aging mother in law, soup socials, music for meditation, AI Tsunami, unplugging from big tech
yesterday i was grateful for dinner at arthur and tina’s house…
today i am looking forward to the second monthly soup social…
it's been a week since last posting... really want this to be a daily thing as the title of the blog suggests, but life has had a different rhythm... there has been the need to get my wife back and forth to block island... her 94 year old mother fell and spent the night on the floor... as it turns out, beyond a little bruising, no harm happened... she and her sister spent a week making sure she was ok and improving her safety... she now wears an emergency call watch... she had resisted that before... sadly, the underlying context is that she is 94, about to be 95, and very frail... we expect to loose her in the not too distant future...
last month we started monthly soup socials... my idea is that soup is super easy and also comforting... especially in the winter... so... make a couple of soups, one with meat, one vegetarian... have some friends over and just have soup and be with each other... it's so easy to entertain this way... as it turns out, people are loving the idea... we are having another one tonight hosted at the house of a friend who attended the last one and we already have a volunteer to host the next one... we wanted to do this because we feel strongly that in the current political and technological environment in person contact and community is essential and will become more so as we move along the historical arc we are on...
one of the substacks i follow is Ted Goia... he writes compellingly about current trends in culture... a couple of his recent substacks caught my attention...
this morning was a post on music to meditate by, which lead me to purchase a number of albums... i love contemplative music so many of the suggestions, if not all of them, were definitely up my alley...
John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean is a musical evocation of that feeling, and also a pathway into experiencing it. For 42 minutes, the listener is swept away by huge orchestral sounds that earned Adams a Pulitzer Prize in Music. This is one of the most powerful immersive works of music I’ve ever heard, and feels almost as inexhaustible as the natural forces it aims to channel.
and then there was yesterday's post about developments in AI during the two weeks that preceeded his publishing the article...
On February 9, the head of AI safety at Anthropic resigned unexpectedly, warning people that “the world is in peril.”
Two days later, a researcher at rival company Open AI announced her resignation in an article in the New York Times. She expressed dismay that her former employer was taking steps that have “potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.”
this is a tsunami of change that is coming at us that is being overshadowed by global politics at the moment... it's almost as if the techbros are running a screen pass towards a touchdown of world domination... this is why i am becoming adamant about unplugging from all the major tech platforms and placing my emphasis on local community and analog technologies... i believe the people in control of tech do not, for the most part, have our best interests at heart... we need to unplug ourselves from them as much as possible...
speaking of unplugging from the major tech platforms... i am methodically unplugging from amazon... one of the ways i am doing that is unplugging from my kindle... for a variety of reasons i liked having and using my kindle... highlighting quotes and making annotations was really easy... you can have a ton of books that don't take up shelf space and in our house, available shelf space is all booked!... it's come to the place that if a book comes into the house another has to leave... i am rethinking this strategy... i am fortunate enough to be able to buy books i am interested in reading... i have decided that whenever possible i will buy books through my local book store (and so far, it has always been possible)... if i love the book i will add it to my library and identify a book that needs to move on... if i think a friend will enjoy the book that needs to move on i will give it to them... we also have a used book store in town that exists to provide cheap reading material to the public while raising funds for the public library... no amazon and an increase in the supply of books circulating in the community...
and speaking of our local book store, we have joined two book groups and will probably join a third... another way to support the local book store and get to know new people...
a few photos from my morning walk...
