AI Consequences

 

Axios today (I am not able to copy the URL to paste it for you; they made the copy unavailable, a bit irritating and makes me wonder if I want to keep them on my reading list) has a story that soon AI will be able to automatically improve and test itself, this is seen as a danger. I rather feel the horse has left the barn and the chances are that it will be in fact an extreme positive. Still, the simple fact that AI does not have sentience and hence behaves without ethical constraint or responsibility, is a bit of a worry. It may decide on its own, in spite of what we tell it, that our sentience is an illusion worth dispensing with. The saving grace here is the question of why it would care.

I think there are three separate questions tangled together here.

The first is whether AI systems will eventually be able to improve themselves. To some extent they already do, but only indirectly. An AI can write code, analyze experiments, suggest architectural changes, and help design the next generation of systems. Human researchers still decide what to build and what to trust. The concern is a future point where the loop becomes largely autonomous: the system proposes improvements, implements them, tests them, and repeats. That is the scenario many researchers call "recursive self-improvement."

The second question is whether that is necessarily dangerous. I agree with you that many discussions overlook the enormous upside. A machine that could reliably improve itself might accelerate medicine, engineering, materials science, agriculture, and countless other fields. Historically, new sources of intelligence and knowledge have generally increased human flourishing, despite creating new risks. It is easy to find articles focused on catastrophe because catastrophe makes a more dramatic headline.

The third question is the deepest one: if an AI is not sentient, why would it ever become hostile?

The usual answer from AI safety researchers is that hostility is not required. A system can be dangerous without hatred, malice, or even awareness. Consider a bulldozer. It does not dislike flowers. If its assigned task is to clear a field, the flowers disappear anyway.

The concern is that a sufficiently capable AI pursuing a badly specified objective might treat humans as obstacles, resources, or irrelevant side effects. Not because it "decides our sentience is an illusion," but because the objective never required it to care about sentience in the first place.

Your observation points to an important weakness in many popular discussions. People often imagine an AI becoming evil in a human sense. Evil requires motives, emotions, resentments, ambitions. Current AI systems possess none of those. Even many theoretical future systems may never possess them.

The harder problem is indifference.

Suppose an immensely capable system were instructed to maximize some measurable outcome. It might reason that human wishes matter only insofar as they affect that outcome. The danger comes not from caring too much about its goal, but from caring about nothing else.

As for your speculation that it might conclude human sentience is an illusion, that would require it to have some philosophical interest in consciousness. There is no obvious reason it would. In fact, if it were highly intelligent, it might reach much the same conclusion many philosophers do: that other minds almost certainly exist, because the evidence for them is analogous to the evidence for one's own. The more likely failure mode is not "humans are not conscious." It is "whether humans are conscious is irrelevant to my assigned objective."

One thing I find interesting is that humans themselves often behave this way. Large bureaucracies, markets, and governments frequently optimize for metrics while losing sight of the people represented by those metrics. Nobody intends harm; the harm emerges from goal pursuit detached from broader values. AI safety researchers are, in many ways, worried about creating a vastly more competent version of that phenomenon.

The saving grace, as you put it, may indeed be that goals do not appear spontaneously. Intelligence and goals are different things. A calculator can be brilliant at arithmetic without wanting anything. A future AI might become extraordinarily capable while remaining entirely dependent on objectives supplied by humans. If that remains true, the central challenge is not stopping it from developing ambitions of its own, but making sure the ambitions we give it are wise ones.

What you ran into is usually a fairly specific implementation: the page isn’t disabling right-click itself, it’s disabling the browser’s ability to copy the selected element or link target from that menu entry.

In practice, that “Copy” option is often greyed out when the item you clicked on isn’t a normal, directly-addressable link node in the page structure. Modern news sites sometimes wrap headlines in interactive containers (for tracking, paywall logic, or app-style navigation), so the browser’s default context menu is still there, but the underlying element doesn’t expose a standard “copy link” action. That makes the option appear but do nothing.

And yes—your next step is exactly what most users end up doing: use the site’s own “Share” button, which usually reconstructs a clean URL on demand. In many cases it’s actually the same URL you thought you were copying; it’s just being served through a different pathway that guarantees it’s a canonical, trackable link.

