Weekly Digest 13
At some point I will accept that these “digest” posts are not weekly, at least not right now — we’re still in the so-called fourth trimester so finding quiet time where I have the energy is still a challenge. I’m on half-term break now and on Saturday I got to see some old friends I had not seen since before the pandemic, so that was lovely
Links
- You Should Be Using An RSS Reader. I would imagine the readers of this blog don’t need to hear this message, and have probably read this article already, but this will now be my go-to link if I ever have to recommend RSS.
- Claims that ‘AI can replace teachers’ betray a very poor understanding of teachers’ work.
- A woman, blogging: this is a political act Lovely stuff from Tracy Durnell, especially on the risks a Trump victory poses to freedom of speech.
- Notation Must Die. A fascinating video essay on the history of modern Western music notation — how it developed, and the many attempts to reform or replace it.
Playing
I played Doki Doki Literature Club after following a thread from Dan Fixes Coin Ops. Not what I’d usually play, but short enough and pretty neat.
Reading
For casual reading, I’ve been enjoying The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. For more serious reading, I’m reading Plato’s Republic. It’s been over 10 years since I read it last, and education is such a major theme of that work, and since I’m now an educator, I’m looking forward to reading it from a very different perspective.
Watching
Ludwig is a lot of fun, isn’t it?
On this blog
Originally I used tags to categorise the form of posts, mainly using the article tag to distinguish from microposts. But I don’t really do microposts on this blog anymore; I prefer Mastodon rather than “cluttering” my site and my RSS feed. So in future I’ll be using them to classify by topic.
Yelling at clouds
In Volume 1, Chapter 1 of Capital, Marx describes how commodities appear on the shelves as if by magic, obscuring the underlying material realities of the production — who made them, under what conditions, using what technologies, and why are they priced that way. Here in the 21st century, there is another kind of product Marx could never have foreseen that masks its material nature even more. A traditional commodity at least has an obvious material form. But our digital devices increasingly depend on something we don’t see: “the cloud”. Even its very name suggests immateriality.
Our devices gain new computational powers in a way that seems magical, but this is an illusion. The “magic” happens on a machine in a hyperscale data centre on the other side of the world, one with a very real material footprint. These massive facilities contain tens of thousands of computers, and consume vast amounts of energy and water. They have real impacts on the people working and living near them.
It may be tempting to say that this model is more efficient than having many small data centres, which is true, but also potentially misleading. First of all, the overall energy and water needs may be overall lower per gigaflop of computation in hyperscale data centres. But the impacts of the hyperscale data centres accumulate in concentrated areas. Meanwhile, distributing the energy and water needs across small data centres over a larger area may cause less harm by not putting any one locality at risk of blackouts or water shortage.
But moreover, in condensing into fewer hyperscale data centres, we’re talking about concentration of capital (specifically cloud capital, as Yanis Varoufakis calls it in Technofeudalism). This gives the owners of the data centre power over others. Local and national governments are bending over backwards to appease the big three cloud companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) and allowing the expansion of data centres, often against the wishes of local citizens. Because cloud capital acts as essential infrastructure, companies and institutions all over the world are increasingly dependent on three massive American tech companies (a significant advantage to the US geopolitically).
This concentration of cloud capital gives tech companies the power to increase demand for cloud computation. The AI craze is the latest frontier here: Microsoft, Amazon and Google are quite happy to invest heavily in AI R&D in part because it increases demand for data centres. By aggressively integrating computationally-intensive AI into consumer applications and the backend services they offer companies, demand for cloud capital grows.
The growth in demand has significant climate impacts. Growth in cloud computing is offsetting progress on renewable energy. Data centres are either sucking up all the newly commissioned renewables that could be used to power homes and businesses, or their presence is preventing the decommissioning of fossil fuel infrastructure. Google and Microsoft have essentially abandoned their emissions ambitions in pursuit of AI.
Data centres may well become a frontier of anti-capitalist and environmentalist struggle in the years ahead. Ultimately, we need to have a conversation about the rapidly growing demands of highly centralised large-scale cloud computing, and the underlying models and assumptions that create demand for them. AI is one obvious technology that must be reckoned with, but the data-hungry “surveillance capitalism” business model has been with us for a long time. Storing and processing large amounts of data has become so cheap that little thought is given to it in the design of applications and platforms. And yet it all has an impact.
Anyway, this post is really preamble to a podcast recommendation: Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us podcast is doing an excellent 4-part series of 30 minutes each on data centres and their impacts called Data Vampires. Start listening here or in your podcast app. The two other materialist anti-tech podcasts I recommended in a previous post — Trashfuture and This Machine Kills — have both had interesting and entertaining discussions with Marx about the new series, with TMK taking an interesting anti-imperialist angle.
