Been trying to get more ad spots in while disrupting the blog layout less 
I don’t think the Google Auto Ads work for my format – they’re a bit too much advertising for my taste. The pop ups are the worst! I’ve been racking my brain over developing a design that is cleaner but also provides room for more ad spots that get looked at but are less intrusive. I think I have an idea – going to create a column on the page that alternates random maps with ad spots, on the side bar. Maps are eye catching on which gets views of ads but also it’s not interfering at all with the main content.
You could see a preview of my future blog design today but after making it live some time soon once I work out all the bugs.Trying to trim out a bunch of text too and putting a lot of resources on separate pages. Mobile is really buggy with the new theme, I made some changes from the old theme that broke it. But I like the direction it’s going, the new layout is cleaner and more how I see the world in 2025.
I do enjoy telling my story, making maps and sharing resources but web hosting is a lot more expensive these days and that thousand bucks a year the advertising brings in helps defray the costs and encourages me to develop new maps and content. Yet I’m still really conflicted about it all, so many sponsors are so morally dubious selling scam products and things I could not recommend in good conscience.
It’s definitely wet out there 
As the final models yesterday predicted, what was going to be a big snow storm then ice storm mostly turned out to be freezing rain and then regular rain today. Things are melting up good before the deep freeze comes in for the balance of week starting tonight. I guess the shit spreaders out on fields yesterday were not wrong, getting the bedpack before rain could get the nutrients into the field. Growing season will be here before you know it.
I was out knocking the snow off Big Red 
which with freezing rain on the snow actually brushed off quite easily with the snow below it. Maybe it was too soon and rain will freeze again to the windsheild but I wanted to get as much of it off as possible. Plus I wanted to shovel around a bit this morning, as my neighbor was out shoveling early this morning, 
and I didn’t want to be a jerk by never shoveling around his unit. He is just up and out a lot earlier then I am.
I turned up the heat to 55 degrees, as I’m a bit worried about losing power. 
We didn’t get that much ice on the trees but there is still a fair bit of ice build up from earlier 
and while some is melting with the non-freezing rain now — it’s around 34 degrees, a strong cold front with potentially damaging winds 
is pushing in by evening and that could have limbs taking out power lines come the evening. And then it’s going to cold. 
Not very cold by January standards but it looks like high temperatures most of the coming week will be in the 20s with gusty winds. It’s been a very windy winter, even if not real cold thanks primarily to climate change. The earth is so fucking hot these days, 
and it’s in a violent fight against the cold of the arctic that is trying to push south during the winter months. The steep gradients in temperatures really have made windy. It’s funny the late John Wolcott warned me about such things years ago, I kind of nodded him along, but now I’m seeing it with this winter, and it’s gone to be bad.
I doubt the library is open today, 
but I will probably will regardless spend day at home. I have books to read on my phone, there are maps I want to make and things I’ve been thinking about. Having access to unlimited data though would be good for some of those maps. I got to think about it. 
Need to do some cleaning. 
I want to make some brown rice up with the remaining black beans I had frozen from two weeks ago for that chilli cook-off at work, 
with some onions and I don’t know exactly what. Good eats for a cold day. Plus more of that homemade whole-wheat bread I made up yesterday. 
Not eating crap doesn’t have to be expensive. I am always reminded of the old saying, what is good for your compost pile and not your burning barrel and is good for your health. 
If more people could smell the smoldering plastic, I think they’d make healthier choices and make less garbage. It’s amazing how much more compost I have nowadays now that I eat healthy. 
It’s not spoiled food, it’s just all those cores and peels, though sometimes I do run them the food processor so I can add fiber to my diet. Fiber is so important, and with inflation, you got to get the most out of your food.
Presidents Day is Tomorrow, or as the Federal Government calls it, “Geo. Washington’s Birthday”. 
How far America has fallen under the Trumpster, though I’m sure when the history books are written it won’t be that bad. I am hoping now that my truck is cleaned off things won’t be too frozen up tomorrow and I can go to Walmart early in the morning and stock up. 
