markjgsmith

2024/06/17 #

• Unbelievably bad day of being constantly warpathed, starved and thirsted yesterday. I think I've traced it back to an incident at a food vendor around 2 days ago. Not a street stand, but a vendor operating out of the front of a actual house. I've been there many times before, they have always seemed nice. As I arrived and stood waiting to say what I wanted, the older chap that works there walked out front to attend to some food that was cooking.

  Before I had even said anything at all, he belched out at me 'Pay' with a strange smirk on his face. I had no idea what he was on about, perhaps he was having a bad day, I thought to myself. A few moments later the other slightly younger bloke asked if I wanted the take away dish I usually get, and I said yes and thank you. The other bloke then held up the coffee he was drinking and said 'coffee'. Then pointed at a coffee stand about 20 meters down the street, and uttered a somewhat malevolent and malicious sounding chuckle. I said that I don't drink coffee, which I don't. I then got the food and paid for it.

  I walked off down the street past the coffee stand, and shortly afterwards someone random started barking orders at me. 'Up!'. I was heading to a shop / caffee that I usually go to. The seating area is upstairs. Well basically ever since then that's when the tsunani of hate and ordering and general harrassment from the past few days started. And it's been rather epic, and not in a good way.

  Another manufactured situation to justify blamming me for everything again and again. Seems like it to me, especially since several of the harrassments since then, in totally different locations have involved people shouting 'Pay!' at me for absolutely no good reason that I could determine, even in places that had no shop or any commercial thing nearby.

  The food place btw is on the same street as the sandwich place that often creates problem situations that I've previously written about. There's something about that street, or perhaps it's just that here, every place eventually turns nasty. #

• There was an interesting discussion around AI & LLMs in the latest All-in podcast. Turns out many researchers that work on various media related projects routinely use LLMs to gather information. That is a new development, but the interesting thing is that they often have multiple LLMs open and run the query through all of them, then cross reference results in order to spot mistakes and hallucinations. #

• A lot of expats and long term travellers I've met over the past 10 years here in asia, told me that as a westerner you will never really be accepted here in asia. You will always remain a foreigner. Now that I've been here for many years, I totally see what they meant. It occured to me earlier how uterly alien to me this idea of not being accepted by a place was to me. In the places I grew up in the EU it was the complete opposite, it was a matter ov pride for both the natives and those arriving from abroad, that being accepted was possible, that you could really eventually feel good calling it your home. #