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Pluribus and ChatGPT
Monday, December 15 2025
Today was the morning that Rob Reiner's death was in the news. He and his wife had apparently been stabbed to death by their drug-addled son. Astoundingly (but can we really say unsurprisingly?) President Donald Trump had something to say about it, and it should, all by itself, destroy his political career. Somehow Trump blamed the stabbing victims for their own murder, implying the murderer (their own son) was driven to do it by their anti-Trump politics. I am not kidding.
Our inside firewood pile, which is the easiest-to-get-to source of dry firewood, had been burned away over the last couple weeks of unusually-cold early-December weather, and I didn't want to start burning dry wood from the woodshed, at least not so early in the heating season. So today I went out with my big Kobalt chainsaw, using, for the first time, a knock-off 80v battery I'd bought on eBay for about $70. The battery is clearly wimpier than a name-brand Kobalt 80v battery, something that is clear when you compare their weights: the knock-off weighs 3.00 pounds, whereas the name-brand weighs 3.75 pounds. I hiked up the Chamomile gorge not quite two hundred feet above (west of) the Stick Trail to a large long-dead white ash that had fallen years ago. I'd cut a couple pieces out of it over the years, mostly so it wouldn't block my way as I hiked up the gorge. But today I bucked some pieces out of it. They were each only a little smaller in diameter than my saw's 18 inch bar and took a lot of power to cut through. But I made at least four cuts before that budget battery started complaining. I then took the saw back and returned with a splitting maul and a wedge so I could split the pieces down to a size I could load onto my wood-carrying backpack. I did enough splitting for a couple light backpack loads, but unfortunately one of the pieces I was splitting was full of carpenter ants in winter torpor, many dozens of which came spilling out onto the snow. I felt bad about it, since they were just trying to live their life (and no, carpenter ants brought into a house are not going to cause problems unless your house has an underlying moisture issue). So I put those pieces aside and only brought one backpack load home. The pieces were covered with snow and contained more moisture than I prefer wood to contain, so I set them on top of the woodstove to be dried out as I burned the last of the indoor dry wood supply.
This afternoon I took a rare daytime bath (rare at this time of year, at least), though I had to run the water slowly so the just-in-time electric water heater could get it to the right temperature. At this time of year, even on sunny days, there's just not enough hours of sunlight to raise water temperatures by that much.
We had lots of leftovers, so I didn't end up needing to prepare dinner tonight. I ate leftover orzo and some succotash Lynn had given us. As I was eating these things and watching Jeopardy! with Gretchen, a suddenly developed a cough that remained with me for the rest of the day and into the night. It reminded me a little of a cough Gregg seemed to have last night. It wasn't debillitating, but it would reassert itself every few minutes, usually so unexpectedly that Gregg was not always able to avoid coughing on the food. I wondered if he'd coughed on that succotash.
After Jeopardy!, we watched the third episode of Pluribus, and it was in this episode that I was reminded of something new in our current culture that is very similar to the "hive mind" exhibited by nearly all the extras (and some of the main characters) of Pluribus. Their depersonalized all-knowingness is very similar to a large language model chatbot like ChatGPT. You can ask them anything, and they usually have an answer they will cheerfully provide. What's a little different, though, is that they will also provide humans who are not part of the hive mind any real-world services they request, such as a fully-stocked grocery store or, in a weird twist in this episode, a hand grenade. (This might've been a bit of a send-up of the infamous occasions when ChatGPT has offered information that its developers have worked hard to get it not to offer, such as advice for how to commit suicide.)
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