Mechanic, Book Lover, Editor, Writer and Researcher for The Savage Collective, lucky thrift bud ☧ “Light, but respectably complex”
Joined November 2022
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When you start buying milk that expires after you get married:
“I will finish this as an ontologically different person.”
Apple could release this today with just slight updates and they would sell millions.
My grandmother passed away this morning after a pretty rapid decline in the past week from decent health. I got to be there with my dad, aunt and uncle and cousin.
I knew my grandmother to often be a cold and bitter woman--holding on to certain things for her whole life that she should have shed decades ago.
She had a tumultuous relationship with some of her kids and grandkids--her parents who passed years ago and with her brother who survives her.
But I also knew her as a woman who regularly babysat her first grandchild as my cousin finished college. I have seen her make friends with a squirrel well enough to feed it by hand. If you saw just that clip of her, you would have thought she was Saint Francis.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” And Walt Whitman said,
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
All this to say that, while I wish I could have known my grandmother better, could have watched her flourish into old age, I am not confused about the spark of the Divine in even the most difficult people and that, as C.S. Lewis said,
"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
But life can be hard and it can beat people down. Even within a close family, we find chasms between ourselves and others that we simply can't cross. As Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It:
"We can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. . .for it is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. . .but you can love completely without complete understanding."
As my grandmother passed away today, a vision of her hand feeding a squirrel returned to me and it is the image that I will keep in the forefront of my mind as a seed of the Resurrection--as a moment suspended in time when Heaven crashed into this mortal coil and lit the skies with Grace.
"Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle
Hereafter, for all anybody knows?"
-Wendell Berry
Sandra Daily
1944-2026
RIP
Wait so he actually *is*
Good Will Hunting?
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”
Make sure to read your local, small town grocery store community boards!! More important info than anything you could find on the internet!
lol @ the time (10 years ago) I went to a counselor for a little bit but she wasn’t very well read so at our second session I brought her 3 books on therapy I had read and thought she could use
I really think learning to build and fix things in the material world is maybe the best possible way to combat modern, existential dread and nihilism.
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Contrary to popular belief, most things that happen in the U.S. happen outside of the paradigm of two-party politics. That’s why modern media makes the world feel so small — because the space it occupies is shrunken.
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I’m sorry, but hackers remotely turning off refrigeration systems at hundreds of supermarkets and destroying all their fresh and frozen food is INSANE. We’ve connected so much of our physical world to the internet that apparently even keeping milk cold is now a cybersecurity problem. What the actual hell.
