The elephant's so white you gotta wear shades.

With a lot of painful and unintuitive training humans can learn how to emulate abstract computation with their wetware brains. And with even vaster amounts of training and resources computers can almost emulate organic thinking and emotion with their mechanical brains.

I’m so tired of ignorant foreigners worshipping China’s railways and bridges. China’s infrastructure looks great, until you realize almost every single province is bankrupted like pre-2010 Greece, or worse. It’s called ‘local debt’. Think about it: the entirety of China’s

The elephant's so white we gotta wear shades.

I'm thinking my next substack post will be "How Screwed is Australia?". Would you appreciate a handy summary of our current geopolitical/agricultural position as we march toward a post industrial future?

Some people are lightning rods who safely divert dangerous concentrated energy. Some are like a leaf that steadily gather a trickle of diffuse energy and convert it into a useful form. I hope to be more like the leaf.

Planted out mango and hybrid acorn oak seedlings yesterday. Might seem strange but the centre of diversity of oaks is Mexico, so it should be possible to develop them into another staple tree crop in Australia.

You are panic buying diesel to mow the lawn. I am stocking up on hand tools I've used for years to grow calorie crops. We are not the same.

Few know that bunyas are also native to the tropics. A tiny remnant population near Cairns produced the seed for this healthy tree. Half of Queensland was covered in fire sensitive Araucaria forests before humans ate the large animals and had to start burning the surplus biomass

"Evil cannot create anything new" Did Tolkien create anything truly novel in LOTR, or just repackage bits and pieces of older European folklore? What about Rowling?

You must thoroughly chew yesterday's dinner in the gentle morning sun before beginning on breakfast.

Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.

If Australia produced way more oil than it consumed... Then it would also be a target for wars, hostile take overs and chaos. Be careful what you wish for.

Over fifty varieties of barley ready to trial this autumn, mostly from Ethiopia. Could be a vital cool season crop for my humid subtropical farm since autumn rains are our most dependable of the year. Just hope I can keep the finches off a few strains at least.

so there's a sort of shamanic-priest-schizo-sensitive type of person, usually an outlier, someone who is extremely high openness and can play with frames, but also has developed enough to have some charisma and be able to explain their ideas to others in the past this type of

I just had my first tweet "blow up" to a bit over 100 likes, a pretty thoughtless reply on a topic I don't normally prioritise. Ironically the dopamine hit of notifications is now ruined- just the same info free reminder diluting rarer real replies.

The F2 cross of Canavalia ensiformis x gladiata is already showing superior vegetative traits to either parent. The former is a poorly twining bush which flops. The latter climbs but gets too heavy to support.

The vast majority of Australians want nothing to do with 99% of the continent (other than the trickle of mining royalties, the cheap food sent into the cities, and the occasional nature doco they can watch on their big screen TV)

I've long predicted that the age of AI and even the internet will be relatively brief in history due to coming resource limits. And on the upside we can stop worrying about being locked inside the matrix forever. What comes after is a much more interesting question...

When the first whiff of autumn chill arrives in the subtropics I get the unstoppable urge to gorge on sugar and fat. My hunter gatherer genes know what to do. If you find a ripe jackfruit the size of your head it is your responsibility to eat the entire thing in one sitting