chatting with a chat gpt major

down the 405, learning about poker

fresh faced Asian kid with ear pods and a small day pack going from westwood to the airport. he popped in the back.

was it rush hour traffic? never heard of the word.

if you dont believe in traffic you wont end up in it.

if you have driven to LAX on a friday afternoon either on or off the 405 several hundred times, you know it's not a big deal.

sorta like the reverse gangbangs where the oiled up Black guy has to please a half dozen sassy ladies, of all shapes. how does he do it?

the same way you eat at thanksgiving.

slowly and with a smile.

Waze was panicking by showing me thick red lines no matter which path, so i asked the youngster if he cared if i got off the freeway. he was all, im running on a tight schedule so i trust you.

trust? me? so you're the one?

trust is a huge thing in my life. i feel like as nutty as i may come across in this or that, when it comes to Work imma get the job done in a professional manner all while trying to be the Best.

believe it or not i was once refused work because someone i had worked with previously said i was: Too Wild West.

i asked her, was i too wild west when i worked with you at that fancy shop downtown for four years?

no.

was i too wild west when i worked for that black-tie organization in beverly hills for six years?

no.

then can you please tell whoever is disparaging my good name to ask those who have stood in my presence in a professional setting, especially during those special moments where the shit went down.

did i panic? did i say hey lets do something totally insane? or did i fix the problem quickly an honorably?

in my heart im wild, guilty, as fuck. but IRL im a midwest Christian in first gear.

i never got that gig. which was why i was exiting the 405 in "rush hour" weaving through culver city chatting up the leaders of the next generation

instead of making six figures at a nine to five.

honestly, fine.

his name was keith. chinese. fixin to graduate with a computer science degree. minor in business.

do you know much about chatGPT, i queried hoping the boy could help me with my latest obsession that could answer questions in great detail and create lego versions of weird scenes inside the gold mine of my mind

he tapped his earbud to pause the blackpink tune and hesitantly said yes.

oh great. do you use it a lot?

i shouldn't say i do, but i do, he acknowledged, putting down his phone.

noting his strange attitude, i asked is it shameful to use?

no, it's... then he came out with it... actually i use it quite a lot.

of course, i said, it's a powerful tool. why wouldnt you? what do you mostly use it for?

it's replaced Google for me, he said. i study it. i hope to work on it later professionally. but also, to be honest, sometimes i use it in my relationship.

say what?

weird story but i was seeing a sorority girl. she was confusing. so id put her texts into GPT and ask it how i should respond. i was actually surprised at the direction it told me to go. and also how it was able to settle her down when she would get upset with me.

are you still with her? did it work?

no, it was too much. ive been with my new girlfriend for a year now. she lives in the Bay. thats where im heading this weekend.

we talked about true love, the pros and cons of long distance relationships during college; and even having a girlfriend at all while in the quiet orgy of college life, especially in southern california where the babes literally fall from the trees like coconuts. ok maybe not literally. but omg.

i gave him my advice: don't have a girlfriend while in college.

keith asked: did you have one in college?

next question, i joked. actually i had several, i laughed. i still talk to a couple of them now, decades later. but thats how special they were, they broke through the rule.

traffic sucked but not for us because like Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, i sorta knew which streets would snag us and which would let us flow.

fortunately there are tons of flights from LA to Frisco, so if he missed his Southwest to SFO at 6, there'd be another at 6:20, so i didnt sweat it, but i was still running yellow lights, switching lanes, trying all the angles i could for this kid because he was good. you could tell.

and who among us doesnt wanna make out with a twenty year old coed in the back seat in east palo alto as the fog rolls in and the windows steam up and she says i missed you so and you say omg i gotta fart hold up and she says keith and you say seriously hold on i had a suspicious burrito at lax

he told me that during his four years in college he watched how OpenAI and the GPT quickly swept over the focus of his computer science major where students who once thought they were preparing to do work in one sector of CS were almost all shifting into AI

keith said: i feel really badly for CS grads who got their degrees a few years ago because now they have to pivot without the benefit of school, by themselves. and it's not an easy pivot.

it's not? ChatGPT can't help them learn?

it can, but just like in any other situation, in order to get the right answer you have to know the correct question.

siri play jeopardy by Greg Kihn i said and educated the lad on the '83 hit from the band who i believe was from no cal but he looked at me like i was a martian.

so what do you wanna do with this kickass education youre getting?

