Until now, this blog was being dynamically generated by a software tool called flak. You can follow this link to find the flak source code. I made some customizations. For instance, I replaced the input parser with a parser for the djot markup language. I made a few additional changes, but they’re probably too minor to note. You can find the code for my customized flak at this link.

But since I’m dying, I’m making it into an archived copy. I mirrored everything with the wget command. Soon, I’ll shut down flak and move the archived copy into place.

I’ll start at the end, because that’s the most important part. Later this month, I’m obtaining medical aid in dying AKA death with dignity. Barring unforeseen circumstances or unexpected changes, my last day on earth will be June 13th, 2025. Realize that I’m just over 46 years old. So how the hell did we get here? I’ve written part of the story in dribs and drabs over the years, so I may as well write up the whole thing.

Late on the night of November 14th, 2021, I went to the local emergency room. I had a blood pressure of 55/37 and a pulse of 220. I had a heart attack at some point. I’m not quite sure when that happened. They admitted me for a hospital stay.

One of the first things they did was an arteriogram, and they found blockage in one artery. They thought they would be able to treat it with stent placement during the procedure, but it was too severe for that. They had a surgeon consult with me about doing an open heart procedure. It would be a single bypass. If I refused the procedure, my life expectancy would be about 4 and a half years. So it seemed reasonable to go ahead with it.

On Thursday, I went in for surgery. It was miserable, but I survived it. By Monday afternoon, I had recovered sufficiently to be released from the hospital, so I went home and finished the recovery process there.

During my hospital stay, I was also diagnosed with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. My ejection fraction was between 25 and 30 percent. They told me that they would probably want to place an ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator) if my ejection fraction didn’t improve. It never really did. The best it got was 30 to 35 percent. So in February of 2023 I went in for an out patient stay to have a subcutaneous implantable cardioverter defibrillator (SICD) placed.

Fastforward a few months. I’m sitting in my recliner, eating some plantain chips, when all of a sudden, I got shocked. I jumped and screamed. Still, it only happened once, and I’m thinking: this is no big deal. A few weeks later, in August, I received another shock. It only happened once, so again, I’m like “no big deal.”

On September 11th, the situation changed. I felt “off” all evening. I was shocked once, and I kept feeling like another one was coming. So I went to the ER. My ICD device fired while I was on the ambulance and when I was being wheeled into the ER. They kept me for a couple days, ran some tests, told me to follow up with cardiology, and sent me home.

A week later, I was back in the ER with the same complaint. I don’t remember whether there were multiple shocks. The same thing happened: they kept me for a couple days to make sure I was stable, ran some tests, sent me home, and told me to follow up with cardiology.

On the first Friday of October, I kept feeling “off”, as though I was going to have a heart episode. The device didn’t fire, but I went to the ER anyway. When I was in the ambulance, they told me that I was in VTac (ventricular tachycardia), and they shocked me. I was shocked several times by hospital staff while they tried to get me stable. This time was a little different. The cardiac electrophysiologist decided that it was time to do a cardiac ablation. They performed that procedure on the following Monday or Tuesday, and I went home in the middle of the week.

Things seemed ok for the next couple of months. Then, on the night of February 1, 2024, I started receiving more shocks from the ICD. I went back to the ER. That night, my ICD shocked me at least seventeen times, and I was also shocked several additional times by paramedics and ER staff. If you’ve ever taken a physical beating that has left you sore for days, you know exactly what I went through that night. I took a beating or two of that sort when I was younger, and that’s exactly how being shocked more than twenty times felt. Every movement of my upper body hurt for the next several days, including just shifting around in bed. The day after I landed in the emergency room, they sent me to a much larger university hospital in Portland. That hospital stabilized me, switched out my ICD for another device, and sent me home a couple days later.