I might also want to get propane lest I decide to camping come Friday or next weekend. 
I might go for a ride or hike if it’s not too cold, although I definately will want the micro-spikes. Then off in the afternoon to see the folks. 
Hopefully they will have power then. I’ve thought about camping next weekend at least for one night or maybe two if I decide to take off Friday. 
I was so disappointed about not getting away this weekend. But the weather with the freezing rain and now the rain would be such crap. The good news is we are in the second half of February, and I figure maybe a month at most of much heating season, and snow will start to melt away and nicer weather will happen in March — assuming things don’t get dried out too quickly. 
Artificial Intelligence Powered By Coal, Incandescent Bulbs and 1800s Thinking
Lead makes people dumb and violent. The opposite of intelligent. One of my colleagues from High School who is a homesteader posts the meme that whenever she hears A.I. she thinks of stainless steel metal straws stored in nitrogen and arm-lengthed gloves used for artificial insemination of cattle and goats on dairies and other farms that either want to import high-quality genetics or not keep a bull on the farm. The endless Facebook ads selling A.I. and warning us that A.I. is coming for our jobs, and therefore we need to regulate it to death so only incumbent players win!
All thoughts that come to my mind when I hear about the Artificial Intelligence in the news. The stock market took a pretty good dip yesterday, when the europhia of the slash-and-burn politics of Donald Trump wore off and the Chinese introduced a new form of Artificial Intelligence that doesn’t burn nearly as much coal-fired electricity, uses as much less toxic high-end electronic components and gives out better answers for a much lower cost.
The reactionary politicians are like we have only one solution to the Chinese eating our lunch – drill, baby, drill.
We are told we need tougher sanctions against China. We need to do more to protect incumbent players in AI space, to keep people with new and better ideas from moving our society. Of course, the Chinese will not be impacted by any of this. The reason why they innovated when American industry fell behind was because the Chinese were forced to do better with less. Try programming an Arduino Uno, and you’ll become a lot better programmer. Not because a 32 KB memory and a 8 MHz processor provides advanced computing power, but because you have to count every instruction run and every byte stored in memory and find ways to do it better as you have no other choice. Working in a resource-constrained environment makes you more efficient and better. American industry, with it’s cheap energy, plentiful processing power and massive server farms is big, fat and lazy. American industry doesn’t have to innovate when they can waste.
Not that I’m convinced that A.I. is real. Sure it can sometimes give you witty answers on Facebook or generate often weird pictures. But it’s endlessly hyped, much less blockchain and machine learning before it, but has only limited benefits in reality. Most A.I. innovation is not real, and is oversold. It’s not unlike what we are seeing in the renewable sector or with electrification. There are real benefits to moving away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and electrification, but we should proceed with caution and try to understand the impacts of what we are doing. We shouldn’t go back, turn our back on technology, but we should be cognoscente of it’s limitations. A.I. won’t change everything, though machine learning and large language models are useful in limited circumstances and can benefit industry and society in various limited ways.
There are real reasons to be concerned about A.I., renewable energy and electrification. But there are more significant reasons to be concerned about protecting incumbent players in industry, or believing that big centralized systems are only the way to move society forward. A.I. will be great as it moves to the personal computer and actually makes life better besides generating weird images, texts and broken code. Have you ever asked AI to help you with a coding project? The answers are usually terribly broken – OpenAI is slightly better then Meta AI but not by much. It can give you hints, but like most A.I. it’s broken.
The truth is incandescent bulbs, coal, oil, and trade sanctions and limits on technology won’t solve the world’s problems. The future isn’t going to be powered by steam or even horses. We need to be encouraging innovation and not protecting incumbents. Going back to 18th century technology won’t solve our problems, even if our society is built on manure, coal, oil and garbage. We got to keep moving forward, developing better solutions but without overselling the new technology and fully understanding the impacts of what we are developed.
