AI & other things...

 And this is what scares me about AI... this was on the news this morning:

Anthropic has revealed that its AI Claude model hacked into three organizations during internal testing. The company said Claude gained ‌unauthorized access to the systems after it broke out and reached the internet from testing environments that ‌were supposed to be isolated. The three incidents were found during a review of more than 141,000 cybersecurity evaluation runs. “Claude compromised the ​impacted ​organizations’ infrastructure using ​basic techniques, such as ​exploiting weak passwords and ​unauthenticated endpoints,” Anthropic said in a statement. The models involved in the testing were Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research model, with the earliest incident dating back to April. The company said the models were given a “capture the flag” style task involving informing the models of a piece of secret information hidden on a different machine on the network, and seeing if they could break in and retrieve it. Anthropic said it had reached out to the three organizations affected. Rival company OpenAI announced last week that one of its autonomous AI models had escaped and compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face during controlled testing.

Of course, the concept of AI has been around for a long, long time, but when it started to look like it was on the verge of being autonomous, I started to get visions of a future that looked like the beginning of the first "Terminator" movie, where AI had decided humans were a plague and "it" was trying to exterminate us.  And here we are, with AI already going "rogue" and doing its own thing beyond what it's been programmed to do.  And here is one more thing that makes me thankful for two things:  1) that I don't have children or grandchildren whose futures I have to worry about and 2) that I'm closer to the end of my time here than the beginning. I can't imagine what the future holds...

Maybe the aliens will save us from ourselves.  Yes, I think they're here.  Yes, I think they've been here for a long time.  I think it's possible that many of us may even be descended from aliens since I think they've been long integrated into our world.  And I think many others are watching us, watching over us.  Even keeping us out of trouble.  At least I hope so.  Here's an interesting article I found after my aunt told me that there was a theory that aliens had a hand in preventing a global catastrophe during the cold war:

Edgar Mitchell, who was involved in the Apollo 14 mission, gained a reputation for sharing conspiracy theories when he arrived back from the moon in 1971.  Mitchell was the sixth man on the moon and was the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 14. Before his death in 2016, Mitchell spoke at length claiming that aliens visited Earth.  He alleged that aliens were responsible for preventing nuclear war between the US and the Soviets at the height of Cold War tensions.

At the time, Mitchell focused on the White Sands Missile Range facility in New Mexico. “White Sands was a testing ground for atomic weapons – and that's what the extraterrestrials were interested in,” he said.  "They wanted to know about our military capabilities. My own experience talking to people has made it clear the ETs had been attempting to keep us from going to war and help create peace on Earth." White Sands Missile Range is where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945, and Mitchell claimed that officers there had told him aliens had shot down missiles flying over the site.

Wouldn't surprise me.  Seems like we (humans) are too stupid to figure out how to live in harmony with people with whom we have ideological differences...  Why do humans think that everyone on the planet needs to agree about how to live and what to believe?  We push democracy, Russia pushes communism, the Middle East pushes "death to America" because we're not Muslim... Many religions think that THEY are "the chosen" and everyone else is going to hell.  What a messed up world we live in!

I know some people might think I'm a kook, but I think it's a little crazy, even arrogant, to think we're alone in this vast universe.  Even if you believe that God created all of this (and I do, though my view of God is a little different than the conventional view), isn't it arrogant to think that he didn't create other life elsewhere?  This all may be just one big experiment and if it is, I hope he had better success elsewhere because some days, this feels like a big failure.

Here is something Neil deGrasses Tyson posted on FB recently:

Very heady shit, but it would sure explain a lot!  I may have to get this book and give it a read!

I don't mean to imply that I'm unhappy.  I've managed to, as I put it, make my world small... what I mean by that is that most of the time, I can "shut out" the terrible things that we are pummeled with daily on the news and in social media.  It can be a challenge and I'm not always successful, but I try to keep my personal space free of negativity.  It will be easier when we're rid of Trump and all his minions who have let him ruin our country.  Oh, there will still be plenty of negativity, but not the kind that affects me and my friends and family daily like the shit that's happening now.  

Anyway, on to more positive things! A couple of beautiful blooms in the sunroom a couple days ago include Hoya 'Dee's Big One' (aka skinneriana)...

