OFF BY ONE

I finally got around to re-assembling that phone yesterday, and it 
spurred me on to look into the 3G switch-off again. It turns out 
that my memory had slipped and it's June 2024 when Telstra are 
turning it off, not 2023. This is rather frustrating because 2023 
was well fixed in my head throughout all my fuss upgrading the 
mobile broadband modem a while ago (or maybe I was correct back 
then, and I've accidentally revised all my memories since?).

But it continues a trend that I've noticed increasingly lately that 
when I'm dead-set certain about a number in long-term memory, it 
usually turns out to be +/-1. Mind you this is only within the 
roughly four-didgit number range that I can reliably remember at 
all - I've got no idea of the number for that phone, for example, 
which is actually written on a sticker on the back (I only actually 
give out my landline number which I do remember with about 90% 
accuracy).

Short-term memory isn't always reliable either, but when it goes 
wrong it's just as often wrong by some huge margin. This does make 
things very tedious while packaging orders, because to some degree 
I can never really trust that I've got the quantities right. 
Double/triple checking is routine of course, I'll count things out 
and again while putting them in their postage bags/boxes, then 
before I seal those up I'll open them up again and count again, and 
if I'm in any doubt later it's not unknown that I'll open one again 
later to make sure (ideally I can just tell by measuring the 
weight, but unfortunately a lot of things that I sell are very 
light).

But then one nevertheless gets things like today where I have a 
message about one item in a pack of five being missing. It so 
happens that I remember that order exactly because new stock 
arrived at the same time and I spent most of the morning counting 
out the quantities of the associated items and adding them to 
stock, before finally taking that order out of said stock. I 
remember the bag, counting out the items in twos a couple of times 
to confirm (being very meticulous after all my counting experience 
that morning), and definitely having five. Now it could be that the 
recipient simply dropped one, or discovered they actually needed 
six and want to scam me into sending a freebie, and either way I'll 
be sending another to them anyway because "the customer is always 
right". But what frustrates the hell out of me is that I can't 
entirely believe that, because I know I make silly mistakes with 
short-term number/counting operations, and I also know that my 
long-term memory is often inaccurate even when I feel 100% certain 
about it.

Worse, if I did make that mistake, it throws into question my stock 
figures that I counted up just before processing that order. As 
much as I agonised over double-checking all of those, I did the 
exact same for that order. If I believe that I could have got the 
latter wrong, then my only option is to start again with all the 
stock for those items (around 200, in many variations).

So around and around I go, never sure of anything, never clear that 
I'm not unwittingly setting my whole business up for sudden 
collapse because I've descended unwittingly into a dream land where 
nothing truely matches reality. This is the fundamental frustration 
of life for me - if you can't believe that you've acheived what you 
think you've acheived then there's no point in trying to achieve 
anything.

Everyone dismisses this, and of course they have to, one can't 
survive while not attempting anything. I'm clearly just taking it 
all too seriously. But how can one be serious about anything 
without being serious about one's own reality?

In fact a lot of people take seriously things that I don't really 
trust as reality. I do tend to view everything through a scale of 
uncertainty, from the likely inaccuracies of news media reports to 
these fundamental things like my own memories. I'll say I'm sure 
about things, but that only really places them somewhere on the 
upper end of the scale. If I do find out that I'm mistaken about 
something like the 3G turn-off date, that's something I was "sure" 
about, but doesn't completely upset my faith in reality. The 
trouble is the things that I do mentally put up there right at the 
end of that scale, actually at "zero uncertainty". I think a lot of 
people would put much more stuff up there on that scale than I do, 
even stuff heard from unauthorative sources like friends and family 
who in this way I never really trust, but I still buy into this 
mythology that an end (actually either end) to the scale really 
exists.

One reason that I like computers and in turn electronics and 
machines in general is because they define certainty. Excluding 
physical faults, which is especially acheived with computers where 
all operations are in theory precisely predictable, machines define 
an operation which is entirely certain. This operation may be 
poorly understood by its creator, such that it doesn't always 
fulfil the intention, but the machine itself is certain. I'm 
especially interested in how to combine these two things - the 
uncertainty in the mind as well as in AI, with the certainty of 
machines. Thoughts along these lines have inspired some of my 
earlier posts like these:
gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2019-10-22The_Perfection_Machine.txt
gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2020-03-29Mind_Making.txt

Back sometime while I was at secondary school I even took it 
full-circle with my first (but not really finished or shown to 
anyone) movie plot idea. In it some bloke (effectively me, 
imagining that a few years later I worked as an IT guy at a 
university and leached off research material and old hardware) 
builds an artificial intelligence which hacks into social media and 
subtly manipulates society however he likes. Then it all goes 
wrong, the manipulation gets discovered, and society collapses in 
the face of scandals and general uncertainty about everything. But 
the guy manages to escape and gather up his own sort of cult, 
formed for him by the AI still expert at manipulating human minds. 
They end up arming themselves and eventually taking control of the 
country, but as this progresses the guy slowly realises that the AI 
has engineered all of it, and that he too was being manipulated by 
it all along. But was the AI simply fulfilling his original wish 
for power, or was it really the one that had taken power, through 
him and his manipulated view of reality?

I still think it's better than any of the movie plot ideas that 
I've pointlessly jotted down since. Maybe I'll try to turn it into 
something some day, but very high uncertainty on that.

 - The Free Thinker.