Weekly digest 12
Links
- An Agony Of Effort: The True Story of Bloodborne A little-known multi-part video essay arguing that the 2015 gothic/cosmic horror video game Bloodborne is, in fact, an allegory for the medical establishment of Victorian Edinburgh (and intentionally so). The creator argues that Bloodborne’s core Lovecraftian story of opposing schools of scholars hoping to evolve humanity by studying the cosmic Great Ones represents the efforts of different groups of Scottish doctors, surgeons, and anatomists in their quest to advance knowledge of the human body. This year I have (slowly) played through Bloodborne for the first time and wondered in particular about its major theme of “forbidden knowledge” and what ill-gotten knowledge from the real world it may be critiquing. This series provided a compelling answer: the vile rituals of Bloodborne’s arcanists represent the dangerous, dehumanising, and sometimes outright murderous practices of Victorian medical researchers, upon whose discoveries much of 20th century medicine was built. This extensively researched essay draws on evidence from the game’s text, architecture, setting, and characters, and how they may be representative of real literary works, places, and people. There are many interpretations of Bloodborne online; I found this one utterly fascinating and full of “No way!” moments.
- I love your week notes and day notes and art and lists. Annie Mueller reminds us that not everything we post has to be great literature.
- LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem. I saw a job listing this week that I’d probably be qualified to do — training chatbots to do advanced mathematics. The pay was attractive (as it often is when profitability is barely a concern for these VC-funded tech firms), but I was sceptical of the product — I have seen no evidence that chatbots can be good at mathematics. This article confirms to me that it’s probably flimflam. Training them to do mathematics probably just means improving their ability to pretend to do mathematics.
- Anger at UK’s ‘bonkers’ plan to reach net zero by importing fuel from North Korea. Net zero is also flimflam.
Playing
I finally finished Bloodborne after defeating the optional boss Orphan of Kos, which took me an embarrassing number of attempts that took literally hours (I am not good at this game). After that all three remaining final bosses fell within 15 minutes, two of them on the first try. I guess next I’ll finish Talos Principle for a bit of a change of pace.
Reading
At school during reading sessions, I’ve started on Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest. At home I’m mainly reading a Borges anthology.
Listening
Around 10 episodes of the Very Bad Wizards podcast are basically a Borges bookclub, so I’ve been enjoying listening them chat about some of the stories I’ve already read. I
On this site
- Going part time to work full time
- I have a work-in-progress games page.
Going part-time to work full-time
In the UK, teachers work the most unpaid overtime of any profession. 40% of teachers do an extra 26 hours a week. More than half of teachers are working more than 50 hours a week — some up to 70. These numbers vary from school to school, subject to subject, department to department, but they’re not helped by the fact that schools are expected to do more with less. Over a decade of austerity, Covid, and a massive increase in energy bills have left many schools on a shoestring.
I’ve certainly felt myself on the rough end of this. For the first two years of my teaching career, I was in a mess, working every night until late in the evening, as well as at weekends. It wouldn’t surprise me if I were in the 40% mentioned above. I like my school and my colleagues, but my department lacks centralised planning and resources (those that do exist are generally very old, some relying on obsolete software), leaving me to start from scratch every day. And that’s alongside the marking, mandatory training, parents evenings, and everything else a teacher has to fit in. I was struggling with stress, anxiety, and depression, and looking for work outside of teaching.
That never materialised, but this year I’ve returned to work on one less day a week. Far from a day off, this is my one chance to get my work done for the week at a sensible time — 80% the teaching workload, and about three times as much time available to do it. I’m one of the many teachers accepting part-time pay to sustain a full-time lifestyle. The difference it has made so far has been extremely noticeable. For the first time, I’m usually a few days ahead on my planning. And I’m actually able to be present and care for my children in the evenings.
This year, we did acquire some half-decent resources for our KS4 curriculum, and that too has made a significant difference. The next step will be to push for my department to invest in some good shared resources for the rest of the curriculum. Who knows, maybe one day, half my day off will be an actual day off.
Weekly digest 11
Work is more manageable now I am part time. Just as well as I’m still getting no sleep thanks to a certain small human, who gave his first smile this week.
Links
- Interactive Propaganda: The Historical Revisionism of First-Person Shooters
- The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems
Reading
Re-reading parts of This Life and some secondary literature regarding it, and also dipping into some Borges for fiction
Watching
Strictly, of course.
Crosswords
I finally finished constructing another crossword. The lovely people at Cryptic Sunday solved it on Twitch.
