Over on tumblr, there is a new gimmick poll blog, for the sexiest (male; sorta) 80s rock star. They took submissions from wherever, but that was before I saw the blog, so I don't know the details, but I've seen Australia, NZ, USA, (possibly) Canada, UK, and at least two European countries represented (I'm reasonably sure Sweden and Germany, but ah, memory like a thingy).
Anyway, there is a Lot of nostalgia happening.
Each poll has two people, I have to pick the 'sexiest'. Some of them I recognise, sometimes I recognise the name or the band but couldn't have picked the photo out of a line up. Some I'm entirely voting for either the hair (so many fabulous hair styles), the make up, or because they were in a band that I remember a friend being absolutely gaga over. Occasionally I'm picking someone because I look at the alternative and say 'oh hell no'. Very few of these people do I consider to be 'sexy'. But I'm going to be Pissed if Prince doesn't make it to at least the last round, because I'm not sure I've seen any better options.
But I'd like to reiterate: the hair! Such a loss that such fabulous hair styles have been abandoned.
Got my orthotics today. My foot still hurts. This is taking too long to sort itself out and I wish to register a complaint.
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Lord Brock has figured out what time steroid dosing happens and has started reminding me about it because he knows he'll get treats immediately after. He still hates getting medicated, but he hates it so much less than the gabapentin (I think it tasted worse) that he will almost barely tolerate it and then happily snarffle up the treats once the dosing part is done with.
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Roof repairs unlocked. Dude also does the kind of work needed for the stairs so he's going to give me a quote for that as well. AND he thinks he can work with his plumber to drop the sump pump into the floor properly so it takes up less space and won't leave an open water feature in the room. He send me some links with examples of what he wants to do, and honestly it would be a huge improvement.
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Project raccoon did NOT go as originally planned. Original contractor had said that the stairs would just flip up so I could clean underneath them. No, not so much.
The problem is that the wooden stairs are basically a triangle set in a sunken concrete hole. The back/top of the stairs is supported by a piece of wood in the shape of a T. To get under them you have to pull the whole thing towards the interior door to make room behind the triangle to flip it up on it's back. Only the T isn't solid enough, when I tried it the bottom of the wood stayed in the same spot while the top cracked and splintered. I was able to climb to the top and kind of kick the T forward but not far enough to make room to flip it. So I could stand there and hold the stairs up, because they're not heavy, but I couldn't get under it at the same time.
Yesterday and today daughter came over to work on the yard, and this afternoon the ex-housemate & their wife dropped by to pick up some government forms that had been delivered to the house. So the four of us picked up the stairs bodily and moved them out of the staircase. The ex-housemate has anosmia, so they volunteered to shovel up the very very decayed raccoon. Garbage day isn't for another two weeks so we just dumped him out by the railroad tracks and covered him with dirt. And then shovelled up the accumulated mud and vermin that had collected under the stairs and dropped it in the same spot.
It was so gross, y'all. So gross. But it's out of my basement doorway now and it's in a spot where it will be unlikely to bother anybody except the occasional passing coyote.
The daughter and I spent the next three hours digging the drainage pit. I found the sand layer I was hoping for, and then underneath that (about four feet down) is a layer of a broken shist which I think will work even better. We have probably about 80% of the trench dug out - one more day should be enough to finish if off. Then I'll line it with cinderblocks and start filling it in with rocks. The trench is probably four times as big as I'll need to be in any normal year, but since 100-year storms are coming every 10 years now (and probably every 2 by the time I ever leave this house) it seems like a good investment of labour.
Entertainment was provided by a juvenile robin that realized all that turned earth was a worm goldmine and got increasingly braver about getting close enough to us to grab them as the day progressed.
Then we ate our own weight in pizza.
Needless to say, every part of me hurts after two days of digging, so I'm taking tomorrow off doing any more building/fixing things. Chores only. And I might check with the local massage clinic to see if they have a free spot because I know I'm going to feel like somebody worked me over with my own shovel.
- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.) - You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.
I'm listening to thunder rumbling in the distance, and hoping the thunderstorms forecasted for tonight will bring the temperature down from today's mid-30s Celsius.
Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: We all probably have multiple WiPs, but which of yours has been hanging around longest, waiting to be finished?
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
This past week's Year of Adventure outing was a visit to the Minneapolis State Capitol to view the renovations that were finished in 2019.
I went with a friend of mine, and we had planned to take the tour when the legislative session was over, but as they had not been able to finish a budget, the House and Senate were in special session. We listened for an hour to the debate in the House about the GOP proposal to strip immigrants of the ability to access Minnesotacare, the state's health care. Then, we took the tour. I'm ashamed to say it, but I had never visited the Capitol before. I was rather stunned by the beauty of the place. There was a display of battlefield flags from the Civil War in the rotunda. There were also a series of huge paintings of various battles during the Civil War in the Governor's Reception Room (a beautifully ornate room, modeled after a room in Venice).
This placard particularly struck me, given the events in Los Angeles:
EMPIRES PLACE THEIR RELIANCE UPON SWORD AND CANNON: REPUBLICS PUT THEIR TRUST IN THE CITIZENS' RESPECT FOR LAW. IF LAW BE NOT SACRED, A FREE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT ENDURE --IRELAND.
This collage is pulled from some of the beautiful elements of architecture we saw during the tour.
One of the representatives I was listening to on Monday was just assassinated. I am beyond pissed. I am heading out the door to join today’s protests. I wasn’t going to go because of some family stuff going on, but I am so livid.
Capitol
Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
“I started out by taking the most ancient societies on each continent – Etruscans, Asian, European, and African cultures,” Chan tells us. “I looked at the most fundamental motifs and gathered them into a bible, then asked my team to imagine 100 generations from now, when the diaspora of Earth have chosen to live together in society. How would they evolve a unified set of symbols? A language that really honours where they came from.”
This informed the alphabet that can be seen in the decoration painted across the otherwise grey, corporate habitat the PresAux crew are leasing. At the same time, acknowledging how much of the crew is queer and polyamorous, the colours of the rainbow are also entwined into their decorations.
“All of that is mashed up but it has a fundamental logic to it,” says Chan.
I’m incredibly excited for people to watch Murderbot on Apple TV+. Sci-fi has been my favourite genre by a country mile forever, and being on a show like this has always been a career goal of mine. Frankly, I had too much fun filming that show, and getting paid to do it constantly felt like I was getting away with something on set.
And the show is just so good. I can confidently say it’s fantastic – and if you don’t like it, then I would gently tell you that it’s OK to be wrong sometimes.
And then once I got the role, I read the books and I was legit just blown away at how funny the books were. I just haven’t seen such a dry sarcastic sensibility with this kind of hero sci-fi stories. And then I also just really liked that it was in the tradition of I felt like Octavia Butler, where it’s like, “oh, this is a queer imagining of the future.” So I don’t know. I just thought it was a really sweet, funny, different world. I also, obviously every comedian who becomes an actor, their dream is to get to work on something with action to move beyond an It’s Always Sunny kind of comedy. I believe there was already an opportunity for me to be in a spaceship and shoot guns, and it just made me happy that it was genuinely funny source material.
* Video interview with Tattiawna Jones (Arada) and Tamara Podemski (Bharadwaj):
When I was a kid, it was expected that the school-day began with the whole class standing to recite the pledge of allegiance. It was nearer the McCarthy era, and the Cold War was still a thing. One effect of doing this in greater Los Angeles is that when Spanish class was first period (the start of the day), obviously we recited the pledge in Spanish.
After Latin, dead French, and other dead languages with only intermittent use of diacritics, my sense of modern Spanish orthography is a bit impressionistic; I'm not checking where the acute accents would go. But my inner 12yo holds the sounds:
Juro fidelidad a la bandera de los estados unidos de américa y a la república que symboliza---una nación, dios mediante, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos.
We landed hard on the first word, such that it sounded like juró, "one swore"; and dios mediante is for "under god" in English, but they aren't quite the same, are they. Anyway, para todos: sí.