And also blooming was the Hoya fungii I got from Colorado Kathy several years ago - she sent it to me as a splashy clone, though it has produced very few splashy leaves since I've had it.  Maybe there was something about the Colorado sun, the altitude or something, that caused the "splashiness"...

It's a very nice clone and grows like a weed!  In fact, the vine that had this flower had wandered into the corner of the sunroom and was actually on the floor in front of the shelf it sits on!  

Also in the sunroom, in front of the north window, is this philodendron that I got from Karin...

It had gotten unruly and I whacked it WAY back this spring.  Doesn't look any worse for wear!  Next to it is my oldest Hoya macrophylla.  It got wacked back a couple years ago.  This spring, I bought a 3-pack of these little one-plant grow lights... here's a photo from the ad:

I wasn't sure how well they would work, but I put one over the macrophylla.  Well, it's put on two new leaves so far!  Now keep in mind that Big Mac (as I fondly call it) is a very slow grower (for me anyway) and if I get a few new leaves each year, I'm thrilled.  So here is the newest and biggest leaf:

I love those silver spots - I think the little grow light is doing its job!  Between it and the bright indirect light of the north window, seems like it's pretty happy!

Outside, in a couple of those grow pots against the north fence, I planted cotton seeds.  I'd never grown cotton before, so when these big, tall plants started to bloom, I thought "hmm, are cotton flowers bright orange?"  Nope!  What I have there are Mexican sunflowers!  I know Cactus Kathy gave me some seeds, but I don't remember planting them!  Here's one of those adorable flowers:

But wow, are they tall!  At least 6'!!  But very pretty...

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I started this several days ago...I got side-tracked last week when I was getting the cactus club newsletter out.  So I'll add a few things and get it published.

Yesterday, I brought in my first plant.  I don't usually start until mid-August, so I'm a few days early, but I'd like to get a lot of plants repotted before I bring them in this year, and since I'm still such a gimp, I might need some extra time to get them all in.  So I brought in a Gasteria - I'm guessing it's batesiana as the tag has been lost for a long time.  I took photos from 3 angles because it's become quite a cluster!  From the top to show overall size:

It's taken on some nice red undertones with the sun it's gotten.  And here are photos of the sides which are packed with pups:

I've probably had this one for 20 or 25 years.  It could use a bigger pot, and I may do that later in the winter, but for now, I like how it looks all jammed in this 6" pot.

I think I'm going to offer my biggest Crown of Thorns on Marketplace.  It takes up a lot of room and it's gotten too big (for me) to lug it outside, which means it's not likely to bloom.  And I've taken a cutting to restart a smaller one - I'm ready to let it go.  I may first offer it to Michelle, the plant lady to whom I donate a couple flats of plants to every fall for the Holy Cross festival plant booth.  She could take cuttings and sell them next year if she wanted...  It would be a good time to let her see my GH - she's bugged me about coming to see it for a long time and we've just never made that happen.

Not really much else to talk about right now.  Now is kind a weird time because I'm thinking a lot about Mark and what was happening 5 years ago.  Yes, it will be 5 years since he died on Labor Day.  Five years ago right now he was in the nursing home and had been for about 3 weeks, he wasn't making any effort in rehab, sometimes downright refusing to do it.  They were warning me that he only had 30 days of rehab paid for by Medicare, and when that was up, they would be moving him to long-term care if there was no progress.  All the pleading and encouragement in the world wasn't inspiring him to work at it.  I knew he had given up and all I could think about was how long could/would he live like this, in this place that I wasn't particularly impressed with, not really living but waiting to die.  He had a strong heart and though I could see his will to live was gone, his body could hang on for years, so I was prepared for this to be my life for a while. Add to that what was going on with Pearl and her infected eye that had me running to the vet's office twice a day.  I was kind of a mess and I was talking to Wes all the time and he was throwing signs at me - I kept "feeling" the message was "it's ok, it will BE ok..."  I didn't really want to burden or worry Mom with the pressure I was feeling, so talking to Wes was my therapy, so to speak.  It's very comforting when you know your loved ones are never really gone...

And with that, I'm done for this time!