i dont know.

my son, lets review: you're an asian man from California that made it into UCLA. that's not easy.

well... he murmured.

oh youre telling me they just open the doors wide to every Asian kid on the honor roll? i thought they tried to cap the number of Californians exactly like you from getting in unless they had a 4 point gazillion gpa and saved a few lives with mouth to mouth and were the lead cellist in the jazz band. am i wrong?

he lol-ed and said you're not wrong.

ok so you must be special in some way. and you made it into the school with the most applications of anywhere in the world. and i can see part of why: youre a bright boy with a good heart. so lets be real for the next 9 to 10 minutes. what will you do with this?

probably get a masters and a doctorate.

yeah yeah yeah, but for what. whats your dream? you don’t buy the drill, you’re buying the hole. we're here for a blink of an eye, what do you want to leave behind? what’s the keith-sized hole?

some people think. he was that person. either he was stumped or he didn't want to tell me a deep dark secret, so he turned the tables by asking me, was your dream to drive for uber in your 50s?

it could have been seen as a diss but i didnt think so.

my dream was and is to play the hand i was dealt the best i can in order for the most amount of people to benefit from me being here during this hiccup of time.

oh you play poker he asked while adjusting his posture? thats where i met my girlfriend.

your boo’s that good at poker? i asked.

id say shes better than most women. definitely, he said proudly.

i dont know a lot about poker, i admitted, but i heard that a lot of it is acting. true?

true, he said. it’s a combination of math... so like comp sci + math nerds like me, we are always running the numbers in our heads. then you have the communication and business majors and theyre reading the other players' faces.

obviously youre a computer guy, i said, but are you any good at reading other people too?

yeah, he said quietly. it's systematic. patterns. but a lot of it is non verbal. so i can look at someones face and i can tell if theyre strong or weak, in general. i can tell if theyre confident.

a weak poker player isn't going to win a lot of hands over time?

my man took out his ear buds and placed them in their case, perked up and said, theres a saying in poker that you can play for five years and lose money even if you’re playing well, because theres so much variance. you know?

im a poetry major, bro. i dont know. if i lost money for five years, i would think i sucked at poker. i’d just spend my gambling money on booze.

and thats what the saying is about, you can be unlucky for an entire year or two even if you aren’t doing anything wrong.

this is tough for me i told him because i was raised to believe there is no luck. theres no luck in computer science. or math. one plus one is always two. theres no luck in how handsome you and i turned out.

but theres luck in poker, he said. a lot of it. you can get in positions where maybe you have a 60% favorable hand over the others. but if you're unlucky at that moment, you will lose that hand ten times in a row. so if each hand was $100, you've just lost $1,000 because of a streak of bad luck.

so i asked this brainiac probably what you'd ask: can a wise poker player know when they are in a bad luck period compared to playing like ass?

yes. poker is really an emotional game. so when you go all in and if you are a 60 percent favorite or a 70 percent favorite and you lose, you have to tell yourself i played well. that was bad luck. even if that happens 10 times, 20 times, and you are losing thousands, he said, you have to ask yourself how will you be able to pick yourself up? and that is what creates a strong player.

ok but how do you know you played well if you keep losing? i asked.

when it’s over you can see the hand that beat you. you can tell if you were duped or if the winner just drew great cards and it was luck.

ahhhhh i said, not really understanding but fuck it we were almost there.

i feel like in todays age everything is so competitive, he continued. sports has all these buzzer beaters, overtime games, extra innings, shoot outs. it's a thin margin between winners and losers and a lot of what decides it is the mental game, which gets overlooked. in the past you could just train your ass off and be a little quicker, a little more accurate. but today everyone can do that. they forget about the mind.

you raise a great point, i agreed, as we drove past the In N Out next to the airport. youre too young to remember, but when i was in college, fat guys were in major league baseball, vlade divac smoked cigarettes in the tunnel at Staples Center in between periods of laker games. it's a higher level of play now. and like, your major, AI technologies and shit. things change quick. hang in there.

i will. my dad is trying to catch up, he's an engineer too.

god bless your dad. so come on, tell me: what do you wanna do when you get all this studying out of the way? what do you want to do with it?

i told you, i’ll probably get a masters or phd

ok but for what? what do you want to do with all of those things once youve pleased your parents?

he thought longer and said: i want to be a VC. i want to help companies grow who wouldn't typically get funding.

my hero.