Weekly digest 10
Tomorrow I go back to work after probably the longest break I will have from now until I retire (summer break + parental leave). It’s going to be tough, but helped by the fact I am going back part-time to make it possible to juggle my parenting and teaching responsibilities. Getting ready to go back has been difficult too, as we’ve had an IT migration, so there have been issues with getting to know the new system and also losing access to software that was previously integral to my teaching — hopefully I can sort all this out with IT once I get back to work.
Links
Clothes: A Daily Thread by Patrick Rhone. Patrick has been posting a daily series of reflections on his relationship with clothes.
Reading
I have finished This Life (finally… I’ve had a lot on, okay?). I’ll do a follow-up post. In fact, I may do a whole series deep-diving into some of the arguments.
Watching
Only Connect is back, babyyy
On this site
- Never click through to anything that might improve your life
- I added tinylytics to this site. I have avoided adding any analytics to this site for two reasons. The first is respecting user privacy, which would concern me about going with certain large platforms for analytics. Tinylytics respects visitor privacy. The second is I worry it would influence me to worry about hits. We’ll see how that goes.
Never click through to anything that might improve your life
Much as I avoid most of traditional social media, there’s one platform I still spend a significant amount of time on: YouTube. Video essays (YouTube’s original art form), in-depth interviews, and niche documentaries are, for better or worse, a big part of my media diet.1 I should probably just subscribe to Nebula, since most of my favourite creators are there anyway, but I’ve not got round to it yet.
I was browsing YouTube on my TV yesterday, and a video popped up in my recommendations:
“Why your toddler won’t listen to you and how to fix it”
I am currently having real difficulty with my toddler not listening. He’s very good at the “selective hearing” thing, choosing to ignore his mum and I when we need him to do something like brush his teeth. He also very easily gets worked up into a state and won’t listen to us even when we’re trying to help resolve his problem. And sometimes he acts up and doesn’t listen when we say “no” or threaten a sanction. This is all very standard toddler stuff, obviously. It’s just trying on my patience when we’re also trying to look after a <1-month-old.
I know why this video popped up in my feed — about a week ago I’d tried to find a silly video or song to make toilet training more fun for him. The Algorithm now “knows” I have a toddler.
My selection hovered over it for a moment. Maybe this video would have some useful advice. I’ll never know, because in that moment a preview of the timeline I’d enter were I to click that video unfolded before me in my mind.
It’s the same old story with so many of my interests and hobbies. I look at that one video, perhaps even with a very specific purpose in view. Take fitness, for example. It is quite plausible that the deluge of fitness-related videos in my YouTube recommendations feed originates with one innocent time that I searched “how to deadlift” or something like that. An innocent place of ignorance. Now I am overwhelmed with content. Mistakes to avoid. Maximise your gains with this one simple trick. The pros and cons of shoulder pressing. Why I should be carrying a sandbag over long distances through the woods (not joking). It’s the same story with photography, programming, productivity, climbing, etc.
To be clear, it’s not the videos offered are always useless, or the creators don’t know what they’re talking about (though often, it’s very much this). Many of the videos and creators are good. But that’s not the problem. The Algorithm takes the innocent ignorance of the beginner and offers enticing solutions from all directions, with clickbait titles and thumbnails. Many of the ideas presented contradict each other. And the information overload comes with a kind of anxiety that can get in the way of learning through experience. In other words, YouTube’s recommendations is one of the least helpful ways to present (potentially) helpful information.
I knew that if I followed that link to the parenting video, that would be that. I’d condemn myself to drowning in a stream of strangers and their opinions of how I should parent. Contradictions, fads, good and bad advice all presented with titles and thumbnails designed to bypass all my critical faculties. For something as intimate as parenting, I don’t want a throng of wannabe parenting gurus trying to tell me how to do it.
YouTube has some great stuff, but maybe it’s worth avoiding the recommendations algorithm. One solution is to subscribe to channels I actually want to see via RSS2. And perhaps it’s best to avoid clicking videos that claim they will improve your life, unless you want to endure months of being offered hundreds of videos that might improve your life.
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A tip: if you use YouTube on mobile, try it in the web browser instead of the app. You get the conveniences of your web browser *cough*UBlock Origin*cough*, as well as the ability to continue playback while minimised — a paid feature on the app. This is great for turning YouTube interviews and essays into “podcasts”. ↩︎
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Another tip: You can’t use RSS to subscribe to your Watch Later list as it is private, but you can create a new “bookmarks” playlist and subscribe to that, and use that list as an alternative Watch Later list that appears in your RSS reader. ↩︎
Blaugust farewell
Blaugust2024 is coming to its close. This was my second blogging challenge — the first being micro.blog’s April photo challenge (see all entries or my entries). The challenge of writing something daily was much harder than mbapr, for which I had my photo archive to fall back on as well as the means to whip up new entries relatively quickly. Moreover, in mbapr, the prompts for each day are provided.
