Rescheduling 📆
I decided to push back my oil change for my truck until Thursday, that way if I’m going to drive in that day, kill two birds at once. I am a little hesitant to get the oil change at 3,000 miles but I also want to get the break-in oil replaced before it can do too much damage, and then I should be good until the end of March when I need a state inspection regardless. Feel silly having the dealer do the oil change, when I could have my local shop do it, and it looks easy enough to do myself, but it’s a new truck, I can afford it, and it’s good to have things documented should the engine blow up.
Likewise, I am thinking I need to reschedule my doctor’s appointment. 🩺 Getting a physical at 8 AM after a night of having a few beers and lots of steak 🥩 seems like a terrible idea. I’d rather kind of sleep in that morning, put of my physical another week. I was actually surprised the doctor could get me in so quickly on September 2nd but if that’s the case, I should be able to change it up. Still getting up early, the past few days I’ve been making sure to be in the office by 8 AM, so I get enough legislative hours in and keep fairly well caught up on work. I just don’t want to spend the whole dinner the night before chomping on peas 🫛 and skipping the beer and steak just because I have to meet my doctor the next morning, bright and early.
It looks like I will be the only supervisor working on Friday in the office 🧑🏫 but I still think I should be able get to work done remotely from Dolgeville, but it gives me pause. I’ll have to make sure I don’t drink too much coffee ☕ on Friday morning before I head down to the town, so I don’t have to pee before the library opens at 11 AM. But it looks like they have a nice patio for working, and the Wi-Fi should be good too. 🧑💻 And hopefully driving up on Thursday evening, I’ll be able to get the House Pond Campsite. ⭕ Now only if th weather holds up. Maybe though I concede Schoharie is a safer, easier choice. Doesn’t work out, there is always Speculator for Labor Day Weekend. Regardless, I’ll have fresh oil in the truck and hopefully with autumn gas prices ⛽ will be coming down. I need to make sure my VPN is working well and Windows is fully up to date, and things are well charged on my laptop.
Road noise 🚗 🏍️ is increasingly annoying me, after all these years living in Delmar. It just seems to be so non-stop this year with the backfiring cars. Last night was quieter then Friday, but maybe it’s also because I’ve not been out so much lately. School 🚸 playing fields have been quieter, but maybe I’ve spent more evenings home the past few years then in years past, but I doubt it. It just seems like there is more and more cars with straight pipes, motorcycles and fart pipes. 💥 It’s kind of annoying to say the least, but maybe it’s more excuse to spend time in wilderness smoking dope and burning plasticky shit, 🔥 listening to the coyotes 🐺 and the cows 🐮 . One of the hilltowns groups I am a member of people were bitching about people burning plasticky shit, and I am brought back to the way things used to be, and I want to own plenty of land someday so I can’t smell my neighbor’s fires even if I do only go to the transfer station once a year to recycle those occasional blackened tin cans I toss. 👃 Really though these days I try to avoid glass and metal, been months since I’ve bought anything in such containers. Memories of Pennsylvania. Out with the truckers, and kickers, and cowboy angels, and a good saloon in every town. I like Gram Parsons, he died much too young. 🛒 Went to the store yesterday, got surprisingly more groceries then I expected, was sure I would break some of eggs 🥚 or spill what appeared to milk 🥛 as I hauled it home on my overloaded basket. Didn’t have any issues despite seeing what appeared to be milk leaking. Didn’t sleep well last night, probably too much caffeine. Just one cup of coffee today at work today, even if they put out cookies.
I look at some of those off-grid homesteads in my social media feeds, 🏡 🐐 the cows and horny buck goats and the pine trees and the “rough” yard full of some what junky equipment and a well blackened burn barrel, and even on these toughest mornings to get through, I remind myself what is all about ultimately. In the interim it’s the weekends in wilderness, in temporary places of campthat kind of look and feel kind of like that in Adirondack wilderness, the Green Mountains, Madison and Schoharie Counties. I do worry about getting sidetracked 🐔 if I do end up buying or inheriting my parents old 5-acre homestead though, as it’s still very much New York and very much grid tied with a $500 a month oil burner bill among many other things. But I’m not sure I can rent forever in this run down apartment. 🏚️ I really hate manicured, beautiful cabins, but also I still think the house I grew up in was too much of a suburban house even if it is rural with a long motoring commute. I kind of like living in city, biking to work 🚵♂️ but I tell you the noise from traffic really grinds my gears lately. ⚙️ Time to shower, and ride by 24-hours of barbwire fence, 55 years of pollution, everybody knows how the puzzle 🧩 was laid. Where the people infect you but never elected you. Tarkio Road.
Late Summer, Start of Fall at Speculator Boat Launch
What I like and dislike about AI
The past few weeks I’ve been reading extensively about artificial intelligence, watching videos about it, trying to be as informed as I can be about the AI data centers and the AI-related stocks in the stock market. I am trying to pin down real facts about what it means for our society, how I can personally benefit and use it, and how it can mislead oneself and society more generally.
I think AI is a tool. A useful one. Not a perfect tool or a tool for all jobs, but it does provide a powerful tool for summarizing the wisdom of the internet, mixing and matching ideas, finding patterns, and even developing software. I am not going to run out and get an AI subscription, but while free tools are avaliable on the internet, I figure use them while they exist and are still free. If they disappear tomorrow behind a pay wall, and I can’t access them for free like through a free library subscription, then too bad, I’ll move on to life without them.
I don’t love the idea of APIs and distant servers and services that can disappear overnight. When you don’t control a tool, it an be quite quickly taken away from you when it’s no longer commercially viable or the government decides to censor or regulate it. I really dislike subscriptions or things not in one’s own control that force you to pay out monthly or play by other people’s rules. I’m a renter and I pay an electric bill, but for all other purposes, I tend to prepay everything else with cash. I’d much rather have a more limited AI models that could run locally, fit on my hard drive and memory, without talking to a distant service. Those days will come – computer power is only growing.
I don’t have the environmental fears a lot of people have about AI. Yes, there are AI big data centers out there that serve hundreds of millions of people, doing all kinds of complex tasks. AI processing uses a lot more power then traditional servers, though in grand scale of the power grid, not that much more power – especially as our transportation system becomes increasingly electrified and heat pumps become the standard way of heating and cooling buildings. All the evidence points to the grid needing to double in capacity in the coming decades, if not triple in capacity. That means higher voltages, and better control of electrons – and a lot more renewables. AI is part of that growth, but a small part of that growth, even if the numbers behind gigascale AI data centers are impressive.
AI is becoming dramatically more energy efficent but at the same time, we are finding new ways to consume more and more tokens. Javon’s Paradox. However, even at all you can eat buffet, there is a physical limit on how much food you can eat. I am less worried that AI will keep growing forever – at some point, all the useful work will be derived out of it. And I am also less worried about the hype. AI is not coming for our jobs, but it might make tasks easier. Still, I got question the centralization of power and knowledge AI represents – I much prefer local models, running locally. But there is a lot of power in being able to tap the collective wisdom of the internet using AI.