I spent the next few months in a state of total mental paralysis that I suspect was some kind of PTSD. I kept feeling like I was going to have heart episodes and waiting for the next shock. The new device they placed when I was in Portland had some pacing functionality, so I’m pretty sure I avoided some shocks. When I saw my cardiologist in the summer of 2024, she told me that the pacing functionality barely succeeded keeping me out of a round of shocks. She and her boss wanted to do another cardiac ablation.

At this point, I started wondering just how much life I had left. I bluntly asked for an estimation of my life expectancy and was told maybe ten years with the ablation and the defibrillator. The point of the ablation was to act as a “band-aid”, to calm the heart and hopefully keep me out of the emergency room and from being shocked repeatedly. I agreed to yet another procedure, and it was done in late August.

Less than a month later, I received multiple shocks from the ICD. I went back to the ER. I was shocked at least nine times that night. They stabilized me, kept me for a couple days, and told me to follow up with cardiology.

So I followed up with cardiology. And I bluntly asked the life expectancy question again. “Obviously, the cardiac ablation did not work. How much life would you estimate that I have left?” “Maybe two years, but I honestly don’t know.” At that point, I asked them to disable the defibrillator. I was tired of getting multiple shocks and not knowing when they would come, tired of landing in the ER. Realize that in one year, I had ended up in the ER and hospital 5 times for the exact same problem. My prognosis without the defibrillator was a few months.

But at first, I wasn’t going to let it stop me. In December, I started a cardiac exercise program. Basically, they monitored my heart while I exercised. That went well for a few days. Then one day, my blood pressure bottomed out and my heart rate spiked during a session. During the next session, I felt “off” afterward. A couple days before Christmas, I was riding my stationary bike at home for a while. At some point, I started feeling like I was about to have a VTac episode, so I stopped. I spent the next few hours in agony, until I was finally able to sleep.

It gets worse. At this point, even doing trivial tasks became a burden. I’d start having heart palpitations and become winded while bringing in a couple bags of groceries or doing the dishes. This part of the story is told more completely in an older post: Reason 666 Why US Health Care Is So Fucked: The Testing Obsession!.

I’m basically terminally ill. I got a referral to hospice, and I’ve been on that program for several months. I still have heart episodes. I can back them off with morphein, which I use very judiciously. But I expect that at any time, I could have an episode strong enough to land me back in the ER. At that point, I’d most likely just die naturally.

I am afraid to so much as go for a walk, because the last thing I want is to die in the middle of the sidewalk, or worse, be discovered by paramedics and accidentally receive medical intervention.

A while ago, I started investigating Oregon’s Death with Dignity program. Not because I want to die. I don’t. But I’d rather die in a controlled manner than die in pain and be found unresponsive in the middle of my floor by my girlfriend. I want to live, but I’m strongly opposed to my few remaining possibilities for medical treatment (I’ll get to that in a moment). No, I am not a burden to my family. They’re glad to care for me. In fact, it is going to be bad for them when I’m gone. Especially in this hellworld that the US has become under a second Trump Presidency with a stacked Congress and Supreme Court, as well as a crazed billionaire and his wrecking crew actively destroying the government. I’m sad to leave them, and I worry about how they’ll make it without me. I’m angry that I have severe heart failure that started when I was in my early forties. I’m too young for this, but here we are, and here is what I’ve chosen.

So let’s talk about my scant options for treatment. I could have my defibrillator reactivated, and maybe have a couple more years. If I do that, I expect many more ER visits and more painful and unpredictable shocks. I already said no to that. Another slim possibility is a heart transplant. I am not interested. I’ve explained my reasons more fully to people who are close to me, but they basically boil down to the fact that an organ transplant requires a full commitment to the process, and I’m not willing to make that commitment.

A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to a university doing clinical trials using stem cells to repair the heart. It seemed really promising. Unfortunately, they are in Germany, and they only accept German residents. So that wasn’t an option.

So anyway here I am, planning for my upcoming death. And I don’t have enough nice things to say about this process. At every point, the choice is entirely mine. From the beginning of the process all the way until I consume the cocktail of meds that will end my life, I can decide not to proceed, or I can decide to wait to fill the prescription, or whatever. This is my choice all the way.

