The plant disease identification/management handbook by Balaji Aglave is excellent for popular plants. A lot of modern handbooks are fluffy with information (maybe that’s popular) but this one gets straight to the point — I was very lucky to come across this book a while back.

One aspect of blogging that I don’t like is the unpredictability of an audience’s impressionability. Many people out there read/watch jokes/spam/falsities/uncertainties with utmost confidence — seen it countless times.

Presenting info in a way that prioritizes “critical thinking/reasoning” over an “oracle of truth” is actually hard. I’m almost out of my 20’s and seeing irl reactions to stuff online makes it seem like I’m still in high school — moreso now than ever before. The money gets made somehow :-)

This AI stuff is kinda exciting.. in a “watching danger from afar” kind of way. What kind of feedback loop does it have? Does it finish off the Internet content–wise? The data has to be huge and ultra fuzzy — so someone has to add semantics/structure right or is it automatic? The Internet is already gamified to an extent… but can it completely auto–generate videos? What kind of exploits will be used against the input? So many questions. It’s like the ultimate frankenstein pandora’s box thought experiment of the most bizarre outcomes :-)

I’ve got a few repositories on Codeberg and following their blog is pretty fun. The recent post on scaling tickles my risk–averse sensibilities. It’s relatively easy to make/stand–up anything but scaling is mostly uncharted territory. The scale at which the biggest companies operate essentially guarantees HUGE and unique interconnected systems that are mind–bogglingly convoluted and complex.

The threat of AI to search says more about search than it does about AI.

Bots are ≈ 80% noise. It’s funny that in general analytics are not needed anymore. 80% noise and 20% signal. 80:20. It’s safe to turn off the computer and head outside — you’re not missing much when not on the Internet (it’s smaller than you’d think signal–wise).

Here’s a final muse for current year. This probably counts as wise posting. On local news there’s sentiment that the world is now “post–truth”… but historically; since when has the world not been post–truth? Truth (verifiability/provability) is ultra rare and trust abundant :-)

The Internet/Blockchain/whatever is not a truth machine and could never be a truth machine. Inside events/stories/happenings everyone’s just as clueless as in past eras and technological differences become “functionally equivalent” — meaning you either waste time separating signal from noise in “fast” and “fake” information infinitum or waiting for “slow” and “official” carrier pigeons to arrive.

The blog linked in a previous post is a gem. Too bad the current site doesn’t appear to have all the archived posts, you need strong search–fu to find them on archive.org.

Here’s a muse; linking to external sites is probably one of the harder parts of blogging. Pages can go 404 and you won’t know exactly why, urls change even though they’re supposed to be immutable.

To blog while having pointers to disparate sources requires checking for dead links, and verifying that content relevancy hasn’t changed. The solution is to either archive everything (hard) or to not link at all (easy). High mutability is one reason why people take pictures of online content — it just works.

Following a bunch of blogs always resurfaces interesting stuff — here’s an entertaining article and video summary of modern rope climbing. Article is 2y old – must have updated recently. I like the humour.

Even though I know the risk of losing viewers by discussing math and physics…