Thankfully it hasn’t made it into my workplace yet. We have a quarterly newsletter that someone tried to submit ChatGPT slop to. It was immediately identified and rejected by the rest of the horticulturists. My bosses are the kind of people who only talk about plants in Latin so there’s a big institutional focus on getting the right information from primary sources and then using multiple layers of expert review.

However, we’re facing massive budget shortfalls over the next few years and I doubt that will get any better if the economy crashes. Outside of installing/maintaining plants, the bulk of the job is intellectual and creative labour that the public isn’t even aware of. I can absolutely see my workplace hollowing out the job and not hiring based on expertise. Instead of five people with scientific degrees debating a space for an hour, at some point it’s going to be someone who hasn’t seen that space feeding words they can’t pronounce into an LLM that doesn’t understand what space is. On paper it will look great for the metrics admins and other departments track. In practice it will immediately ratfuck everything that makes our urban forest function and drive away the really rare pool of overqualified people we have.

This appears to be supported by the findings of a 2022 paper, in which scientists describe the results of taking C. sphaerospermum into space and strapping it to the exterior of the ISS, exposing it to the full brunt of cosmic radiation.

There, sensors placed beneath the petri dish showed that a smaller amount of radiation penetrated through the fungi than through an agar-only control.

The aim of that paper was not to demonstrate or investigate radiosynthesis, but to explore the fungus’s potential as a radiation shield for space missions, which is a cool idea. But, as of that paper, we still don’t know what the fungus is actually doing.

That’s where it seems really cool to me. If we have nuclear spacecraft or even just passive cosmic radiation exposure, what’s otherwise a waste/threat could become a factory. Reinforcing the hull with a regenerative radiation shield, genetically engineering it like E. coli to biosynthesise needed compounds, mass producing it as food for something we can eat- it’d be so useful to have something like that in space where you’re surrounded by energy you can’t use.

Certified Anubis Moment. Straight to The Devourer with you.

Poors drink water. I need emotional support water that costs $10 per bottle. Prestige water.

Healthy slop

Start by sauteing a mirepoix. If you’re doing meat or mushrooms, saute those until browned as well. Then anything healthy goes in the slow cooker with some stock until it’s slop. If it’s something that gets sweeter when roasted, it’s roasted first. I season it with a bay leaf, mushroom powder, onion/garlic salt, black pepper, and whatever works for the protein. I like my soups/stews very earthy and comforting, with healthy slop ending up being like a non-acidic borscht or thicker chankonabe.

Yeah but it looks cool as hell when I do it.

I mean, the guy didn’t know that water and ice are the same thing.

What was his logic here? I still believe that but I’m curious to hear a scientific reason why.

I wish I had been born into the era of science where I’m smart enough to discover things. I can’t code. I can’t do calculus. I would have thrived in the 19th century where I could invent washing my hands and be considered a world-class doctor.

A cargo ebike. No insurance (very cheap anti-theft insurance if you want), no registration fees, $20/year in electricity. I can get anywhere in the city as fast as driving but that’s no longer stressful. Instead of being stuck in traffic and dealing with road raging drivers, I get to zoom along nature paths with the strength of an Olympic athlete. My commute feels liberating instead of like the first and final insult of my day. It’s the first thing I’ve purchased since a smartphone that feels like it’s a foundational 21st century technology. Most of my problems with 20th century development go out the window with it.

Give yourself time and space to distance yourself emotionally from it. Delve into something that lets you reestablish your identity and do independent personal growth, then use that regained confidence to find the kind of relationship you want. I just hike exhaustively until I no longer think about them or care what they’re doing, becoming more of a naturalist which helps my self-worth. In that community I can find people with similar politics who make better partners. If you try to rush your recovery from that relationship or turn to self-destruction instead of growth, you just further entrap yourself in the patterns that resulted in the last one.

I mean the period of heat death beyond that. The black holes have to be fed and eventually that matter will dry up. The universe will keep expanding and chasing thermodynamic equilibrium until some maximum point of entropy where every particle is spread out over increasingly vast distances, with such a total loss of interactions between them that temperature across the universe is 0 K. We’d be doing the Alpha Centauri generation ship thing but to find the next electron.

