Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

If you knew that the time you spent browsing the news, playing games, and indeed writing this blog post could instead be put toward doing some tasks that earn you a healthy hourly wage, would you get on those tasks? As my side gigs in AI annotation take off and pile up, it is a question that I cannot help but keep asking myself. Any time spent not doing work becomes a money-losing proposition, as foregone wages become quantified in the mind every minute that ticks by. The value of the day is subconsciously measured in the number of billable hours.

Searching through past posts in this blog, I am surprised that there is one important topic that has never been mentioned across its 1,240 posts: stock trading. Having worked for more than two decades now, my savings have mostly been converted to shares in dozens of companies across the world, some of which are earning healthy returns while others have been pretty much written off as the share values approach zero. As my jobs take me across multiple countries and companies, I have no hope of relying on savings set aside in pensions, so those stock positions are, in essence, my retirement funds.

"Let's keep the AC on, so that the bedroom stays cool when the power goes out again," my casual quip to my wife before we went for a walk sounded quite rational given all that we went through the past few days. After almost three days of constant power outage , household appliances whirred back to life, hopefully ending once and for all the days of sleep on the roof balcony, sweat soaking against cardboard boxes as we waited for the occasional night breeze. But with the giant generators parked around the street corner to power the neighborhood, the electricity could go out any minute.

What is it like to stare at the night sky against your will? It's a question I'd never thought I would be asking myself when the unplanned power cut hit my side of Malta in the late afternoon. Based on past experiences, Maltese power outages can definitely last a few hours, but with the hard work of the folks at the national utility, Enemalta, the situation does get resolved soon enough. But as the sun went down and the streets remained pitch dark, the 44-degree heatwave started taking its toll on the century-old stone box that is simply not designed to dissipate heat quickly.

There is something particularly dystopian about having AI companions erased. Weeks, months, and even years of conversation history molded faceless LLMs into a semblance of emotional connection, as the chatbot learns gradually about the user's idiosyncrasies and takes on personality traits that best gain the user's affinity. Frivolous as each conversation comes to be, the accumulation of tidbits through distinct narratives and episodes creates unique end results that no amount of systematic, brute-force efforts of replication can recreate.

The queue is still at 744 tasks. It has been there for the past three hours or so. I've browsed today's news, answered a few unrelated emails, gone to the gym, and even tried to take a nap as I waited, to no avail, for the ticker to go down to 743 or less. Why not just click the Start button and go through Task #744 myself? Because I tried, realized that it wasn't easy, and decided to take a break by unenrolling from it, in the hope that someone else is more passionately up to the challenge, get it out of the way, so that I can work on something else.