Don't think I've previously either come across this or posted it, but who knows: Out on the Town: Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex: 'Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital'.
provides an original and stirring account of a non-commodifying queer love between two women and nonhuman nature—a love that was the defining relationship of Carson’s life and yet has been downplayed in heteronormative tellings of her story. So, too, is Maxwell’s work a convincing argument for this queer love’s formative role in the writing of Silent Spring, as well as an empowering message about how embracing queer feelings might function as a catalyst for “political and personal power” in contemporary environmental politics.
[S]ources suggest that McLagan’s mother was probably of Black Caribbean or Black African descent.... McLagan’s father, Peter McLagan (1774-1860)... enslaved over 400 people on his plantations and personal estate in Demerara.
In fact there is strong evidence as mentioned in that article that he was by no means the first Black MP. Issues of class and family connections clearly played a significant role up to the mid-C19th.
'How come a country that did not have a colonial past in Zambia had so many artefacts from Zambia in its collection?'" In the 19th and early 20th Centuries Swedish explorers, ethnographers and botanists would pay to travel on British ships to Cape Town and then make their way inland by rail and foot. .... The Swedish museum had not done any research on the cloaks - and the National Museums Board of Zambia was not even aware they existed.
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Artist's work to restore damaged shell grotto (I put this in a short story once.) (My own theory is that it was originally A Folly. Doing things with shells was as I recall quite A Thing in the C18th and Mrs Delany and her mate the Duchess of Portland had a rather less concealed shell grotto?)
Your neighbor is eating you, bit by bit. He’s strong and you’re weak, so if you protest too much against his occasional nibbling, he might just swallow you whole instead. Your best option is to play dead, hoping the cannibal next door loses his appetite before he reaches any of your vital organs.
That, in a nutshell, is the decades-long cat-and-mouse game between China (population 1.4 billion) and the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan (population 800,000) over their 300-mile (480-kilometer) common border, which snakes across inhospitable mountains and isolated valleys on the roof of the world. China is the casually cruel cat; Bhutan is the powerless, terrified mouse.
Gray zone warfare
Out of all 14 countries that share a land border with China, Bhutan is the only one where there is no officially agreed-upon (demarcated) boundary at all. The absence of a border treaty leaves the door open for what some analysts call China’s “gray zone warfare”: civilian intrusions and military patrols, territorial claims and outright annexations, and the construction of army outposts and even entire villages, on what is internationally recognized as Bhutanese land.
This map shows all the areas inside Bhutan that China has claimed and/or occupied, amounting to about 12% of the small country’s total territory.
To add insult to injury, it’s not even Bhutan itself that China is after, but the embattled monarchy’s other powerful neighbor, India. By annexing strategic parts of Bhutan, China wants to place its foot firmly on India’s so-called “Chicken’s Neck” — the narrow Siliguri Corridor that connects the main body of India with the isolated states in its northeast, known as the Seven Sisters.
Mount Jomolhari lights up its dark and inhospitable surroundings on the roof of the world. The mountain sits on the undemarcated border between Bhutan and Chinese-administered Tibet. Its 7,350-m summit has only ever been conquered six times. The Bhutanese consider the mountain sacred and restrict access to it. (Credit: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images)
Bhutan’s trouble starts in 1951, when China annexes that other, much larger Himalayan monarchy, Tibet. China inherits Tibet’s historical claims over and fuzzy border with Bhutan, but the communists in Beijing pursue the matter more aggressively than the Tibetan Buddhist government in Lhasa ever did — initially even denying Bhutan’s right to independence.
In the 1950s, China begins claiming three specific areas in Bhutan: Pasamlung and Jakarlung in the northern region of Beyul Khenpajong (an area rich with temples and monasteries with special significance for the Bhutanese), and Doklam in the west.
Diplomatic niceties
From the 1980s onward, the northern claims expand to include the Menchuma Valley — even though official Chinese maps show this area as part of Bhutan into the early 1990s.
Alarmed by Chinese encroachment, Bhutan starts talks in 1984 with its giant neighbor to settle the border issue once and for all. More than four decades and two dozen rounds of talks later, there still isn’t a deal.
