Great segment from John Oliver on the continuing dangers of AI around mental health, suicide risk, and plain old delusion–and the absolutely sociopathic responses of the AI CEOs.
Great segment from John Oliver on the continuing dangers of AI around mental health, suicide risk, and plain old delusion–and the absolutely sociopathic responses of the AI CEOs.
A really interested tidbit from Joel Salatin about how North America before the Europeans actually produced more food than it does today, even with the various chemicals.
CNBC newsletter:
Musk’s Tesla is beta testing an in-vehicle version of xAI’s Grok chatbot. First rolled out last year, it allows drivers to give voice commands to their car’s navigation system.
Meanwhile, my thirty-year old pickup truck has no power windows, locks, mirrors, or seat. The radio/cassette player doesn’t work–and I may not fix it. It doesn’t get in a hurry to go anywhere, which is increasingly to my taste.
The Louvin Brothers, “Dying from Home, and Lost.” The harmony on this one really reminds me of my childhood church, which I wrote about here. That album, by the way, is one banger after another.
It’s ridiculous, really, that I haven’t read any of the Foxfire books yet. I’ve checked out from the library an ebook edition of The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cooking to get me started and I’m going to keep an eye out for used copies of the main series.
This might interest a cross-section of folks here: A Greek Orthodox priest has released “Paradise Metal.” From the review site: “microtonal Byzantine modes with DIY electronic modernism,” “sublime new age ambient to shoe-gazy basslines and mountaintop guitar shreds to techno incantations.” Bandcamp
Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:
We do not easily remember peasants. The realities of their lives are a dim presence in the historical record. We catch only glimpses in the great obscurity that is the centuries-old peasant past of Europe. The first is from the Poland of a century ago:
Every field knows its owner, the Earth is indignant at every crime committed on its face. The moon watches and prayers are still said to it. The stars answer a woman or man who knows the right way to ask them. Nothing bad should be said near water. The wind listens and talks. … While animals do not know as much as man they know things he does not, the properties of plants and substances for instance, which are shown to men by animals. Some animals understand and condemn the immoral acts of man, the bee will never stay with the thief, the stork and the swallow leave a farm when an evil deed has been committed there. … The lark, which soars so high, is the favorite bird of the Angels; during a storm they hold it in their hands, and when, with every lightning flash the heaven opens, it is allowed to look in.
This way of understanding the Earth and the heavens is part of a past we have now lost, lost in less than a single lifetime, lost with barely a sign of its loss in a present that is obsessed with itself.
(In case you’re wondering, the quote within the quote is from Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.)
It’s clean sweep week here in town—the time of year when the city will, free of charge, pick up anything you put on the curb. Rachel said she’s already seen a couple of pickup trucks roaming the neighborhood trying to beat the city to some treasures. That will absolutely be me someday.
Thinking about Johnny Cash this morning brought to mind this from Over the Rhine: “Earthbound Love Song.” 🎵
Johnny Cash, “Satisfied Mind” 🎵
Finished reading Sacasus’ “AI as Christian Heresy.” His final paragraph clarified something that’s been banging around in my head:
What would it mean to render to the machine what is the machine’s? To regain a sense of what it is to be a person, coupled with a subversive practice of the same, within a techno-economic system whose default settings incline us to forget this vital fact about ourselves and our neighbours? To reclaim a confidence in what we can do ourselves and for one another in the face of an array of technologies, services, and institutions that market themselves under the implicit sign of our ostensible helplessness and the banner of a debilitating liberation? Let the machine have everything that is stamped with its spirit. Let us keep everything else.
In my day job, AI will not be an optional tool for long. In fact, I suspect I’ll end up being the person my department semi-officially appoints to find ways to use AI in our work. I’m not anti-AI; in fact, I’ve found good uses for it. I am, however, deeply cautious and skeptical. With all of this in mind, I’ve been thinking about guardrails around AI both in my own life and at work.
One good use I’ve found is what I’ve characterized as “letting the machines talk to the machines.” Or, in Sacasas’ phrase, “render to the machine what is the machine’s.” Microsoft Copilot is really good at finding ways of accomplishing tasks using previously unknown to me features of Excel. It’s also good at taking a stream of consciousness knowledge dump and turning it into coherent process documentation.
This is Machine work. My foreseeable future is, to use Kingsnorth’s phrasing, as a cooked barbarian. Using machines to do Machine work is, to my mind, letting the machine “have everything that is stamped with its spirit.” In the spirit of taking the devil’s money to do God’s work, I am rendering to the Machine so that I may have more mental space to do what is truly mine to do, which is work opposed to the Machine.
Excellent quote on Todd’s blog on how the rich (and genAI users!) are harmed by lack of pushback.
Robin Sloan’s magic postcards are cool. I’ve always thought QR codes are a great technology for the interface of physical and digital. Once I homebrewed a beer and attached a label with a QR code linking to this hidden page on my site and gave them to friends. Turns out no one noticed!
Economic theory tells us the stock market is a future earnings prediction machine. But have you ever seen anything more wildly distractable as the stock market? If it was actually pricing the future, it would not flail about with every bit of breaking news.
The Green Man’s Patch
That, by the way, is the name Rachel and I have settled on for our yard/garden/micro-homestead/thing. Thanks to John for the “patch” inspiration.
All the serviceberry trees are now planted. The one to the right is in the former location of an ornamental sand cherry tree we planted several years ago in our normie yard period. I kept a chunk of the sand cherry trunk to see if I can carve something from it.