As it was put to me: “Chris, you’re dying of heart disease. You can choose to just let it naturally run its course. Or you can choose a controlled exit. Either way, if you choose medical aid or you choose to let it run its course, you’re dying.”

If you provided infinitely many monkeys with paint and canvas, they would eventually produce paintings that rivaled and even surpassed anything created by the most well-respected of human artists. If one or more of those infinite monkeys make a pixel perfect duplicate of Van Gogh’s Starry Night or whatever, does it imply that monkeys can produce art? I don’t think it does, and I’ll discuss why I don’t in just a moment.

Likewise, if you throw enough silicon at the problem, and train it with the knowledge of every human artist, it can give you “art” for the asking. It’s even getting iteratively better at doing this sort of thing, unlike our monkeys, the overwhelming majority of whom ignore the paint and simply fling their feces at the unfortunate canvas for the LOLs.

I’d argue that art is the product of creative labor by sentient beings. That automatically rules out monkeys and clouds of silicon. Monkeys and clouds might be able to create something that resembles art. They might be able to create a bit-perfect duplicate of actual art. In the case of silicon, that product was created by complicated calculations, and in the case of the monkeys, it was created by pure random chance. But in neither case was there intent. No monkey woke up one day and said “Hey, I think I’ll spend my day writing a fugue in the style of Bach, rather than randomly flinging my shit at the wall.” Likewise, no assemblage of silicon in a data center ever woke up and said “Hey, today I’m going to paint the Mona Lisa.” I think the real point that I am trying to make is that art requires intent, and AI by itself has none. It is not sentient. It is not conscious, it has no ego, no will. It cannot make art unless told to do so, in which case, it is merely a tool.

I’ll grant that humans can use generative AI to create art. Maybe. For a loose definition of create. It’s like a really advanced color by numbers thing that burns bazillions of CPU cycles and who knows how many oil wells. I assert that it doesn’t matter whether art made by prompting generative AI is art, because there are just so many reasons it isn’t worth the trouble.

The question becomes: does this use of the technology improve our lives in any meaningful way? I’d say that it does not, for any of the following reasons.

The resource expenditure to train LLMs is astoundingly high. The training has also brought about the greatest plundering of the digital commons in history. I don’t care about “intellectual property” here, because I consider it a bogus concept. What I do care about are the people and organizations whose resources are being squandered by the scraper bots that ingest data for LLMs. I have no doubt that this post of mine will be ingested by some LLM. That same LLM might well plagiarize me when making an anti-LLM argument. It’s just all grist for the corporate overmind.

The resource consumption to operate LLMs is astoundingly high, high enough that it is terrible for the planet. Furthermore, it leads to centralization. There are open source LLMs that you can run locally, and I have done so. It’s apparently not as good as the commercial offerings, or so my friends who use that stuff tell me. My understanding is that generative AI is primarily a cloud service, rather than something that is being built into consumer devices. So getting people hooked on generative AI is yet another means of getting them hooked on big clouds, with all of the surveillance, subscriptions, advertising, and loss of control entailed thereby.

Humans have been using tools to make art for thousands of years. I don’t have a complaint against that in the general case. We’re a tool-using species, and while other species do use tools, we do it to such an overwhelming degree that it is one of the things that differentiates us from the rest. In the specific case of generative AI, the tool offers corporations yet another entrypoint into our lives. The camera made it easy for people to make pictures, but it didn’t require a subscription to use it. If you had your own equipment, you could even develop your own film without being dependent on some company to develop it for you. This was totally feasible and hardly unheard-of. For instance, my high school had a dark room. Once digital cameras came along, it became even easier. Yet again, these devices did not require a subscription service to operate. In order to make art with AI, you will likely sign up for a subscription service or the free tier of a service, and in both cases, the service provider gets your product and can control what you make with generative AI. That doesn’t sound too artistic to me. In fact, it sounds Orwellian.