As existentially bleak as living through climate change is, I’m glad my brain only has to deal with the crisis of watching one planet in one solar system die. The average schmuck in Warhammer 10¹⁰ will be chasing the last sparks of warmth in a blizzard that will only get worse. The last habitable planet, the last active star, the final energy source they can find that will keep the temperature above 0 K for their grandchildren. They’ll have every beepboop gizmo the universe ever achieves to counter the crisis but there’s nowhere they can go short of making a new one, the same kind of deus ex machina we hope for but representing a new kind of hyper-death instead of just clean energy. Maybe they’ll still be able to grow crops if scientists manage to duplicate physics perfectly in some kind of thing outside of everything within the next 18 months according to the latest IPCC report. Individuals aren’t built to manage whatever psychic damage that causes no matter how much we abstract what it means to exist.

She’s an unstoppable chaos queen with a stink-nipple on her butt

New Jordan Peterson book just dropped

I just have a sense of morbid curiosity about 2028. How little will democrats have learned from the past decade? How can they possibly fail in a more embarrassing way than 2024 or install a more embarrassing person than 2020?

This is liberalism’s moment to really eat ass+hair.

I’m considering applying this to my plant science research. In response to drought stress we observed that the tree became -3 smaller marijuana. Accelerometer data reflects the impact of this change in biomass, with hotdog levels variably +2 to +5. We demonstrate that as the tree becomes smaller marijuana it also becomes bigger hotdog.

Favourite: civic infrastructure. I turn a lever and safe water comes out. If my entire city uses the bathroom at the same time, nobody gets cholera. I’ll be warm this winter. I can bike on a flat path to a lake owned by the public, then charge my phone for it at free and browse hexbear instead of looking at that lake. When infrastructure works and meets our core needs it’s a miracle of collectivism.

Least favourite: Atomisation and the idea of isolated “first/second/third place”. There’s no reason a park can’t be as educational as a university class or as enriching as a wilderness or as productive as a homestead, other than we choose to develop it for one limited set of recreation use. Downtown cores don’t need to be hyper-commercial, hostile spaces that are unsafe to walk around but we develop them for the benefit of capital instead of pedestrians. The ideal garden city is intensely focused on critical geography and situating people in a larger socioecological project. The lines should be blurred between grey and green space, between commercial/residential/social, and between human/natural enrichment as much as possible. It’s all the worse when you bring in the separation of town and country with those rural communities alienated from civic infrastructure and cultural participation and the urban communities alienated from touching something other than grass.

At what point did the current politics leanings of the Democratic party would make up your spiritual and moral framework?

When Obama won in 2008 and didn’t end the wars or close Guantanamo Bay or provide recession relief, I knew I wasn’t a liberal and that the democrats represented a .

Before that I read the Communist Manifesto at like age 12. Its worldview made more sense than the social studies textbooks I was otherwise reading and when I found the Theses on Feuerbach it gave me a foundation for secular morality/ethics that clicked with the Sartre and Camus I was starting to read.

I don’t know what you are, but my is beeping.

Me screaming that Fred Rogers had a preeminent jazz pianist improvise every episode’s theme song to no one in particular.

They had hundreds of animals and no staff ecologists. They had 1 veterinarian. Instead of having paleontologists on staff, they had a big game hunter. All their biologists worked in the lab. They built everything like theme park rides because automation kept labour costs down and made secrecy easier.

Me screaming about urban park design to no one in particular.

I try to maintain good work relationships with managers because I want things to go easy for me. My time off requests, my ability to be promoted or transfer, the daily workload and its division, my ability to advocate for what I think is best- all of these are at the discretion of the manager regardless of my beliefs. When there’s no target on my back and I’m seen as a team player, the job is predictable and not unnecessarily difficult.

For that reason I’d apologise and explain the situation. Work smarter, not harder. You’re making your job more difficult if she dislikes you and your coworkers like her.