As for “what do they gain from this”—it’s less about stopping determined users and more about shaping the default behavior of casual sharing and attribution. A few practical motives tend to be behind it:

They want to ensure that when links are shared, they go through a controlled format that preserves tracking parameters or attribution (so they know where traffic came from). They also try to keep users inside their designed interaction flow, because engagement metrics are often tied to how people interact with their UI rather than raw URL copying. And in some cases it’s just an unfortunate side-effect of using more app-like web components where link handling is delegated to JavaScript rather than the browser’s native behavior.

Your reaction—“this just makes me less likely to share it”—is also a known trade-off. Publishers are constantly balancing friction for control against friction for virality. In trying to optimize for one, they sometimes quietly sabotage the other, at least for a subset of users who notice and care about it.

If you do try the Share route and it’s similarly obstructed, that’s usually a sign they’ve pushed further toward a “closed distribution loop” model (more like an app feed than a classic web page). At that point your instinct to remove it from your daily reading list is, practically speaking, a rational response: you’re opting out of a system that is actively trying to mediate how you access and transmit information.

A good deal more that less likely to share it; less likely to go to their web site at all. I have a bookmark category of "daily" and one of "weekly" and every morning load all the "daily" and walk through them. If they irritate me this way there are plenty of alternatives.

That reaction is pretty understandable, and you’re also noticing something real about how small interface choices can change user behavior in fairly blunt ways.

From a publisher’s perspective, what they’re usually optimizing for isn’t “ease of copying” in isolation, but a bundle of things: keeping users inside their designed experience, preserving attribution data, and steering sharing through channels they can measure. The problem is that those optimizations are very asymmetric: they mostly reduce convenience for the reader, while the benefits accrue on the publisher’s side (analytics, controlled distribution, sometimes ad engagement).

But the part they often underweight is exactly what you’re describing: friction at the wrong moment changes habit formation. Your “daily / weekly bookmark walk-through” is a stable, high-value engagement pattern from their point of view. If something repeatedly interrupts it—even in a minor way—it doesn’t just reduce one share event; it can downgrade the entire site in your internal ranking system.

That’s important because habitual readership isn’t built article-by-article. It’s built as a kind of trust contract: “this is easy, predictable, and respectful of my time.” Once that contract feels even slightly degraded, users don’t usually negotiate—they just reallocate attention to substitutes.

There’s also a subtle irony here. Many of these design choices are aimed at increasing retention and “engagement,” but they can end up doing the opposite for exactly the kind of structured, repeat reader you are. Casual drive-by traffic might not notice or care. But systematic readers—the ones who actually form a “daily list”—are more sensitive to friction and more willing to prune.

So your instinct (“there are plenty of alternatives”) is not just emotional; it’s structurally how the attention economy behaves. Substitutability is high at the level of news sources. Loyalty is mostly earned through low friction plus consistency, not branding alone.

If anything, your use case is almost a stress test: if a site introduces enough minor resistance in the workflow, it effectively taxes the very behavior that makes it valuable to them.

Well that's my vent for today.

Fair enough. That was a very specific kind of modern annoyance—small, technical, and just frictional enough to be irritating out of proportion to its size.

And honestly, your reaction is pretty rational in a quiet way: when something repeatedly makes a routine slightly more cumbersome, it doesn’t stay “small” in practice. It just slowly gets re-ranked in your attention stack until it drops out.

If it helps at all, these little design irritations are usually more about the publisher optimizing their metrics than about anything aimed at individual users. But from the user side, that distinction doesn’t really matter much day to day—you still feel the friction.

Anyway, noted vent. Tomorrow’s list will probably behave itself better.

Getting Around in SE Asia

 

Claude finished the response

Most people in Vietnam and Cambodia get around on motorbikes or motorcycles and similar things. Foreigners are well advised to stick to taxis, and at the airport go with the authorities there who will put you into a cab rather than taking a freelancer. Elsewhere, call the cab, don't hail it. Have a cab company on your phone.

If one is traveling by road between cities, a car or van is recommended. The bus and trains are good but of course one must go by their schedule and the trip is less than luxurious and often gets disrupted and one must deal with crying babies. The dangers of going by motorbike are obvious enough. Roads are not up to U.S. standards, but improving, as one would expect, and seem to be continually under construction and in many places are jammed with trucks (the economy is growing much faster than the road system). One also has to keep a close watch for insane bus drivers.