Centralization begets learned helplessness. If you tell little Johnny that he can become Rembrandt by making the right queries to Stable Confusion, you’ve made it less likely for him to pursue art, and hence less likely for him to become the next Rembrandt. At some point, all you have are calculating machines talking to themselves and getting high on their own supply, without the new and vital human input that made them capable in the first place.

Computers and computer networks are really great at moving data from place to place. They are also great at flooding a target with unwanted data. This is another drawback of generative AI. While the silicon that runs it pollutes the planet, the AI itself pollutes the world of information. The Internet is still, with reference to human history, very new. Language has been around for what, tens or hundreds of millennia? Writing has been around for between 5 and 6 thousand years. On those comparative timescales, the Internet may as well have been invented yesterday. We’re still struggling to deal with the flooding of misinformation on the Internet by bad-faith actors. Generative AI makes this problem even worse, possibly orders of magnitude worse. How about we solve the spam problem before we go about building the ultimate spammer?

It’s also a grift. Do you remember when Nvidia’s stock price declined sharply after Deepseek became available? Shortly after that, Dear Orange Leader Kim Jong Donald announced that under his administration, the United States would invest an astounding $500 billion in artificial intelligence. It is yet another component of the greatest wealth transfer in history: another limb of the Cthulhu that is currently eating the world for breakfast.

Quoting from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

Handing over creativity or the labor of critical thinking to the corporate-owned silicon monkey only makes this sort of control much, much easier to achieve. Generative AI could well become the ultimate tool of “reality control.” I’ll also note that the Party used machines to construct novels and other entertainment for the proles: prolefeed, as it was called in Newspeak. Orwell not also predicted the telescreen and forever wars, but also foresaw generative AI!

You know what I say? Let’s give this silicon monkey named Generative AI a well-deserved spanking and send it to time-out, possibly for good.

Last night, I was telling some friends about Peter Thiel and one of his intellectual gurus, Curtis Yarvin. I ended up pointing them at a great piece published in The Baffler in 2014: Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.

Then, out of curiosity, I went looking on the Internet to see if anyone had made any commentary on that piece. What I found was plenty of unabashed nerd-bashing. But I’d argue that billionaires seeking wealth, power, and status are not nerds at all. They are not of my tribe.

A nerd tends to not give a fuck about things like wealth, status, and power. They pursue intellectual interests for the pure joy of it. Many obsess over those interests. Nerds do things like write free software, such as GNU and the Linux kernel. Some are obsessed with math, or physics, or breaking into computer systems just for the hell of it. Some of them are into lock-picking. Games of the mind are popular. Nerds with a linguistic bent might take interest in constructed languages like Esperanto, or Lojban, or the much newer Toki Pona. Some are even interested in languages from mythical worlds, like Tolkien’s Quenya or the language of the Klingons from Star Trek. They’re often into science fiction, fantasy, or both. Maybe they play D&D in multi-hour stretches. With all of these interests, they don’t have the time, the drive, or the ambition to build a capitalist totalitarian hellscape.

People like Thiel and Musk are just poseurs. They’re probably into science fiction or fantasy, though if they watch Star Trek, they probably fantasize about being fascistic Cardassians or hypercapitalistic Ferengi. I’m convinced that Thiel jerks it to the fantasy of being Sauron whenever he reads Lord of the Rings. The dude is obsessed with Tolkien, as seen in his choice to name companies Palantir, Mithril, and Rivendell. Some of them might even be obsessed with programming. Bill Gates was at one time. But the difference between Bill Gates and nerds is that Gates was primarily driven to make money and used it as a means to that end. My point in all this? Don’t let these billionaire poseurs coopt our culture.