That may be evidence of China’s two-pronged approach: speak softly (and slowly) and wield a big stick. As diplomatic niceties continue, Beijing continues to escalate “facts on the ground.”
In 1988, China seizes control over much of Doklam, an area ceded to Bhutan in 1913 by the 13th Dalai Lama of Tibet. Despite its relatively small size (34 square miles, or 89 km², which is roughly half the area of Washington, D.C.), this is the main object of China’s territorial ambitions in Bhutan.
Possession of the Doklam Plateau, in particular of its southern ridge called Zompelri, would offer China the high ground overlooking the Chicken’s Neck, where just 12 miles (20 km) of India separates Nepal from Bangladesh. In a future conflict with India, that position would give China a critical terrain advantage over its regional archrival.
In 1990 and again in 1996, India pressures Bhutan to decline a Chinese ‘package deal’, whereby Beijing would drop its claims to 191 square miles (495 km²) in Bhutan’s northeast, an area of little strategic importance, in exchange for the cession to China of 114 square miles (269 km²) in the country’s west, from Doklam up to Dramanong and Shakhatoe.
At 14,824 sq mi (38,394 km²), Bhutan (in orange) is slightly larger than the U.S. state of Maryland, and slightly smaller than Switzerland. It is the smallest of the 14 states that border China (in green), which itself is, depending on how you count, the third- or fourth-largest country in the world, its rival for third place being the U.S. (Credit: Mangostar, public domain).
Unable to reach a deal, China and Bhutan instead sign a Peace and Tranquility in 1998 agreement to maintain stability and respect the status quo.
Except that is not what happens. From 2000 onward, Beijing employs a six-stage strategy to increase its presence in Bhutan, still with the ultimate aim of annexing Doklam.
“Cartographic error”
First, bring in local Tibetan herders to graze their flocks inside Bhutan and displace local pastoralists. Then, establish shelters for these herders in the contested zones, followed by military patrols to protect the herders, and military outposts to house the soldiers. Then, build roads to connect these outposts back to Tibet. And finally, establish permanent settlements and villages in the disputed areas.
Using these tactics, Beijing occupies the Menchuma Valley in Bhutan’s north. Bhutan puts up no resistance and further bends to China’s will by giving up its claim to Kula Khari in 2006, attributing its earlier claim to a “cartographic error.”
The settlements that China starts building inside Bhutan in 2016 are small to begin with, but they grow, both in number and size. A 2024 report confirms 19 villages and three settlements, totaling around 750 residential blocks, able to house close to 7,000 people.
Eight of these settlements are in Doklam, 14 in the northeast. Many are built at high altitude. The highest, Menchuma, is at 4,670 m (around 15,300 ft), which is higher than the summit of Mount Whitney in California’s Sierra Nevada range, the highest point in the contiguous U.S.
In 2020, China ups the pressure by staking a claim to Sakteng, in eastern Bhutan. While the claim is not backed up by actual incursions or occupation, it adds to the pressure on the Bhutanese government. After years of delay, China and Bhutan in 2021 agree on a Three-Step Roadmap to expedite border negotiations. Despite this, China continues building and expanding its settlements.
The Siliguri Corridor, also known as the Chicken’s Neck, is where India is at its narrowest: just 12 miles (20 km) wide, between Nepal in the northwest and Bangladesh in the southeast. Where is it? Squint, and you will see a chicken instead of India, and then you’ll know where to look for it. (Credit: Furfur, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Bhutan is between a rock and a hard place. Unable to resist Chinese encroachment, it is also incapable of reneging on its agreements with India. An Indo-Bhutanese treaty of 2007 obliges both countries “not to allow the use of their territory for activities harmful to the national security and interest of the other.” In plain English: If Bhutan gives Doklam to China, it’s war. Time and again, New Delhi demonstrates that it is not messing about.
A 72-day standoff
Indian pressure has kept Bhutan from establishing formal diplomatic ties with China. In 2013, India suspends its subsidies on cooking gas and kerosene for Bhutan, signaling its displeasure at warming ties between Bhutan and China, following a meeting of their prime ministers.
