Usually, I write Wattpads as these super cumbersome, largely unedited essays, but given the time constraints of travelling, I'm going to write them as these aphoristic, largely unrelated blurbs.
In 24 hours, I will be in Montréal, my third trip there since I first visited almost a year ago in September 2025 - possibly my last before I become a resident. Right now, I have knots in my stomach, because today I'm going to tell Ewan that I intend on moving out of our apartment by October, which gives me the dread and humiliation of selling Milky-White for five beans - the magical nature of which remains unclear. This has been maybe the biggest ongoing thing in my life since we last spoke: the project/prospect of me moving to Montréal. It's gone through what feels like several thousand trials and tribulations: me versus my finances, me versus R, me versus my parents, me versus my speculative professional life, me versus my laziness and/or untreated mental illness(es), me versus l'Office québécois de la langue française, me versus myself, etc. But, as of the end of this summer - which I hope is the last I spend largely unemployed - all lights are green now. I'm cool with everyone again. I'm still deathly fucking nervous about it all the time, because I've never made this big a decision that was this risky on my own. My gut tells me it is the right decision, and I'll come out of it some kind of better, more assured, more independent person, all risks considered.
Our argument about AI basically
Rachel is more pro-AI than I could ever be. She uses it constantly and for every conceivable reason. In fact, she is the one who introduced me to a lot of this stuff. She occasionally works as a freelance language model trainer, where she gets to test AI models that are still in development from OpenAI and Anthropic. This sounds very prestigious and scary to the people we know, but she found it on Indeed, and it just involves her effectively solving puzzles on her laptop, which, for me personally, sucks a lot of the drama that comes to my head whenever I tell people she's a freelance AI trainer.
She is very serious about the NDAs she has to sign, and won't tell me much about them besides the names of some of these models, which mildly annoys me because I have nothing but suspicion for these corporations, but I honestly think it's kind of cute she can be so intent on following rules and instructions. She is capable of this almost frenetic degree of rigour. It's why her LSAT scores were so high.
I've been wondering recently if AI will ever drive a wedge between us. We rarely fundamentally disagree about anything (besides the one time we got in an argument about whether or not a friend of mine was exploiting a mutual friend of ours by virtue of him being their landlord, which I came to the defense of landlordism, and subsequently recanted when I discovered a toilet brush covered in long-dried feces of mysterious origin that the landlords of the Plateau place left in the bathroom). That's not to say we don't often see the world differently - we frequently do. But, arguably, the greatest strength of our relationship is that we're willing to talk about anything for any amount of time in any way conceivable without reserve. She'll humour anything. But, when she thinks she's right, especially about something intellectual, you'll have to pry her position from her cold, dead hands before she concedes. One time, we were at this dinner party, because we are at the age and in the millieu where we do shit like that, and we argued for three unsteady hours about the mathematical definition of infinity, and she was totally wrong, but when one scores like 179 on the LSAT without even studying and grew up with an notoriously domineering father, you can meaningfully drag out an argument like that to being that long. She's recently been talking a lot about that OpenAI and Hugging Face thing about the supposedly autonomous AI agents hacking into that German website. Her thing about it is that she views the development of GAI as being this race towards creating "philosophical zombies," where whether they're actually sentient and intelligent is irrelevant and unresolvable, because there is no fixed definition of sentience and intelligence to begin with, and AI will eventually be able to perfectly mimic whatever those two things normally look like to us. I find this interesting for reasons I'll explain later, but I am way more sympathetic to the notion that this hacking scandal was manufactured by OpenAI to sell more subscriptions, which she isn't at all.