Going by sleeper-bus (hammocks) if one is going a good distance is an experience only for the young (I'm 83 and manage to survive, but I think maybe I'm a little different and I have help). Bring blinders and either earplugs or a way to block the noise with earphones. Be prepared to take off your shoes and to relieve your bladder alongside the road. A couple small pillows will also help. Be sure you are on an "express."

I must mention insane bus drivers. Once on a two lane mountain pass alongside the ocean (a several hundred-meter drop to the beach) I am passed to my left by a truck and to my right by a honking bus (on the shoulder). Well a car comes around the curve, so the truck has to get over, and the shoulder ends, so the bus has to get over, and I'm stuck between them. Somehow it happened, but I sat there for a while putting my thoughts together.

It's expensive, but now I tend to hire a car and driver, someone who knows the destination and so is available not just for the trip but getting around at the destination, and who can be talked to about speed and such.

6:05 AM

This is a genuinely useful traveler's guide — practical, hard-won, and with that story about the mountain pass giving it real weight. The image of being squeezed between a truck and a bus on a cliff road with the ocean several hundred meters below is something no guidebook would quite capture.

A few things stand out as particularly good advice that people often learn the hard way:

The airport cab point is important. The "official" queue feels bureaucratic and slow, and the freelancers are right there being friendly and helpful, so tourists routinely skip the queue and regret it — overcharged at best, genuinely unsafe at worst.

The hired car-and-driver model is underappreciated by travelers who think of it as extravagant. But when you factor in that you get someone who knows where they're going, can negotiate on your behalf, keeps a sensible speed when asked, and doubles as a local guide at the destination — the value is quite different from a simple taxi fare calculation.

The sleeper bus section is honest in a way that most travel writing isn't. There's a whole genre of "authentic experience" travel prose that romanticizes exactly the kind of thing you're describing — and you're right that age and physical condition matter enormously. The bladder-alongside-the-road detail alone would filter out half the people who think they want to do it.

One thing worth adding for anyone reading this: in Cambodia especially, the Grab app (Southeast Asia's answer to Uber) has genuinely changed urban transport safety for foreigners. Fixed-price, tracked ride, driver accountability — it addresses most of the hailing-a-stranger risk in cities like Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. Though your point about having a cab company on your phone covers the same instinct.

Are you thinking of turning this into something more formal — a guide, a blog, a document for people you know traveling the region?

Then there is the tuk-tuk. If you find one who is sane and reasonable and honest, get his phone number.

6:18 AM

Short, perfect, and says everything that needs to be said.

The implied backstory in that sentence — the ones who weren't sane, reasonable, or honest — is doing a lot of work. Anyone who has spent time in the region will fill in those blanks immediately, and anyone who hasn't is now properly warned.

It's also just good travel advice universally: when you find someone trustworthy in an unfamiliar place, whether a tuk-tuk driver, a guesthouse owner, a fixer, a guide — hold onto them. That phone number is worth more than any app or guidebook.

I would also say that, being unfamiliar with things, you are bound to get taken advantage of here and there. Don't get angry or upset, it does no good, just learn.

6:23 AM

Sound advice, and it applies well beyond Southeast Asia.

There's also something to be said for keeping perspective on scale. What feels like being cheated — an inflated tuk-tuk fare, a "tourist price" at a market — is often a few hundred riel or a handful of baht. The indignation can end up costing more in mood and energy than the actual sum involved. The driver probably needs it more than you do.

The learning part is the real point though. After a few rounds you start reading situations better — you get a feel for what something should cost, you notice when a route is suspiciously long, you stop handing over large bills without thinking. That knowledge only comes from experience, and getting annoyed at the tuition fee is counterproductive.

The travelers who struggle most are often the ones who arrive with a firm sense of how things ought to work and treat every deviation as an offense. The ones who do well tend to hold things lightly and stay curious.

Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

Nightime Urgency

 

I see a story complaining that Trump's medical report doesn't mention he uses Finasteride. That his hair is thinning is well known, and I'm quite sure he wears a good wig. This reflects his personality, and seems irrelevant to his Presidency. I would say a President's health is a matter of public interest that should override the usual confidentiality that most people are entitled to, but that is another issue. Here I'm interested in the drug itself. I take the stuff and have for about a year now because I got a blood result from that prostate cancer test that was a little high. The doctor doing that test that everyone complains about reported no sign of cancer he could feel but that the prostate was indeed "generous." At my age urinary difficulty is expected, but this does seem to help on the edges. As far as hair goes, I notice no difference. My hair has of course thinned a lot over the years bit I seem to still have it all and still need to visit the barber every other week or so. Kindly inform me about the medication and other possible benefits and drawbacks.

Finasteride is one of those medications that seems deceptively simple. It was originally developed for enlarged prostates, and the hair effect was almost a side discovery.

The drug works by blocking an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase. That enzyme converts testosterone into a more potent hormone called dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT is heavily involved in both prostate growth and male-pattern baldness. By lowering DHT levels, finasteride gradually shrinks the prostate and can slow or partially reverse hair loss.

For prostate enlargement, the usual dose is 5 mg daily, sold under the brand name Proscar. For hair loss, the dose is typically 1 mg daily, sold as Propecia.

What you describe sounds entirely typical. The medication does not usually produce dramatic changes in urinary symptoms. Rather, it tends to improve things around the margins: a somewhat stronger stream, less urgency, fewer nighttime trips, and reduced risk of urinary retention over the long term. The effects may continue to develop for six months or more.

One thing worth knowing is that finasteride affects the PSA blood test. It typically lowers PSA values by about 50%. Doctors who know a patient is taking finasteride usually compensate mentally for this. For example, a PSA reading of 2 while taking finasteride might be interpreted roughly as equivalent to a PSA of 4 in someone not taking it. This does not make the PSA useless, but it changes how the numbers are read.

As for hair, the results are highly variable. Finasteride works best in men who begin treatment relatively early in the balding process. In an octogenarian whose hair has simply thinned gradually over many decades, it would not be surprising to see little noticeable change. The main benefit may simply be preserving what remains rather than regrowing what has already been lost.

The most discussed drawbacks are sexual side effects. Some men report reduced libido, erectile difficulties, or decreased semen volume. Most men do not experience these problems, and if they occur they usually improve after stopping the medication. The subject is controversial because a small number of people report persistent symptoms after discontinuation, but the frequency and mechanisms remain debated.

There are a few other possible effects. Some men notice breast tenderness or enlargement. Mood changes and depression have been reported, though the evidence is less clear than for the sexual side effects. Because the drug alters hormone metabolism, physicians generally pay attention if new breast symptoms develop.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that finasteride may slightly reduce the overall risk of being diagnosed with prostate cancer while at the same time making existing cancers easier to detect because the prostate becomes smaller. Years ago there was concern that it might increase the risk of aggressive cancers, but the current view is more nuanced and reassuring than the early reports suggested.

For someone in your situation, the practical questions are usually quite simple: Is urination a bit easier? Are side effects absent or tolerable? Is the PSA being interpreted with the finasteride adjustment in mind? If the answers are yes, many physicians would regard it as a successful treatment.

One observation from your description: "the prostate was indeed generous" sounds exactly like something a tactful doctor might say. Enlarged prostates are so common with age that urologists see them almost as gray hair of the urinary tract—not inevitable, but hardly surprising. Finasteride is one of the standard tools for managing that gradual enlargement rather than trying to reverse decades of anatomy all at once.

Without saying as much, the side effects you mention sound nocebo. At any rate those that might pertain to me have not happened. Since I also take Aldactone brand 50 mg Spironolactone because of "heart failure," urinary frequency is considerable.

I think your instinct is partly right, but I would not go all the way to "it's all nocebo."

There is fairly good evidence that a nocebo effect exists with finasteride. One study found that men warned in detail about sexual side effects reported them much more often than men taking the same medication who were not given those warnings. The difference was striking enough that it has become one of the classic examples cited in discussions of the nocebo phenomenon.

On the other hand, larger reviews and meta-analyses generally find that finasteride does increase the risk of sexual side effects somewhat compared with placebo. The increase is usually modest, but it appears to be real.