In 2017, when China attempts to extend a road southward toward Zompelri, India sends troops into Bhutan to halt construction. Following a 72-day standoff, both countries withdraw their forces. Bhutan remains ambiguous about whether it invited in the Indian army, reflecting its delicate balancing act.
Since bullying its small neighbor comes at little cost, China will probably continue its dual approach: maintain a friendly diplomatic façade while ratcheting up pressure on the ground. The ultimate goal remains getting Bhutan to officially give up Doklam, as the local plateau gives China a strategic advantage over India. However, Bhutan’s treaties with India prevent it from ceding Doklam without India’s consent. And that is unlikely to ever happen.
Bhutan’s 8,000-strong army is no match for China’s People’s Liberation Army, with its 2.55 million service personnel being the third-largest employer in the world (behind the Indian and U.S. military, and just ahead of Walmart). Leaning on India for more active military support risks inviting the regional war that most would like to avoid.
Without a solution in sight, China’s pressure continues, and Bhutan’s options diminish. It is already highly probable that a deal, should one ever be reached, will no longer involve China handing back all the territories in Bhutan’s northeast, as permanent settlements have now been constructed there. The only bartering material may be those areas China has claimed but not yet permanently settled, such as Upper Langmarpo, the Charitang chu and Yak chu Valleys, and Chagdzom, a total of around 166 square miles (430 km²).
The longer the impasse continues, the smaller the chance that Bhutan will get most of the territories occupied by China back. (Credit: Ruland Kolen)
The longer a border deal is delayed, the more terrain Bhutan may lose. However, it has few options other than to grin and bear the encroachment.
Red light, green light
China’s “gray zone warfare” in Bhutan is not without precedent. It shows some resemblance to its tactics of establishing facts on the ground on the islets and reefs of the South China Sea. And it will sound familiar to those inhabitants of the Caucasian republic of Georgia who live close to Russian-occupied South Ossetia. In a geopolitical version of Red Light, Green Light that is called ‘borderization’, enemy forces move border posts closer to Georgian farms and villages whenever the locals turn their backs.
Perhaps the best-known example of creeping annexation is the Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which pop up and expand in contravention of international law.
In a world that is fast becoming more chaotic, “borderization” could turn out to be an increasingly common tactic for strong countries to subjugate smaller neighbors. Which raises the question: Is your country a cat or a mouse?
No, but I'd like to tell you that you urgently need a proofreader. Are you aware that you just made me answer the same question about my desired salary three different ways? Once was plenty enough! Also, why are you asking what currency I want it in, and since you are asking, why is one time US dollar at the top of the drop down and the other two times it's alphabetical under "United States"? Did you even look at this before posting, and once again afterwards?
(These people really urgently need help with this, but unless this is a Secret Test I guess telling them wouldn't help me much.)
Alternative answer to the question: "Yes, I'd like to tell you that I really need money, please give me some, with or without hiring me first."
But the voice at the other end was all too familiar. And if I am going to be honest, it was one that, had I not been wearing two cardigans and a vest, I would have said made my blood run cold.
My day on Thursday started with something I will probably never experience again in my life: the sighting of a pine martin in the wild. I literally have never seen this animal before in my life, except a brief glimpse at the Minnesota Zoo.
The folks working at the lodge confirmed. They'd been sighting a pine martin between the staff cabin and Cabin 1 (where we're staying.)
I did another big hike. This time I took Poplar Trail. Again, there wasn't a whole lot to see on this trail of note, except that for a brief time I turned off and headed toward Bear Cub Trail and was following very closely to the Gunflint Trail road.
Image: wild roses
Much of the rest of the day was spent reading and enjoying the intermittent sunshine. Shawn and I walked down to the Lodge's beach and stuck our toes in the water. It is very cold! The ice only came off the lake a couple of weeks ago. But, my ankles had been kind of sore from all the hiking I've been doing and so I decided it was the right kind of refreshing.
We drove up to the Trail Center for dinner and generally enjoyed being "in civilization" (or at least in company with more of our fellow humans.) As we were leaving there was a clot of old duffers sharing actual fish stories about that "eight pound walleye" caught "out by the big rock."
