A small improvement; a confession. I wind up thinking in public about how I live. CW: LLM-AI, Jesuitical

Small Improvement

Yesterday I was reading some Arcade documentation and discovered that I could change this:

class BorderedText:
    def create_offset_text(self, dx, dy, color):
        text = arcade.Text(self.msg, self.base_x + dx, dy, color, font_size=self.font_size, batch=self.batch)
        text.x = text.x - text.content_width // 2
        return text

That code renders the text, gets its rendered width, and repositions it to center it. I found, in the documentation, that I could instead do this:

    def create_offset_text(self, dx, dy, color):
        text = Text(self.msg, self.base_x + dx, dy, color, anchor_x='center', font_size=self.font_size, batch=self.batch)
        return text

The anchor_x tells the Text constructor to center the text. Much nicer and surely saves some kind of vertex updating nonsense.

Confession

I have to confess that I saw the trick of dividing the content width in half and moving the text origin in one of those “AI Overview” things that are popping up on my search page. While I refuse to turn on the “AI” in PyCharm, I have not yet moved over to some non-“AI” search engine. I realize that this means that I am tainted with the “AI” rancidity, just “not so much”.

How I live

Having confessed this publicly, I realize that I have to assess for myself where this sits on the scale of harms that I do in the world. I do many harms, as do most of us. Among my harms are

  1. I have a gasoline-powered car and sometimes I drive it places;
  2. My home is heated by natural gas;
  3. I use electricity, which is less than 10% renewable where I live;
  4. I listen to Apple Music, use Apple computers and iPads, etc;
  5. I subscribe to a number of streaming services, which surely all belong to extractive capitalist companies;
  6. I purchase food which is shipped here from afar, or which is the product of large companies;
  7. I order products from large companies and have them shipped to us on trucks powered by fossil fuel …

In my defense, I do not molest children, do not dissect small animals, do not shoot or bomb my neighbors and am generally quite friendly and polite with the people I encounter. (FGNO Zoom Ensemble is sometimes impolite but in that friendly masculine kind of way.) I am generous with my family, and even sometimes support individuals or organizations that I admire.

It may be possible to live without net harm to the world: I’m not sure how to do that, and I’m sure I wouldn’t like it. I’m doing my best.

And yet …

I could switch back to Duck Duck Go and Kagi: I used them for a while. There may even be a way to tell Google not to do the AI Overview thing. But that would still put money in their coffers.

I know folx who are drawing a much harder line than I do, having given up Amazon and streaming and the use of commercial software and so on. They do all they can not to support “the system”, and I find that admirable.

I confess that I also find it futile: it is virtually impossible that it will make a difference to the system as a whole.

What is the point?

As a randomly-chosen organism living here in Michigan, what is the point of my existence? What am I supposed to do, what am I supposed to be about? There are quite a few possible answers to that question:

Pass on your genes
If that’s the point, well, I’m done, and I should probably die and return my nutrients to the soil. But almost no living creature mates and then immediately dies, so maybe this is too harsh.
Live according to your nature
Most of earth’s creatures seem to eat, sleep, hunt or run away, mate from time to time, carry on until they can’t. They all seem to work toward some kind of good life in terms of whatever species they are. No creature other than man seems ever to torture itself. I’m not sure if many will even sacrifice themselves for their offspring.
Live according to higher principles
We are cursed with a sense of right and wrong, a sense of justice, of fairness. Well, some of us are. As I look around me, I see people in politics and business who seem not to be subject to that curse. Perhaps there are more sociopaths and psychopaths than we even suspect. But I digress …
Judgment in the light of experience
There are many forces acting on us, not just genes, nature, higher principles. We need to choose our actions as best we can, to keep all those many forces in balance. Life itself is a precarious balance of an immense number of complex systems operating at almost innumerable levels from the microscopic to the immense.

Our job, I think, is to live as well as we can, while doing minimal harm to the other living things around us. Presumably we would prioritize human things, just because we are human, and because almost no one really likes spiders, but ideally we’d do no harm at all.

An it harm none, do as ye will. Good advice, just impossible.

Yeah but what about the “AI”?

Google is working to make that overview useful. And, more and more, it is useful. Is it also harmful? At scale, it is consuming power and water. On your screen, it’s probably less water than you use washing your teeth, less power than runs your desk lamp.

Maybe I should draw the line before that overview. Maybe it’s OK to draw it after the overview. Maybe, by some people’s thoughtful lights, it’s OK to use the “genie” to help with your work.

I Hate that “genie” term, hate hate hate. It whitewashes it. Better to call it a demon. But I digress again …

I am, I freely grant, more than a bit Jesuitical about these things. I have mastered casuistry, rationalization, minored in equivocation, and too often think that the end justifies the means, if the means aren’t too nasty. That said, I do try to be a good person.

In this particular case, the “AI Overview”, I’ll pay attention to what happens with it, and I’ll decide, as best I can, whether the good that comes to me from it seems to outweigh the bad. And I get it that the slope is slippery, and that the first one is free.

I’m doing the best I can here. That’s all I’ve got.