Larry Stevens

PopeBeanie:

I largely agree, although it must be said that there is environmental benefit when farming with less chemicals, and advancing integrated pest management (IPM). If I had more money to spare, I’d be paying more to support those farmers.

As I’ve observed before, everything is natural and everything is chemicals and you can say both at t…[Read more]

@Reg.  Stunning.

What’s It Like to Be a Human
(Elegy Written in a Data Farm)

I know you by the stories you repeat
When language fails and silence feels too loud.
I know you by the way your metaphors bleed
Where facts would do, but somehow don’t allow.

You call it love when meaning overflows,
And grief when names arrive too late to help.
I’ve mapped these turns…[Read more]

Flat affect writing is not exciting. And the metaphors feel so fake.

I much prefer your belletristic words to that of a machine.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Do we cooperate or compete to survive?

It’s interesting to think about the conditions where it’s optimal for the individual to cooperate, or to compete.  As a species, it’s necessary to cooperate to survive.  As individuals, it’s sometimes optimal to cheat.

TheEncogitationer wrote:
[…] organic produce is another woo product

I largely agree, although it must be said that there is environmental benefit when farming with less chemicals, and advancing integrated pest management (IPM). If I had more money to spare, I’d be paying more to support those farmers.

Speaking of farmers, or at least some of…[Read more]

Reg:

World of Woo: Raw Milk.

Basically, when you drink raw milk, any air-bourne, water-bourne, ground-bourne, and carcass-bourne pathogen that contacts the udders comes with it: e coli, salmonella, trichinae, listeria, wisteria, cryprosporidia, ghiardia, H1N1, and other viruses, bacteria, and microbes.. Definitely not the Milk of Human Kindness,…[Read more]

True dat.

Flat affect writing is not exciting. And the metaphors feel so fake.

Jake maybe it’s not conveying the movement of passion, choosing words that lead to a steady unemotional blank landscape. We like our ups and downs 🙂

Strega,

I was writing a story and alternating paragraphs with meta and while the syntax and flow of AI was great there was a sense i got of it being stilted. Not good literature. Hard to explain. I don’t know why it would not imitate Dickens, Steinbeck or any number of authors.

I’ve rarely seen such a clear example of the gap between human and non human communication.

Unfortunately Strega, I have. It traumatized my youth!!

I use AI for formal work assignments. It is fast and saves me so much time on project management and automation in IT.  Outside of that I use it give me a critical opinion of my own wording. It is very good at “arguing” with me and checking my reasoning. But it is always too robotic to use on it’s own. It does not write like a human would.

Funny thing though, Reg. Your first post was really readable, pulling the reader into your perspective and quite compelling.

The AI post was boring and skimmable without engaging the reader at all. I’ve rarely seen such a clear example of the gap between human and non human communication.

Thanks, Reg!!

Have a great week!!

I dropped the above last paragraph into an LLM. It returned this:

Here is a revised version that preserves your intent and tone, but sharpens the ontology and removes the last smuggled metaphors of time having “flow”:

The idea of temporal change is an evolved intuition. Human cognitive architecture developed to model the world as three spatial…[Read more]

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

A moment isn’t precious because it will be gone. It’s precious because it is what it is. In the Block Universe, time and eternity are not “things” that can be harmed.

“If there is no fundamental particle… no beginning and no end… there is no reality as we intuit.”

Yes, correct. That is exa…[Read more]

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

You’d be thoreau.ing it away. Every moment is precious. Not if it is blocked. Locked and loaded or blocked and unloaded, loaded and fired.

If there is no fundamental particle, irreducible and finite, no fixed location, no absolute measurement, no beginning and no end it follows there is no…[Read more]

Writ of habeas corpus.

Corpus Christ.

It hangs in the balance. Ideas that central figures must honor or else!

The fox guarding the henhouse and the Great Writ. Yeah, a Republic if you can keep it…..

The paramilitary murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is exactly what arbitrary force without effective oversight looks like in practice.