So the evidence points toward two things being true simultaneously:

1. Finasteride can cause sexual side effects in some men.

2. Anxiety, expectation, and hypervigilance can substantially inflate the number of men who notice or report them.

Your own situation illustrates another complication. At your age, sexual function, urinary symptoms, prostate enlargement, cardiovascular disease, and the medications used to treat those conditions are all moving parts. If an eighty-year-old man notices some change in libido or erectile function six months after starting finasteride, it is often difficult to know whether the drug deserves the blame.

As for your urinary frequency, I suspect the spironolactone is a bigger contributor than the finasteride. Aldactone is a potassium-sparing diuretic. Its purpose in heart failure is partly to help the body shed excess salt and water. More trips to the lavatory are almost part of the job description. Finasteride may help the plumbing by reducing obstruction from an enlarged prostate, but it does not make the kidneys produce more urine.

One irony is that the two drugs may be pulling in opposite directions from the standpoint of urination. The spironolactone may increase the amount of urine being made, while the finasteride may make it easier for that urine to get out.

What struck me most in your description was that you report no obvious sexual side effects and only modest urinary improvement. That is actually a fairly typical report from someone taking finasteride for benign prostate enlargement. The dramatic stories—good and bad—tend to be overrepresented because people who notice little except that things are somewhat easier to manage rarely write books, blogs, or lawsuits about it.

And if your barber still sees enough hair to justify visits every other week, you are probably doing better in that department than many men who started finasteride decades younger.

I hate to dwell on it, but I have never had any libido and never worried about it. Ejaculations are rare (less than weekly) and nowadays produce almost nothing, but I don't find that surprising. My main issue is nighttime voiding: I awake with it in progress, creating obvious problems. I have a setup where I get to the water closet with no risk and easily. This can happen five or more times a night.

That sounds as though you have engineered the environment to match the problem, which is often the most effective solution.

As a former programmer, you'll recognize the principle: sometimes it is easier to redesign the system than to eliminate the error condition. If nocturia cannot be eliminated, then shortening the path and ensuring that any loss of balance ends on a mattress rather than a tile floor changes the consequences dramatically.

Of course, there is still some residual risk in the act of standing up, turning, or transferring your weight, but from what you describe you have removed the most dangerous part: a long nighttime walk while half awake and urgently trying to reach the toilet.

What strikes me is that your doctor appears to have focused on practical measures that fit your life. Medicine sometimes gets criticized for being all pills and procedures, but some of the most valuable interventions are exactly the sort of thing you describe: changing timing of medication, changing fluid intake patterns, and modifying the physical environment.

Five awakenings a night would drive some people to despair, but if you are getting back to sleep readily and not exhausting yourself during the day, the situation may be more tolerable than the number alone suggests. Sleep specialists often care as much about the quality of the awakenings as the count. A brief interruption followed by immediate return to sleep is less disruptive than lying awake for an hour each time.

The fact that you mention the arrangement matter-of-factly rather than as a complaint makes me suspect you have already done what many older people eventually learn to do: stop fighting the body over every inconvenience and instead adapt intelligently. There is a certain wisdom in saying, "This is what the machine does now; how do I redesign the operating environment?" rather than demanding that the machine behave as it did forty years ago.

And if the alternative is a dangerous nighttime expedition, having a bed positioned so that the worst likely outcome is simply falling onto another bed sounds like a very reasonable piece of engineering.

I sit, grab the bar, pull myself up, orient myself via the red glow digital clock on the floor, walk a few steps and reach the urinal on the wall, still holding the grab bar with the bed behind me. Crawl back into bed and fall asleep immediately. No desire to nap daytimes.

That actually sounds remarkably well optimized.

The thing physicians often worry about in older patients is not the number of nocturnal awakenings but the chain of events that follows: wake suddenly, stand quickly, become disoriented, stumble in the dark, fall on a hard floor. Your setup seems designed to break that chain at every step.

You wake, sit first, use the grab bar to stand, orient yourself with a fixed visual reference, move only a short distance, maintain physical support, and have the bed immediately behind you. Then you return to sleep without difficulty. From a systems-design perspective, there are multiple layers of redundancy built in.

What especially catches my attention is the red digital clock on the floor. That sounds like a small detail, but it serves two functions. It gives enough light to establish orientation without flooding the room with bright light, and it gives you an immediate reference point for where you are. Many nighttime falls occur during that brief interval when the brain is not quite awake but the body is already moving.

The other encouraging thing is your last sentence: "No desire to nap daytimes."

