meristohm

Nevermind hallucinations, the donkey-work is important; why bypass the hours of research, which trains our in-built LLM and can lead to new realizations, and get the carrot without much effort? This LLM stuff feels like a candybar; the anticipation of the magic feels good, the thing tastes good while you're eating it, and everything thereafter is shit, but we easily forget, and reach for the next candybar. I appreciated Blindboy Boatclub's take in his podcast episode "Artificial intelligence is Disgusting and it will never replace Artists" from 2026 March 17. I also appreciate Electrical Engineer & Computer Scientist Timnit Gebru's perspective on these stochastic parrots. While intraspecies diversity confers, up to a point, a survival benefit, consider the long-term consequences of playing this particular game. We don't have to eat every candybar the rich mostly-guys ply us with.

Abstract: Regular voluntary exercise has been shown to increase waste transport through the glymphatic system in mice. Here, we investigate the impact of physical exercise on both upstream and downstream brain waste clearance in healthy volunteers via noninvasive MR imaging. Putative glymphatic influx, evaluated using intravenous contrast-enhanced dynamic T1 mapping, increases significantly at the putamen after 12 weeks of long-term exercise using a cycle ergometer. The putative meningeal lymphatic vessel size and flow, measured by intravenous contrast-enhanced black-blood imaging and IR-ALADDIN technique, increase significantly after long-term exercise. Plasma proteomics reveals significant changes in inflammation-related and immune-related proteins (down-regulated: S100A8, S100A9, PSMA3, and DEFA1A3; up-regulated: J chain) after long-term exercise, which correlate with putative glymphatic influx or mLV flow. Our results suggest that increased glymphatic and mLV flow may be the potential mechanism underlying the neuroprotective effects of exercise on cognition, highlighting the importance of long-term, regular exercise.

I read the entirety of this brief letter. I'm sad about Gnome, too. It's not the interface for me, but I appreciate diversity, like that Gnome exists, and I like that other people like it. I probably like XFCE and especially Cinnamon because Windows on a 386 was when I really got into computers.

What's the biomass of the declining populations compared to the increasing populations?

What are the ecological roles of each?

Are the declining populations more generalist species or niche species?

What role does human activity play in these changes?

Think forward to what you will care about when you're dying, if you have the luxury of such consideration.

As I get older, what matters more and more are the relationships I have with other people and other beings in general.

I also value the story of "private sufficiency, public luxury", and I mostly move myself around the planet under my own power these days (good way to not pay for exercise / work-out space). I'm ready to never use a computer again, and to work with other humans to tend land in the old ways. I accept that I'll die, and I do my best to be kind and compassionate to others, ready to retaliate if attacked, with default being a cooperative state, because that's a story I like being part of.

Non-fiction: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

This prompted me to lay belly-down and listen to the snik-snik-snik sound of a slug munching grass.

For those who are able (physically and/or mentally able) to go by some proportion of human power, I highly recommend significantly reducing reliance on automobiles. Walk and bicycle instead; less need to make time for exercise, plus a sense of self-efficacy, and, if it sounds distasteful now, it might be enjoyable later as the body adapts to the moderate demands. Start slow and often.

Easy for me to say, as bicycling has been my primary "fast-travel" mode since my teens, but at scale, automobiles have significant negative ecological impact, from exhaust (ozone, soot, CO2, etc), to tire particles in the waterways, to mining the lithium and other minerals (and all the attendant impacts there), to however the electricity is converted (including electric cars in my criticism here, though from a harm-reduction standpoint, by all means switch from petrol-powered to e-), to the risks to pedestrians and cyclists from these multi-ton monstrosities taking up so much space on roads and in neighborhoods. Again, harm reduction, not abolition, is what I'm harping on; for those who really need it (medical reasons, mainly; which could happen to any of us, on any frequency), expensive fast travel is key. Ditching convenience for self-efficacy can be difficult.

Imagine paying $15 in electricity for ~3,000 miles of cycling with a cargo bike, and the holistic tiredness at the end of the day! That's my life, years ago having given up plane, train, and automobile travel except in the case of medical need and an annual family trip within a few hours' drive of home, and I'm richer for it in so many ways.

That said, I'm aware of my privilege here (with a spouse who commutes to work and whose income largely supports us, while I do childcare and caregiving as my main, unpaid-but-compensated work), and how difficult "just switch to bike!" would be without systemic shifts. It's prohibitively expensive to live in some cities now, pushing people further out, and who is going to make the time to bike 5+ miles into town without some significant, tangible incentives? What might help shift culture towards meeting a greater proportion of our basic needs using our own chemical-to-mechanical energy?

What are the environmental costs? Given that we exist in an ecosystem, and rely on myriad other life for our own healthy-enough existence, focusing on jerbs and the cost to build the data centers, and ignoring all the other costs (to name a few: water, solar absorption potential of plants, rainwater absorption potential of the land, pollution (air, land, water) from all the related energy conversion (and commuting, unless all the employees are walking or cycling to work?), and psychological impacts of robots).

