At Home

We’re spending the summer at home. It’s too hot and also too expensive in the high season. We sold our house in Zurich so that we could even afford this whole thing here. With part of the proceeds, we bought a small apartment in Oberägeri, because it is beautiful up here in the foothills of the Alps.

We’re enjoying the quiet days and recovering from the strain of travel. Charly is also enjoying being at home to the fullest:

Someone once voiced concern that I might get bored as a retiree. Well, if I read this post, it does seem that loafing around isn’t doing me much good after all.

That may also be because I spent two weeks flat on my back with shingles. Shingles is quite an interesting illness, a kind of greeting from childhood. Anyone who once had chickenpox, and in my generation that is pretty much everyone, carries the virus for life. If the immune system is weakened, the virus can spread again. Well, since all the tests and scans have classified me as hopelessly healthy, the only possible trigger is getting older, or the stress that comes with early retirement life. So I just spent a bit of time around the house, which is perfectly fine too.

I also had the chance to take a private sightseeing flight with a friend. The poor guy has a pilot’s license and has to complete his required hours every year. So we quickly flew from laughter to the Aletsch Glacier and back. Spectacular!

I’m terribly proud that I didn’t throw up.

Then I went hiking. A good chance to play with my new camera gear. From Zuger Alpli, the route goes over the Gnipen to the Wildspitz and back down the ladder: Gnipen-Wildspitz

Steep little patch.

We also took the opportunity to visit various relatives, friends, former colleagues, and so on. That was lovely. I write a lot here about learning to sail and traveling, but the hardest part of our plans is certainly leaving behind all the people we care about. But that’s simply unavoidable if you want to do something like this. It is also the main reason why we will definitely stay in the Mediterranean for the first few years: that way we can always get back quickly for a visit, and hopefully we will then be able to welcome visitors ourselves one day too.

I also played around with LLMs and built a social media machine. Anyone following us on Facebook or Instagram was able to join in my experiments directly. The machine takes a blog post like this one, breaks it apart, and automatically creates social media posts for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Media, Substack, all fully automated.

LLMs are absolutely fantastic, what an incredible tool. A huge step in the industrial revolution. With LLMs, almost anyone can tap into the full potential of information technology. Until now, to do that, you had to organize an entire room full of people like me, extremely expensive and exhausting. Trust me, I did that for 25 years.

At the same time, all of this is frightening, because there is a good chance that it is a gigantic investment bubble that, when it bursts, will drag the economy and probably a few states down with it. But that is not the worst-case scenario. Worse will come if the fanatical tech bros from the Valley are right about their scaling law and reach Artificial Super Intelligence. Then humans will no longer be the crown of creation and rulers of this planet, and the outcome is uncertain. Nice to know that only the very best are working on it and everything is under control:

Of course, there would also be a positive scenario: AI will massively accelerate research and development. Diseases will finally be wiped out, work will become more or less voluntary, aging will be defeated, and energy will be abundant. Fortunately, we have elected competent and far-sighted leaders to the highest offices in the world, who will make sure that all of this is steered in a productive direction.

*This blog post has been automatically translated by a Large Language Model.