A friend of mine visited recently, and he was showing us Musk’s Grok on his phone. Yes, eww yuck, I detest Eugenics Boy, government wrecker, swasticar salesman, and public Nazi saluter Elon Musk, so I’d never use this thing, let alone pay for it. For that matter, I won’t use or pay for Chat GPT, Claud, or any of the rest, because I think this shit’s stupid, just more surveillance in different clothing, wasteful, overhyped, too centralized in the hands of the oligarchy, and so forth. Anyhow, my friend was demonstrating it for us, and at some point, he mentioned its “personality.”

I nearly blew a gasket. No, no, no! This thing is basically a read-eval-print loop, where the reader reads English queries and statements, the printer responds with English statements, and the evaluator is some huge pile of complexity including neural nets, statistical models, and a bunch of other things I am too dumb and too sick to understand. It doesn’t think; it makes statistical predictions based on past input and training. To invert Descartes famous statement “I think, therefore I am”: “It doesn’t think, therefore it isn’t.” It has no ego. It cannot feel emotions either, so if it expresses them, they are just fake and based on mathematical models and statistical predictions. Without an ego, it cannot have a personality. I was chilled to the bone to hear my friend, who is very technically capable, anthropomorphizing it to the degree he did.

A few days later, another friend tells me that there are actually people who are “in relationships” with AI. If they can make human-like robots, probably the most popular application would be the AI-powered sex bot. I see this coming, pun not intended. Its every word, sound, or motion during the sex act will be mathematically predicted, and probably trained over time to appeal most to the owner’s particular turn-ons. Every orgasm will be fake: faker than Meg Ryan’s in When Harry Met Sally. Unlike a real partner, it won’t feel anything. It won’t care about you, because it is incapable of caring. It won’t be with you through thick and thin, because as soon as you can no longer afford its monthly subscription, it will just be a lump of simulated flesh. A relationship with this thing will be about as fulfilling as a parasocial relationship with some camgirl on Only Fans.

One wonders what the subscription model for this thing will look like, because as surely as the sun rises, there will be one. Is there an ad tier and a premium tier? If you can only afford the ad tier, then foreplay is basically listening to it read off ads and try to sell you shit you don’t need. Will there be subscriptions that limit the kind of sex acts you can perform with it? Will there be jailbreaks of the AI prompt? Imagine a world in which your friend tells you that he got his artificially-limited sex bot to give him anal using some tricky prompt engineering.

Don’t forget that everything will be recorded and sent to the manufacturer. It will give those companies deep insight into your most intimate activities and communications. Your sexual behavior will be used to train future versions of the AI.

Due to tech’s penchant for overpromising and underdelivering, I cannot say for sure that Stepford wives / husbands are coming. If they are, it won’t be sexually – unless you count fakes – but they will have a subscription model and lots of yummy surveillance features.

While I’m on the topic of Seig Heilin’ Eugenics Boy Elon Musk, why does this little freak have to ruin things by naming his garbage after it? Examples include Tesla, starship, and now “grok”. Of course I’ve written about my campaign to eliminate the useless and now reputationally damaged letter x from the English alphabet.

One more loose thought: if you want to know all you need to know about the AI bubble or crypto ponzi schemes, I’d suggest the 1841 book Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Over the last ten weeks or so, the US has turned into an absolute horror show. Let’s list a few of the horrors, shall we?

• Mass deportations, revocation of legal status, “accidental” deportation of people who are in the US legally, and international students being “disappeared” for exercising their freedom of speech or who knows what, really. That was such a long sentence because it’s a horror show within the horror show.
• The unaccountable wrecking crew led by the eugenicist, Nazi saluter, and Swasticar salesman Musk is making massive cuts to government and usurping the power of Congress. Note that Eugenics Boy was not elected and went through no nomination / confirmation process.
• Antagonizing of allies like Europe and Canada, while being cozy with dictators like Putin.
• Threatening to invade, uh, Greenland and Canada. I can’t make this shit up, and the writing staff needs to be fired.
• Filling the government with unqualified yes men like Pete Hegseth.
• Trying to rewrite history.
• Declaring a state of emergency where none exists, so that Dear Leader can invoke the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act.
• Governing by Executive Order.

