a problem that we need to solve. This article goes into great detail about how they are trying to do this. Much of it goes over my head, but I can understand that they have tried many things and none of them have worked.

I write science-fiction and in the backstory of one of my novels is that part of the galaxy (the part doing well) banned AI until they could make it a white box. None of the story is dependent on this fact, but I put it in there anyway. Maybe it will impact a future story.

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-learn-about

The Minnesota State Fair is one of the best in the country. Granted, I haven’t been to a lot of them, so maybe I’ll just say it is the best one I have been to. We went on a day that broke the attendance record so the crowds got pretty intense in the afternoon.

The morning was excellent. Low 60s to start and not many people. We get there when the fair opens at 7am and have breakfast at one of the communal dining halls. then it is on to food on a stick, live music, and walking through the animal barns. We sat and listened to a musician that we also saw at the Grand Ol’ Opry back in June.

Everyone is happy to be there. People are friendly in lines and polite as we all navigate the crowds.

I’m looking forward to next year.

We had family in town and went to Canterbury Park to watch the horse racing. Some were very into it and some weren’t. Fortunately, I was only better $2/race so the fact that I had only one winning ticket didn’t matter. It was still less than the cost of going to see a move with popcorn in a theater.

It was interesting to watch the different ways people bet. No matter how much information is available about the horse, owner, trainer, jockey, and track, most of us were just going with our gut. Even if the information we had indicated that one horse was a clear favorite, not all of us picked that horse.

We make lots of bets in our lives. Not necessarily monetary gambles, but taking action with the expectation that certain evens will happen. We bet on the cars going in the opposite direction will stay on their side of the highway. We bet that the lawnmower wasn’t made with defective parts and won’t explode at high rpms while we walk around our yard.

Most of the bets we make on a daily basis are pretty good. Sure, there are terrible stories, but the risk of them actually is very low. The internet allows us to hear about every single one. One fluke episode and everyone hears the story. We factor that fear into our risk assessment. And we never get it right.