In which I say something nice about Generative AI

My wife runs a nutrition business that has a strong internet component. She’s spent quite a bit of money on a contractor who’s expert at Search Engine Optimization, and it’s been successful. After the pause for Covid-19, though, the traffic to her web site dried up. Maybe SEO Guy lost his mojo, but we heard similar stories from others in the business. Her website isn’t just a storefront. She loads it up with information about nutrition and metabolism and critiques of dieting. The principle is, like Sy Syms used to say, “An educated consumer is our best customer.” Since she didn’t have customers knocking on the door, she started blogging about trending topics. And then the customers came back. Her site isn’t getting any more traffic, but the phone has started ringing. I’m guessing that we’re seeing Google’s AI in action. When someone asks a question, it searches its blurry JPEG of the Web and finds her essays and blog posts, then serves them up to customers directly. If the days of the SEO Arms Race are over, I’ll be glad to see them gone.

Enjoying a summer evening on the porch, when a hornet landed on my eyeglasses and crawled onto the inside curve of the left lens. I’m really nearsighted, so the hornet was in perfect focus with an apparent length about 10 cm. My blood pressure should be back down to triple digits someday soon. #bugs

Bush-hogged yesterday, but it was too hot to rake up the detritus for the compost heap. Early morning is cooler, so I left it for today. At dawn, all those pulverized weeds were soaked with dew, so I don’t need to water the pile. Umm, right, just the way I planned it! #composting #procrastination

Whenever I feel like the world is becoming homogenized, everything the same, I snap out of it by remembering the thousand ways that #CSLewis scholars pronounce “Sehnsucht”.

The Three Levels of Vegetable Gardening 1. Getting amusement out of it. 2. Getting food out that’s worth more than you spent on it. 3. Getting out more calories than you put into it.

I peaked at level 2. 🌱 #gardening

Sara Brown just spoke about #Tolkien as a war poet. His poems look internally, where the most famous WWI poets looked outward, bitterly and angrily, toward the people who weren’t on the front. Faërie is the means by which he jumped past those early Kübler-Ross stages. #Mythmoot

Symphony #93, third movement, by #Haydn is on the car stereo. Lyrics suggest themselves this #caturday: Miss Fléau the cat, She loudly complains That she’s in a crate And her dinner’s late And she doesn’t want to take a road trip…

“Ce n’est plus le temps de plaisanter ; les bons mots ne conviennent point aux massacres.” -Voltaire, 18 juillet 1766

Small-town politics can be a trip. I just got an alert urging me to “vote Pennefeather for Fork Supervisor“. #virginia

Some days I love the Internet. Just now I looked for the text of “The Gay Science” by Friedrich Nietzsche. DuckDuckGo served me up a PDF of it printed entirely in Comic Sans.

In the mail today: the Cremation Society of Virginia invites me to an informational meeting at… Texas Jack’s Barbecue. 😮

Today I Learned that in Uzbek, Webster’s Dictionary is called “Vebsteringliztilininguchinchiyangixalqarolug’ati”. #English

My wife’s phone hasn’t been ringing off the hook, because phones don’t have hooks any more. What’s the modern equivalent of that expression?

At every #graduation ceremony, a speaker has to say “be the change you wish to see in the world.” That’s kind of alarming to someone who’s working to increase their soil organic matter. 🌱 #gardening

Last week I cut the weeds in my garden into neat rows with a hoe. If you don’t look closely enough to see it’s all lambsquarters, it looks like I have a thriving crop growing. 🌱 #gardening

Transplanted the tomatoes today and put cages around them. In May, the purpose of a tomato cage is to keep me from stepping on the seedlings. 🌱 #gardening

Ran into a friend from college whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years. At one point in the conversation I set up a two-line joke and she beat me to the punchline, just like the old days.

Usually when I go to the hardware store, I occupy two people for 10 minutes to find a part that costs 29 cents. It was almost a pleasure to immediately buy a thing that costs $40 today.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 30 definitions for “man” but only 12 for “woman”. Let’s step up our game! #words

The furthest-from-mainstream church around here put on their sign for Easter, “The cradle and tomb are empty; the throne is full.” I’m no theologian, but “the throne is full” has a different meaning from what they probably meant to say. #WondersAndSigns

I just typed “Plan” and the iPad’s predictive text offered up “B” as the first choice and “A” as the second. It knows me pretty well by now.

Financial reporters call a 10% drop in a stock index a “correction”. Shouldn’t they also call a 10% rise a “mistake”? #stocks