trail builder, timber faller, stone mason, wilderness zealot, literature enthusiast, and slightly better poet than rupi kaur
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Joined December 2010
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These people also abandoned their cat to the forest here. So by ironclad analogy I shall henceforth and forever assume anyone who doesn't landscape their property is a steaming pile of 💩
People we bought our house (on 4 acres) from spent 7 years there and planted nothing. Not one plant.
Been there about a month now and have put in about 3 dozen trees and shrubs and over 100 bulbs. And I am lamenting how little I have been able to accomplish.
Why would you buy a place like that and then just live inside on your iPad? Incomprehensible lifestyle.
What's worse is ppl are reading so much in the slop style & hearing it on YouTube it's changing our natural cadences & word choices to sound more like it. A grand homogenization accelerating.
The voice of AI is the whirr of the global Vitamix.
This writer who won a short story contest was accused by the Atlantic of using AI, and he has denied it.
Most people who hear about this probably won't go and actually READ the short story but you actually can (it's easy to find), and so I did.
Most of the time when someone is accused of using AI, we just tend to believe the accusation because (frankly) you can usually transparently tell it's written by AI.
Well, I don't think this story was written by AI. I'm personally very very sensitive to AI-generated writing (I hate it, I feel an almost visceral revulsion). The short story is objectively really really good and if it was written using AI, then it would mean that AI is leagues better at creative writing than we think it is.
I don't know what could have prompted anyone to even think it was written using AI, unless the journalist who leveled the accusation is one of those midwits who think anything "with lots of words" means it's AI-produced... but the journalist is a published writer herself and can presumably distinguish quality writing. The short story is clearly good writing.
(I recommend that you read it - it's not long, and it's a good story)
The journalist cited @Pangram, which I also generally trust, but either it still can't quite distinguish top-quality writing from AI drivel or I can't.
People we bought our house (on 4 acres) from spent 7 years there and planted nothing. Not one plant.
Been there about a month now and have put in about 3 dozen trees and shrubs and over 100 bulbs. And I am lamenting how little I have been able to accomplish.
Why would you buy a place like that and then just live inside on your iPad? Incomprehensible lifestyle.
"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings."
Fair warning. Somebody pulls that shid near my hydrangeas I will personally lead the anti-nerd genocide.
Over 10k acres of new public land in Ohio just locked in.
Nominal cost, and much higher future revenues from harvest contracts plus hunting and fishing licenses etc than the $3 per acre in tax they had been getting.
Great model for putting formerly abused semi-abandoned private lands under healthy management and opening access to the public. It's how Eastern States can win back public land.
"Your universe has no meaning to them... they will make a fire from your beautiful oak door."
Vaguely related. Toronto is spectacularly weird. Like vast swaths of it are inhabited almost exclusively by wealthy South Asians and their African Immigrant servant underclass.
You go there knowing it is highly "multicultural" but it's not so in the way NYC is, or even London, it's astounding really.
Big box store apartheid
Americans across the spectrum have their differences but also a lot in common culturally. The differences among large factions of the Canadian population are insane. I can't imagine they hold together as a country even another 20 years. One minor economic depression and they're toast particularly in the face of this deliberately antagonizing bs, whoever's doing it.
I think people hate this poem for the wrong reasons. Sure, it's not beautiful. Sure it tries a little too hard to be a riddle solvable only by those who are, self-assuredly, very smart.
But the real problem with this poem is that it is a turd nugget of nihilism.
A poem by Anne Carson, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read it in full: newyorker.com/magazine/2001/…
Noticed I've been dumber, less focused, and more emotionally labile since beef became too expensive to be the cornerstone of my diet. Creatine seems to move the needle back.
Anybody need a new conspiracy theory?
I like the spirit of what he's suggesting. Like "F your money grubbing stupidity, maybe aim to solve a REAL problem."
Personally I'd aim for a treatment to lower narcissism. We'd get vastly better results to the same end and as a bonus way fewer stupid amoral startups.
Palmer Luckey reveals the startup he'd build today: oxytocin doping to end divorce
"I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling."
"We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids."
"And we can, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine."
"It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply right now, and if you do that, maybe you won't die alone."
"It's pure biology. It's used for women who don't bond with their kids, and now for women who don't bond with their husbands. It's also used for kids with various neurological issues, some kids with autism who struggle with pair bonding."
"The cool thing is it's a self-reinforcing loop. We understand that very well. Unlike most drugs, it doesn't form a chemical dependency. It actually unburdens you from a chemical dependency."
I think the reason emerging development of super-intelligence makes the average person's gut churn with inarticulate dissonance is that deep down we know that Truth is ontologically intractable.
Zoom out and look down on the development of tech over the years. The answers we have created with our development despite their many comforts have come at a cost, the cost of knowing less and less what is real. Our experience of the tangible and spiritual have thinned in proportion to the knowledge we have gained. Eating more and more of the fruit of the tree of knowledge casts us farther and farther out of the garden.
I think we all feel this as an evaporation of the richness of human experience at some level.
The knee-jerk reaction to this experience is naturally the inverse, a desire to retvrn, or Luddism. But it's worth considering that the datacenters aren't the problem per se, that pandora's box is more or less irrevocably open and that the actionable problem (now) might in fact be best addressed by looking at our wanton neglect of the other transcendentals: Goodness and Beauty. That Eden might be a state of balance.
Though they can expand and contract under the force of our devotion the transcendentals are not solvable. And critically there is a center of mass to be kept between them. Lean too much weight into one and civilization tips off its delicate axis.
Anyway it makes both rational and intuitive sense to me that this dissonance with progress we're wading through is an issue of balance and not an inherent fault with the pursuit of knowledge.
Maybe, idk, act accordingly.