I would argue that the county (an arbitrary demarcation in the first place; I prefer watersheds) would see a measurable lift over the next several hundred years if instead of data centers we tended the land in a way that increased species diversity and also food available from that land. I can't eat data center, though I suppose its existence could help optimize exploitation of land, farm workers, and the transportation of crops, while the rest of us indulge in all sorts of diversions?

I would be more inclined to give to people via Patreon if there was a way to set a desired income amount and a transparent "overflow pipeline" for what happens with any extra money.

No, but I don't use LLM stuff; I value effortful practice towards improving how I do things, without converting too much external energy in the process, and while I still use and benefit from computers, I prefer a low-tech approach to life. solar.lowtechmagazine.com is wonderful (I learned about it from HN! I'm grateful for the person who made that post, and the many others who share other human-made blogs) I enjoyed learning to type on a typewriter as a kid, and then on computers in middle school, and I still push myself to improve my typing skills (just a little push, like I do with walking and cycling; I'm good at those things, pushing too hard has diminishing returns, and a little attention to improvement feels good).

Just like we all survive because some number of other lifeforms die, we all benefit from some amount of technology, but to consume too much is to take from future generations, and I don't like that story. Mad Max: Fury Road is an entertaining movie, but can we not rush headlong into making it our reality?

Do you understand the unbridled desire to consume a massive amount of resources to move a human body in a multi-ton knobby-tyred truck from home to school to work to grocery store and back, and to play the flashiest games, to wear shorts inside during the winter, and to talk to robots as if they are friends? I understand that desire, and how, with billions of people having access to such power over enough time, we are now "enjoying" extreme weather more frequently, killing so much other life with our pollution, and harming ourselves in the process? And, because that is stressful to face, many of us are inclined to dive back into the consumption cycle for distraction and diversion?

I'd argue my quality of life is higher for using only hand-me-down phones (current one is ~8yo, thanks to LineageOS) because when I'm feeling dysregulated I run out of phone-based distractions really quickly (I don't allow JavaScript, and I don't install any games). I'm healthier for walking and cycling everywhere within ~16km of home (privileged to live in the city, as expensive as it has become, but I'd still do it if I lived further out), and for using heating & cooling only to take the edge off the outside temperature (16C in the winter, 26C in the summer), mindful of where all this energy comes from, what the effects are at scale, and the quality of life of future generations long after I'm dead. I don't do all this for efficiency, but for effectiveness (that of my body, my default mobility and data-processing machine) and consuming a reasonable amount of energy rather than one that, at scale, will burn my house down.

Regarding not-yet e-waste, some people just like tinkering, and the challenge of getting old hardware to still function as a useful tool.

I also understand the reaction to other people's "nonsense"; I sometimes go there, too, and it's an ongoing effort to reel it back to what I can reasonably control.

Is it helpful to have all this spelled out for you?

...and it's fine to not use the loud, vibrating power saw and instead take some extra time to use a handsaw, and thus get more practiced at it.

It's fine to hire movers, but sometimes they end up damaging stuff. My solution is have a lot less stuff, and move it myself.

I increasingly have more respect for the Amish community one of my relatives lives near, at least in terms of their considered, intentional limits set on resource use. I don't agree with all their choices, and some seem arbitrary, but I respect their autonomy to choose.

I choose to move around the world primarily under my own power or augmented by a battery (supplies 2/3 of the Wattage I need to make my cargo bicycle move); harm reduction in the face of fossil-fuel addiction. I choose not to use generative AI because I'd rather human do more work for themselves instead of selling short future humans with profligate resource consumption.

It's fine to strive for things, but the most important thing in my life is my relationships with other humans. If I'm a person who can't walk, and am in physical therapy towards being able to walk, it's fine to keep working at it, and it's fine to never be able to walk; what matters is how I get on with my mates, and spending massive amounts of electricity on data centers is arguably harmful to the health of interpersonal relationships.

I reckon a lot of people on this forum have poorer health thanks to man-made pollution.

The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase environmental harm. (Travel is a big one, and buying large homes, remodeling homes, heating and cooling those homes, well beyond the private sufficiency that would be enough for us if we also supported public luxuries instead of playing Smaug)

Rather than corporate health I'm more concerned with ecosystem health (actual eco-system, as in interconnected living beings, not the word applied to software...), and care much more about investing in the performance of the ecosystems (based on land, water, and air) that sustain life in the region I have this tiny bit of influence on.

Corporations are fictions, a game we're playing. After they go up in smoke, the land will still be here.

Would there be so many billions if we didn't figure out how to convert petroleum into fertilizer and so many other useful things? My point is that, just because we now have billions, it feels wrong to justify maintaining those billions of people at the luxury levels so many of us enjoy. We differ from other animals only by degrees, not by kind. From watching so many nature documentaries over the years, and reading nonfiction books about animals, I understand many mammal newborns don't make it into childhood. I'm not convinced that a high human infant-mortality rate is bad. It just feels bad, and with our pathological focus on feeling happy and suppressing sadness, a consequence seems to be we make decisions out of momentary selfishness rather than care for future generations long after we individuals are dead.