Tldr
An out-of-sequence Column written in 2026 in which I pretend it’s still 2018.
Turns out I accidentally skipped Column 357, following up 356 directly with 358. I didn’t want to write Column 500 prematurely. So here’s an 8-years-belated post.
Revisiting those Columns briefly to get into character…
- that’s the exact time I switched from Stanning Google to owning the iPhone
- I became a dad for the first time merely weeks earlier1
- Donald Trump was the president
So. Some things are different and others aren’t.
Sadly.
I’m 30 and that’s old
Boo hoo I’m 30 and 30 doesn’t feel young any more.
Avengers: Endgame
I am absolutely pumped about the upcoming Avengers: Endgame. If they manage to pull this off - I can only imagine the heights the brand will soar to thereafter. I mean, they’ve just been turning out success after success after success.
I cannot imagine them ever falling off a cliff or anything. It would take Eternals of time to do that - sorry no an eternity, I mean. I expect we’ll be moving on from the “Main” Avengers after this. They’ll probably give more play to some of the newer entrants to the universe. Chadwick Boseman is stellar and Black Panther was very popular. Maybe they’ll center the universe more around him?
J.A.R.V.I.S. gives me an idea
In Age of Ultron (2015) Tony Stark says of his do-anything virtual assistant:
Started out, J.A.R.V.I.S. was just a natural language UI. Now he runs the Iron Legion. He runs more of the business than anyone besides Pepper.
- Tony Stark, Age of Ultron, 2015
This got me thinking - could training a natural language interpreter against an unimaginably big corpus of text content somehow make it useful in unanticipated ways?
You could just train it to predict the next word based on a string of input words. Once it predicts the next word, it just predicts again with a new string ending with whatever the last word was. It probably wouldn’t use words, really, it would probably use some, smaller semantic unit. At some point we’ll decide on what to call those tokens.
Anyway I doubt anything like that will ever happen. Nobody’s going to spend money on developing chatbots.
The iPhone and Apple
As mentioned in Column 355, a mere 2893 few days back, I just got the iPhone. It feels so weird to use. I am quite unsure of this choice and cannot imagine myself be going all-in on Apple stuff.
Top 5: Pros & Cons of being Tall
I wrote about this in my Journal recently, August 28th, 2018. I can’t imagine I’ll still writing in journals, let alone this specific journal years and years later.
Pros
5. I can reach & hold stuff easier
4. I can use leverage to my advantage in lots of situations
3. I can eat a lot without getting fat
2. Immediate respect
Not that being tall actually means anything.
1. Rosy glasses & world view, similar to hot chicks
Basically people are nicer to me because I’m tall, similar to how attractive people perceive the world differently than less attractive ones.
Cons
5. I can’t blend in if I wanted
4. That leverage can be bad
3. Getting to have variations of the same conversation with everyone
“You’re cousin’s roommate was probably taller than me? Wow-wee”
2. I don’t fit comfortably in things designed for average folks
Breaking this illusion - we’re in 2026 right now and looking at new cars… and yeah this sucks.
1. Shorter life expectancy & health problems
Quote:
- every word my son has ever said up until this point
Footnotes
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hence skipping a number and not noticing it for nearly a decade. ↩