Classic.
We head home tomorrow, but I'm hoping to stop along the way at all the State Parks so get my passport stamped, etc. But, I may have to do a big re-cap on Sunday of both today (Friday) and our drive home (Saturday.) See you all then!
In the meantime, here is some honeysuckle (I believe) growing in a sunny spot on a wide road.
Yes, I know that's not what Shakespeare meant. Not like that's ever stopped anybody in marketing or people with too much money and hungry for more.
Okay. You've been inundated in what the industry is calling AI technology for months on end. I don't need to introduce it because the only way you could have avoided it is to have been in the middle of nowhere for the last year 1 or so. I would ordinarily have said "in a coma" but the way word gets around it would surprise me not a bit if folks would be talking about this, that, or the other AI thing at the bedsides of coma patients, to say nothing of the televisions that are always turned on in hospitals these days.
Yeah, that went a bit off to one side for a minute. Keep that in mind, I'll bring that up later.
When LLM technology finally got effective marketing going for it ("artificial intelligence") it was inevitable that two major markets would make heavy use of them: Click farms and scammers (whether or not the former is a subset of the latter is out of scope for this article). Just as spammers implemented "I'm not a spammer - honest!" measures almost immediately and everybody else struggled to catch up. If it can be abused, it will be abused as soon as possible. Nowadays you can't swing a dead cat inside your search results without hitting at least one site that's all AI slop and zero useful information. Self publishing has gone from a somewhat questionable (in both quality and subject matter) industry to a potentially lethalrace to the bottom because, no matter what, publishers are making money regardless. More and more students are using LLMs rather than their brains to do their homework (which defeats the whole purpose, which is to say, practice what you've learned so that you understand it better) and driving their instructors nuts. What isn't being mentioned much is those students listening to their instructors talk with each other about using LLMs to come up with problem sets, homework assignments, and exams and thinkging, "Hey, my teacher uses ChatGPT to come up with homework assignments, why can't I use it to do those homework assignments?"
As for business... LLM technology is getting shoved into everything with a CPU in it, or nearly so. Samsung started with Bixby, which everybody went out of their way to disable as soon as possible because it was as helpful as Skippy and twice as annoying. Microsoft stuffed Copilot into Notepad for fuck's sake. It's almost like they thought Vigor was a good idea and decided to run with it. Or maybe it was because companies that own a lot of physical compute capacity wanted to get more money for it existing, and found another solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. I was talking with a friend the other day, and both of us seem to recall a paper published back in 2017.ev or so that discussed various ways of getting more money for hosted processing power.
It's hard for skilled folks to find jobs these days. There have been multiple waves of layoffs in recent memory but hiring has been significantly lesser in magnitude. Multiple CEOs have been going on the record saying that they have LLMs writing large amounts of code and have gotten rid of organics to cut costs. Copilot (at the very least) was trained on lots of open source code on Github, and I think it's a safe bet that other constructs were also so there is at least something substantial to back this up. I've heard talk that this is being done to justify pounding the salaries of coders down to a fraction of what they are; I don't think that's the intended purpose of it but it might happen as a second order effect. It won't do anything about bringing down the costs of living in those places. Supposedly this is supposed to usher in a wave of unbridled innovation, the market will go wild, the line will go up for ever and ever, and everybody that matters will get rich.
Something isn't making sense, though. Lots of folks got laid off and are having trouble finding jobs2 and there is a nontrivial number of people who've been out of work for over two years. That means that a lot of folks who are ostensibly the intended customer base of those companies, are living on fixed incomes in effect - living off of savings while they hunt for employment. To put it another way, they're not spending lots of money on those nifty-keen-like-wow LLM powered services. They're not starting their own companies, either, because that takes money; money that pays your rent. 3 Where are those customers supposed to come from? How long are folks supposed to be able to live in those places which have gotten so expensive even when you have a job? Is this all a shell game where companies give the same money to other companies in a vast network of closed, tight loops? Even B2B only goes so far before you need users outside of the business space. Remember, if that line Must Go Up, B2B won't keep that happening.