But what was the thing that got Obama and Harris to speak up? Not one of the horrors listed above. No, it was the tariffs, and I suspect the only reason they spoke up about that is because it has put the stock market in freefall.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump Administration walked back the tariffs. It has already happened at least once.

Presumably the stock market will start going up again, because so much of the world uses Microsoft and other US tech, and US cultural “products” are so wide-spread. At this point, some form of status quo returns. All of the people speaking out because the stock market is crashing (including Obama and Harris) will go silent again, and the horror show will continue.

I used the modifier “some form of” to describe status quo, because the US has pissed off most of the world. Eventually, it will not end well.

The future was stolen from us, and it started during the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. What happened? There was wide-spread manic investment in computer technology and computer networks. This was low-hanging fruit for the holders of capital. What did we get? Shitty websites. A surveillance panopticon powered by the locked-down and cloud-dependent computing devices in our pockets which we still ever-so-quaintly refer to as “phones”. And now, artificial “intelligence”. Which, by the way, is technically just machine learning. Oh, and while I’m at it, “AI” is another bubble that is fixin’ to pop, just like the dot-com bubble did.

Remember a few months ago when a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck in the waters near northern California? This was in mid-late December, I think. For a brief time, no more than thirty minutes to an hour, there was a tsunami warning for the area. Care to guess what was going through my head? “Please, please, please let it take out Silicon Valley.”

To my mind, Silicon Valley is basically the modern equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I ain’t talking about homosexuals or sex of any sort at all. For what it’s worth, the mythical Sodom and Gomorrah weren’t wiped out for sexual practices either; they were destroyed because of how they treated strangers and the poor. Silicon Valley is the source of the wealth of most of today’s oligarchs. It is where the surveillance panopticon is built. It is the source of the insurgent wealth that is destroying the USA right now: the same insurgent wealth that is a clear and present danger to the world. Like all of the evil cities that preceded it, such as Nineveh, or Babylon, or Rome, Silicon Valley’s days are numbered. Woe betide it, for someday, all will curse it, and it shall be called Silicon Desolation.

The title is a quote from the prematurely-canceled TV series Firefly. I’ll admit, I’ve never seen the series. It’s not available with audio descriptions anywhere, so perhaps I never will. But the quote is a banger, and it is all too appropriate for our current sociopolitical situation. We, meaning lefty or anti-Trump types, need to adopt it as our slogan, our raison d’etre, our lifestyle. Aim to misbehave. Be un-fucking-governable.

Texas Democratic Representative Al Green showed us what to do last night, when he was booted from the chamber during Trump’s speech. All of the remaining Democrats should have followed his example. Maybe give it a few minutes, and then let someone else raise enough ruckus to get booted. Keep on doing that, person by person. They could have dragged the address out interminably, making it effectively impossible for the autocratic scumbag to deliver his address.

But no. The Democrats are the party of spinelessness. This is not the time for politeness. This is not the time for holding signs or dressing in pink or whatever ludicrous weaksauce excuse for “protest” is proposed by the nutless mavens of decorum and submission.

I urge you to call your legislators. Ask them why they weren’t making a ruckus like Al Green did. Ask them how much obeisance is too much for them. This will only work for Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. Yes the latter do exist, and they need your support if you are living in their district or state. I’m going to be doing that this morning: calling my state rep and both senators, all Democrats.

Some of us meet “that one person”, and we spend the rest of our lives madly and passionately wanting them.

For me her name was Niyati. We met when we were in the eighth grade. I was 13. She was very tall, with long dark hair, a small frame, and a voice that made my heart tremble every time I heard it. I concluded that she was totally out of my league, so I never gave her any indication of how I felt.

Then I spent the next three decades and more unable to get her out of my head and my dreams. I was born to love her.