You are damn lucky. I had squatters on a piece of riverfront property. After spending the bucks to get them legally evicted, I got to pay for cleanup. 37 motorhomes and trailers to be removed. Sheriff had to sign off as there were no titles. I was a mile away from a transfer station. But first, we had to get them inspected for asbestos and get a statement that none was found. We need to make cleanup of junk like this easier, not harder.
Hey Ryan, I really appreciate your point of view. I think people need to at least grapple with optimism these days. Anyway, I think about the subject of this article a lot. My true love is growing things and making cider, but I still make my living as a software engineer. It’s something I’m usually embarrassed to admit to homesteader types, and the even worse thing is that I like it. I’m plenty skeptical of AI and I don’t think its ubiquity is taking us in a positive direction as a society, but it is a powerful tool and I use it. The trick is to use it surgically, which admittedly takes a lot of self discipline and reflection. But it absolutely has its value.
As an example, the USDA has a mindblowing database/catalog of soil types spanning the entirety of the US. The amount of detail and comprehensiveness is staggering (planning to write an essay on the history of it at some point). But the documentation is rough, and figuring out how to use it as an engineer is not intuitive. It’s also not geared towards your average person trying to understand the soil in an area. So now I’m working on a website that will allow people to get a comprehensive overview of a place and the soil and its natural capacity for farming, what it wants to be ecologically, etc. It’s only accessible to the average person because you can feed a crap-ton of raw data into an LLM, and have it construct a picture in language the average person can understand. Wendell Berry would probably still be appalled at me, but oh well.
I understand…sort of. The skidder offer was a no brainer yes. That actually would be a great Hallmark … the mysterious but capable skidder guy who shows up and carts the stupid problems off to the dump..
You are damn lucky. I had squatters on a piece of riverfront property. After spending the bucks to get them legally evicted, I got to pay for cleanup. 37 motorhomes and trailers to be removed. Sheriff had to sign off as there were no titles. I was a mile away from a transfer station. But first, we had to get them inspected for asbestos and get a statement that none was found. We need to make cleanup of junk like this easier, not harder.
Hey Ryan, I really appreciate your point of view. I think people need to at least grapple with optimism these days. Anyway, I think about the subject of this article a lot. My true love is growing things and making cider, but I still make my living as a software engineer. It’s something I’m usually embarrassed to admit to homesteader types, and the even worse thing is that I like it. I’m plenty skeptical of AI and I don’t think its ubiquity is taking us in a positive direction as a society, but it is a powerful tool and I use it. The trick is to use it surgically, which admittedly takes a lot of self discipline and reflection. But it absolutely has its value.
As an example, the USDA has a mindblowing database/catalog of soil types spanning the entirety of the US. The amount of detail and comprehensiveness is staggering (planning to write an essay on the history of it at some point). But the documentation is rough, and figuring out how to use it as an engineer is not intuitive. It’s also not geared towards your average person trying to understand the soil in an area. So now I’m working on a website that will allow people to get a comprehensive overview of a place and the soil and its natural capacity for farming, what it wants to be ecologically, etc. It’s only accessible to the average person because you can feed a crap-ton of raw data into an LLM, and have it construct a picture in language the average person can understand. Wendell Berry would probably still be appalled at me, but oh well.
Well, he can be appalled.
Why in the heck did the guy drag a couple of trailers deep into the woods? Why two?
I don’t blame him that much. He had big plans. It was going to be his dream home and he was going to stay in them while it was built.
Life kept happening though and “someday” never came.
I understand…sort of. The skidder offer was a no brainer yes. That actually would be a great Hallmark … the mysterious but capable skidder guy who shows up and carts the stupid problems off to the dump..
Thanks for this wisdom. Reading your post was like settling in to a warm bath, and my sanity returned!
Honey has that anesthetic effect! Its also a great antibiotic and anti-inflammatory…In many ways:-)))
True.
Haha this is cool.