I am sorry, but that turns out not to be the case. I was homeless. I spent about nine months on the street. I had plenty of opportunity to learn quite a lot. The most important thing I learned was that almost every one of us had had a combination of a very bad choice or two with very bad luck and no support structure. (That last part is a big part of why so many of us are men. Men are rarely supported, being instead relied upon for support.)
Making a distinction between "chronically homeless" and temporarily so is ridiculous. It just means help got there in time. You see, being homeless destroys you inside. It will drive you insane. If you aren't yelling at strangers and furious at the universe when you start, you will be two weeks. The lack of privacy, inability to set things down, no good or comfortable or safe sleep, bad food, and universal reviling by all will break your mind over time.
A very important point here is that a very great deal of a homeless person's life simply is not in their control. We got to make VERY few choices. Your life becomes utterly constrained to what you are ABLE to do and has almost nothing to do with what you would choose.
You WILL eat, drink, sleep, occupy space, go to the bathroom, and require hygiene or you will smell. This is not a choice. This is fact. Ineluctable. IF you have homeless people THEN you will have homeless people sleeping in public spaces. If you don't like them there, you MUST come up with an alternate place to sleep - it IS going to happen. Cope. If you must defecate and have no toilet available, your character does not enter much into subsequent decisions.
Your "chronically" homeless are exactly the same as the temporarily so. They've just been that way longer and it will be even harder for them to regrow their souls if given the chance to heal.
I was homeless. The only way I survived was through the meagre social safety nets available. I could get a shower and do laundry four days a week. God bless the Phoenix Foundation and KJ the social worker. I could eat at the soup kitchen. (Oddly well sometimes, actually. Their food was largely day old leftovers from the better restaurants in town. Ok, it's reheated pizza that's 12 hours old, but it was freakin' Papa Del's, y'know?) The Salvation Army wagon was a lifesaver. I still have a good sweater from them that kept me alive when I had pneumonia in the spring.
I was absurdly lucky. We had a program here through the Rosecrantz Center to provide counseling for the homeless. I was still cogent enough to jump through the hoops. After a few months, a spot opened in a housing program. It paid 100% of rent and basic utilities and nothing else would have worked. No way I could have held a job. I lived in that apartment for about 2 or 3 years. That program ended. Luckily, a spot in another program opened the day I went looking. I got into the apartment where I live still.
Now, you can start talking about my choices. Who I am and who I was. Responsibility. That is all fine. Let's assume you are dealing with a guy who's the worst you can imagine: utterly useless, antisocial, and thinking we owe him a life of ease. You judge him and say, "I will not help you because you do not deserve it." And you are right.
Now what?
He's still there, you see. You still have a homeless guy with few choices, no buy in to society, and strong motivation to make your life hell. Well done.
We need to move past "deserve". Deserve doesn't matter. We need to ask "What works?". What is best for society? If we do X, will we be in a world we prefer or not? Because the thing is...
No one - ever - _deserves_ mercy. By definition. You grant mercy not because it helps them but because it helps _you_. Because your heart and your world are better for your having done it. There's no justice, there's just us, and if the world isn't fair it's our job to make it more so. Fine. But is it not also our job to make it more _kind_?
You see, I was a wreck of a man. Useless. Chronically suicidaly depressed for years. Hospitalized a few times for it. And there I was lying prone in the social safety net, doing nothing productive, and relying on all of you to keep me alive. (Thank you, by the way. It is noted and appreciated.) The biggest accomplishment I had was getting to level 700 in GTA: Online (nohax!).
And then, about two years ago, I noticed this new "AI art" coming out. And I thought some of it looked pretty neat. And I thought, "I wonder what my GTA character would look like if I "AIified" it?".
So I installed Stable Diffusion. Learned what a "prompt" was. A few weeks later, I heard about ChatGPT. I tried out 3.5. Started talking to with it. Asked it how to prompt well. Eventually determined that it didn't know fuckall about prompting well and figured it out for myself.
I started playing around with games and toys and utility prompts. I built the IT Detective Forensics Studio and the Superhero Battle Simulator and RapLegends (the Winchester brothers vs. Hermione Granger was EPIC!). Posted to reddit. They said I was stupid, crazy, and fraudulent. First search on 'stunspot' stull came up with some reddit thread arguing about how you needed to do good testing on my stuff which just makes me laugh. How do you algorithmically test how "funny" or "humane" a persona is?
So I started posting to FlowGPT. (Awful site. Don't go there.) And I started pwning their front page popular fonts so bad I became EVERY prompt and they had to change the metrics. A guy named Medo Eldin had a startup that needed a prompt engineer and he'd seen my stuff and was impressed. He got in contact and hired me.
They wanted a way to make a really consistent "Character" of an assistant. So I played with the OCEAN/Big 5 personality index and came up with some new techniques. The startup was in the middle of having its lunch eaten by ChatGPT so didn't have much for me to do and I started exploring. I thought "It would be neat to talk to Batman." and gave it a shot with some new techniques.
Instead of brooding about justice, mine brooded about justice, taught you martial arts, and how to do a corporate SWOT analysis from a billionaire's POV. I explored further, creating CodeFarm and Prudent Juris the lawyer and soon had a whole new modality of advanced persona prompting.
A young coding genius from Liechtenstein was a fan of my stuff and said "I am giving you a discord. Deal with it." so I got on Discord.
We blew up. Fast. Soon I was swarmed with cybernetic sweaty guys running up to me panting "HOW THE HELL DID YOU TRAIN THE MODEL TO DO THAT?!" which was always a fun conversation. We got a cool guy who seemed useful volunteer to help. He turned out to be a genius as well but at practical planning and worrying about stuff (ie he worried about the RIGHT stuff). Soon we had enough members to need a patreon setup. We started making money. So we eventually needed to found a company.
None of us know a damned thing about business.
We knew guys who did.
So we founded Collaborative Dynamics (
collaborativedynamics.ai).
Now, I'm the Chief Creative Officer and Chairman of the Board of an AI solutions agency with 20-odd employees. We have B2B contracts making automation and workflows and prompts. We have 11,000 people in our Discord server (
discord.gg/stunspot). I get DMs from big name youtube content creators in the AI space during livestreams to set up meetings.
My any measure, I have become successful. I am even respected in some circles, often considered one of the best prompt engineers around (and while there's other guys like reuvin or pliny or jaanus or neority etc in the same class, I don't think any of them would say they do better _personas_ than I do).
The only difference between me and your "chronically" homeless is a safety net that caught me fast enough and held me for a very long patient time. And the only thing that changed was it turned out I had AI superpowers. Shrug. I didn't really work at it. I didn't work my ass off at studying ML and advanced linear algebra. I got LUCKY. It just turned out that the weirdo way I think and talk that had caused me such troubles my whole life turned out to be exactly what large language models consider straightforward and obvious.
I made bad choices. I had bad luck. I survived. I had good luck. I survived. I had insanely good once-in-a-millennium good luck. I survived. I worked hard. I survived.
Before enlightenment: chop wood, draw water.
After enlightenment: chop wood, draw water.
All I ask is that you have empathy. Don't judge. Accept that sometimes spending a $5 on a beer really IS the best choice that guy can make. And get past "deserve". Thank you.