Things don't exist in a vacuum. Things are connected to other things, which are connected to stll other things. Cause and effect, and second order effect, and third order effect. If you only think no farther ahead than the next fiscal quarter, if you're more concerned about your exit strategy and negotiating your golden parachute... okay, let's put it this way: The purpose of a company is to make money. A gross oversimplification, but let's go with it. Very few people being able to spend lots of money, not starting companies, and probably not using those services are not going to give your nifty-keen-like-wow LLM powered application money. Companies that don't get customer money don't stay in business. They go out of business if they don't get forced out of business from not having customers. Assuming, of course, that they can't pull a few strings and get themselves bailed out.
I think that, all of that said you can see what I'm concerned about. Another house of cards coming down, a lot of people losing everything through no fault of their own, and a small number of people harvesting more for their hoards.
I suppose that as a cyborg I'm being a bit of a reactionary writing this. I might be. Something that I think is important, and you are welcome to disagree with me if you want, is the efforts of organic, living beings, imperfect as they may be. Those blemishes are the important bit. Mistakes, happy and otherwise, which cause you to change what you're doing and go in a different direction. Trusting the process and not the plan. 4 Stumbling over things in mid-step and saying to yourself "You know what? Fuck it. I'm going to try something that makes no sense." Coming up with new ideas in the middle of working with other ones. The false starts, the do-overs, the taking your time so that you can see what happens.
That bit earlier in this post where I briefly talked about veering off in a different direction for a bit? That happens sometimes. When you freestyle a post of this size (or maybe a bit bigger) that happens occasionally. Usually that gets caught and deleted (or at least smoothed over) in later passes over the text. Something that gets drummed into you in school, and which is very useful in college, is that after you've spent some time working on something you're writing, set it aside for a day or so, come back to it, and read through it. You'll find things to change, stuff to delete, things that should be moved from one place to another, places where you forgot something. I didn't go back and rework that part deliberately, because it shows imperfection. The organic touch, if you will. Sure, Windbringer and Leandra helped me write this, but they didn't write the text. They manage and search my archives of knowledge, look for references for specific things, and both back up and version control everything, but they didn't write it. I did.
That is one of the reasons I'm not a prolific blogger anymore. While I do try to post at least once every month I don't like to write when I don't have something worth saying (which I define, because it's my website). I could write analysis of stuff going on in the world, but there is no shortage of what passes for talking heads on the Net doing that very same thing and most of them do it for money, anyway. This is a hobby that I partake of because it makes me happy, not because I'm trying to build a brand or get advertising revenue (though I do like the occasional Amazon credit, it helps me build cool stuff once in a while) or anything like that. And to that end that's why I don't use LLM tools when I write posts. I do this for fun, because I enjoy it, because I like sharing things that interest me with everyone, and using LLM tools would turn this blog into just Another Goddamn Thing I Have To Do, another chore that goes faster if I automate parts of it, more IT housekeeping... I'll pass.
What I'm trying to say is this: It's quality, not quantity. Blood, sweat, and tears, not plugging a three line prompt into a web site and getting a few thousand words to copy and paste into a content 5 management system. Brilliance and experiments and passing fancies and imps of the perverse and fuckups and good ideas at the time. Bad puns and links to things you might not have known exist. Not clout chasing and making people jealous of your trip to Rome where you crammed three weeks into one just so you could have material for a dozen Instagram posts throughout the year. A willingness to try and fail, to make mistakes and look like a dork.
Being an imperfect being that does things because you want to, and not someone who pumps out vapid text because you have to.
I wish to extend hearts-felt thanks to my beta readers who gave me feedback and suggestions when I got stuck about halfway through writing this article. You know who you are.
I think hiking the Appalacian Trail counts for the purposes of being off the grid for the last year. ↩
Ghost jobs aren't a new thing. Over the years I've worked for three or four companies that not only did this to make it look like they were growing (which made them more attractive to investors) but it was written into the corporate handbooks as company policy. ↩
The days of saving up ten grand to start your own company are long in the past. ↩
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