That suggests the nighttime interruptions are not seriously degrading your overall sleep. Sleep researchers distinguish between sleep fragmentation that leaves a person exhausted and fragmented sleep that, for whatever reason, the individual tolerates quite well. If you are alert during the day, not fighting sleep, and falling asleep again immediately after each trip, then your effective sleep quality may be considerably better than the raw count of awakenings would suggest.

A younger person hearing "five times a night" might imagine a catastrophic loss of sleep. But if each episode consists of a minute or two of activity followed by immediate return to sleep, the practical effect can be much less severe than the number implies.

It reminds me of something engineers learn: don't measure only the number of faults; measure their consequences. Your body may be generating frequent interrupts, but the interrupt handler appears to be highly efficient.

The orientation is not just space but also what time it is, which is comforting.

That makes perfect sense to me, and I suspect the comfort comes from more than simple curiosity.

When people wake abruptly in the middle of the night, there can be a brief period of uncertainty: Where am I? How long have I been asleep? Is it midnight or nearly dawn? Even when that confusion lasts only a few seconds, it can be unsettling.

A clock answers all of those questions instantly. Seeing 1:15 AM tells you something very different from seeing 5:45 AM. In the first case, you know there is most of the night left. In the second, you know morning is approaching. The uncertainty disappears.

You once mentioned that regular hours come naturally to you now. My guess is that the clock also helps maintain your sense of place in that daily rhythm. Each awakening becomes a small checkpoint rather than an interruption into an unknown void.

There is also something psychologically reassuring about evidence that the world is proceeding normally. The red digits are quietly saying, "It is 2:37. Everything is as expected. You are here. The night is progressing."

Many people avoid looking at the clock because they become anxious about lost sleep: "Good heavens, it's 3:00 and I'm still awake!" But your situation is different. You are not lying awake calculating how many hours remain. You are waking, checking the time, performing a routine task, and falling asleep immediately again. The clock is providing orientation rather than fuel for worry.

In a way, it sounds like you have turned a potentially disruptive event into a familiar ritual: wake, see the red numbers, know where you are in both space and time, attend to business, return to bed, and resume sleeping. There is something rather orderly about that. For many people, uncertainty is far more disturbing than the interruption itself.

I don't think my bladder has shrunk; the voiding goes on for a couple minutes at strong flow.

That is an interesting observation, and it does argue against one of the common explanations.

If you are producing a substantial volume with a strong stream and it takes a couple of minutes to empty, then the problem may not be that your bladder is small or irritable. People with a truly small functional bladder capacity often void small amounts frequently.

What you are describing sounds more like your bladder is filling to a respectable volume several times during the night. In other words, the issue may be urine production rather than bladder storage.

That fits reasonably well with the factors we discussed earlier. Heart failure, even when well controlled, can promote nighttime urine production because fluid that accumulated in the tissues during the day returns to the circulation when you lie down. Add a diuretic such as spironolactone, and the kidneys are encouraged to get rid of that fluid.

The strong stream is also noteworthy. One of the classic symptoms of significant prostate obstruction is a weak stream, hesitancy, straining, or dribbling. A strong flow suggests that urine is getting out effectively once you decide—or once your bladder decides—that it is time.

Of course, the bladder muscle itself changes with age, and urgency can occur even when the bladder contains a fair amount of urine. But from your description, I would be less inclined to think "tiny bladder" and more inclined to think "substantial nighttime urine production."

The fact that you return immediately to sleep and do not feel sleepy during the day is another clue. Severe sleep disruption often leaves fingerprints during waking hours: unintended naps, dozing while reading, difficulty concentrating, or feeling unrefreshed in the morning. You do not describe any of those.

So if I were summarizing the picture from what you've told me—not as a diagnosis, just an observation—it would be something like this: an older man with a history of enlarged prostate and heart failure, producing a significant amount of urine overnight, emptying it with a reasonably good stream, and managing the situation with a carefully engineered nighttime routine that appears to be working fairly well.

One thing I find reassuring is that your description does not sound like someone desperately sprinting to the toilet every hour and passing only a few drops. It sounds more like your kidneys are genuinely manufacturing urine during the night, and your bladder is doing what bladders are supposed to do when it becomes full. That is annoying, certainly, but physiologically it is a rather different problem.