Firewood
I’ve mentioned before that we’ll be getting a woodstove in the next few weeks—so we need a better way to store firewood than our current method of stacking it on the ground. I initially planned on a lean-to shed but Rachel and I started looking a bit more closely today and realized the location wouldn’t work well. So we decided on two smaller platforms, which will actually give us more cubic feet of space with a more manageable stack height. You have to get creative sometimes when you’re working with 0.14 acres.
Today I got the platform built for driveway stack. Tomorrow evening I’ll add some deck boards gapped about an inch apart to encourage airflow. Next weekend I’ll build the platform in the side yard. Ralph decided she wanted to be in the platform photo.
This morning, Rachel and I were talking about home. We often talk about plans and projects, and what we’ve built here over the years; sometimes, though, we talk about home in its hidden sense, the feeling that lies behind our patch of ground in the plain light of day.
What is home in the hidden sense for you? Does it align with your patch of ground?
When the two senses of home align, that is a sign of an integrated life. In such a life, there is no need for somewhere else. Other places may be fun and interesting, but they are not required.
There are many reasons why a person’s sense of home may be misaligned. War, addiction, poverty, violence, and other abuses can rightly, or at least understandably, drive people from home. People in these situations need help to find a new, integrated life.
At the same time, so many of us have been taught to be unhappy at home. Ambition, greed, entertainment, and lust wrongly drive people from home. The patch of ground for these folks is utilitarian. Life, as they see it, is elsewhere—at work, on vacation, in imagined worlds.
Maybe the desire for an integrated life is not present in everyone. Maybe some folks have other worthy aspirations. For me, however, the only place I need to be is home, in the warm heart of my world.
One of the prettiest dogwoods I’ve ever seen, across the street from the credit union.
Rachel got a nice picture of our chives in bloom. Edible and pretty!
A survey of the fruit on the Green Man Micro Homestead (just made that up! maybe a bit overstated?):
So they’re remaking Little House on the Prairie. Come on, guys, we already have a bad version of Little House on the Prairie: the whole second half of Little House on the Prairie.
When you situate yourself in a nexus of relationships–ancestors, community, spirits, nonhumans, and more–your role in the intergenerational gift economy becomes clearer. When this role becomes clearer, your responsibility as both inheritor and steward becomes clearer. Your responsibilities become your sacred task. They are no less tasks for being sacred, but the context matters. There are some responsibilities I have that are not easy. When I settle into the nexus, though, the clarity keeps me going.
To deny or ignore this nexus of relationships is what cultural critics have called the atomization of the individual. It has many effects, one of which is perpetual adolescence. Taking up your role in the intergenerational gift economy is what constitutes adulthood. The person who refuses their role in the nexus of relationships also refuses the task of adulthood, and so spends their life in pursuits of childish things.
Nate Hagens has put out an excellent three video series on the role oil plays in our modern world system, and how this might play out into the future. 1 | 2 | 3
Rachel and I aren’t preppers but at this point it’s looking like good sense to stock up on some staples.
A few small tasks completed on the F150 this week:
I had hoped that replacing the door striker on the driver side would fix the not-fully-shutting problem. It didn’t. Looks like it may be that the door hinge pin and bushing are worn out, making the door sag. Thankfully the replacement pins and bushings are inexpensive—though taking the door off looks like a job.
Garden
I mentioned earlier this week that Rachel has bought some new trees for the yard. We planted the juniper that day. On Saturday, we planted the first of the three serviceberry trees. The call-before-you-dig folks still need to mark our tree plat before we can plant the other two serviceberries.
By the way, what do you call that strip of ground between the sidewalk and the road? We call it the tree plat but the internet tells me that’s very much a minority position. Apparently some people call it a “nature strip” (ugh, so many problems with that term) or a “tree strip.” As I was sitting on the front porch contemplating this question, the word “verge” bubbled up into my memory. I actually like that one.
Anyway, so trees will be planted soon. We also built a string trellis system for Rachel’s heirloom tomatoes. Those things have broken every system we’ve tried to order their vigorous growth. We’ll see how this one does.
The lilacs have been perfuming our house all weekend. Glorious.
If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
Many times over the years I have heard that there must be a necessary delineation between spouses. They each must have their own identity, interests, and ways of seeing the world. We are warned that a complete identification would annihilate one’s own self-identity, which is essential for well-being.
This is the language of psychological safety. There is no safety in love.
If Rachel dies before me, the loss will be total and irrecoverable. I have seen in the experience of others that it is survivable, but it is no less total. Does this mean I have no interests or life apart from her? Of course I do. I have interests she does not share. I like things she does not like.
But I do not hold these things back from her. I do not reserve some portion for myself. All that is mine is hers; all that is hers is mine. There may be areas of my life that she doesn’t have a lot of interest in visiting, but she is no less queen over that territory.
A great deal of trust and no small amount of time is needed to establish such a love. It may or may not happen; if there is a formula, I do not know it. If you find the possibility of such love before you, however, it will not tolerate reservations. There is no safety in love.
Garden phlox is always one of the first things to bloom:
Bleeding Hearts. This is a plant passed down through three generations of women in my wife’s family:
Lilacs are just starting to bloom. In the next day or so there will be enough for me to harvest for syrup.
Honeysuckle. This was one of my requests for the garden because I associate it with summer in my childhood.
We got this gooseberry three years ago but it never seemed to take off for its first two years in our front yard. Last fall, Rachel moved it to the back and its already grown more this year than it did in the first two years.