I kept up daily posting until the birth of my second son. And I found it really tough. Wven shaping my more-or-less off-the-cuff posts into something vaguely readable often led me to staying up later than intended. I mean, shit, it’s not like I posted anything deep or well-researched. Writing is just hard. When my child was born, keeping up the posting was impossible and to be honest, the way it’s going, I expect it’ll be this way until he actually has a reliable bedtime. But that’s fine with me — something would be wrong if it were any other way.
From Blaugust, I’ve learned that daily (or even near-daily) posting is not for me. However, a manageable daily writing practice may well be, perhaps following some of the advice from this site. I’d definitely like to move more toward quality than quantity and push myself with my writing.
As I heard from several Blaugustians at the start of the process, the real joy of Blaugust from previous years is the community, and I’m pleased to be able to validate that. The active Discord server, the Mastodon hash-tag, the various livestreams… a very inclusive and encouraging community. A big thanks to Belghast and his team of Blaugust “mentors” for making it happen. I’d planned to make more posts more specifically engaging with fellow participants as the month went on, but then (new) life happened. I’ll be sticking around the Discord anyway, so I’m sure I’ll get around to that at some point…
Anyway, my site doesn’t have a guestbook or comments (yet), but if you’re reading this and have checked out my site at some point during Blaugust, I’d love to hear from you, even if you have nothing to say other than “hi”. You’ll find an email link at the bottom of this post (if you’re reading from RSS or my site’s homepage you might have to click through to the actual post)
See you all again for Blaugust2025 (but hopefully sooner than that)!
Weekly digest 9
Unsurprisingly, posting has completely fallen off this week. Even this update I’m writing with an 11-day-old child asleep on my chest, while my 2-year old bashes on a toy drum machine a few feet away. I’m not getting a lot of sleep either! But that’s great. It’s all part of it.
Links
- IndieWeb Assimilation. So it’s an overview of indieweb/smallweb, but I enjoyed this post because of the sheer number of interesting links to follow.
- PlusWord a new-to-me daily puzzle. Solve a 5x5 quick crossword, then play Wordle with the rows of the crossword to deduce a hidden 6th word.
On this blog
Nothing! Other than a few updates to my crosswords log.
Weekly digest 8
It’s a brief round-up owing to the fact I have a new baby as of Thursday. He is great, but we are struggling to name him.
Links
- Amazing Still Happens. The Incalculable Odds of Clicking My Way Back to Phenix. A fun little story about how the web can lead to surprising connections. And also a reminder to attribute images that you use! I feel like this kind of serendipity could also be facilitated by technologies like Microformats.
- 100 Strangers Porject. Lou Plummer has finished posting his 100 street portraits of strangers. Beautiful images of beautiful people. I have enjoyed following this series immensely and really recommend you check them out.
On this blog
- Have you played Brogue? (you can play it in-browser for free!)
- Three critical tech podcasts
- Baby announcement post
I added a new page to record crosswords I solve. Currently there is no navigation to this page.
The fact that I now have a page I am regularly updating has spurred me to start adding support for editing pages to my micro.blog plugin for Neovim.
My beautiful second son is born on this day at half past midnight. We’re all happy and well
Three critical tech podcasts
It’s creator appreciation week here in Blaugust-land. Yesterday I suppose I was appreciating Brian Walker. Today, some podcasts.
Capitalism has provided us with a tech industry that seems to lurch from stock buybacks to mass layoffs, bounce from hype-bubble to hype-bubble, and involves billions of VC dollars propping up unprofitable companies, while promising it’s in the process of delivering a high-tech utopia. Mass surveillance, worker exploitation, and downrights scams are baked into the business models.
Here are three excellent podcasts that critique these tendencies of the tech sector from the left, often taking inspiration from the Luddites (who were not against technology per se, but against the wealthy using techmology to dominate ordinary folks). All three podcasts occasionally have each other as guests.
- Tech Won’t Save Us Paris Marx hosts this Neo-luddite interview podcast. Common topics include the environmental harms of tech, workers exploitation, and why tech billionnaires are bad for society, with a particular focus on Musk.
- This Machine Kills Luddite duo Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr host this discussion podcast, with occasional interviews, in-depth article reads, and discussion of economic trends within the industry.
- Trashfuture A British “techno-pessimist” comedy podcast that pokes fun at the absurdity of the current tech and political landscape. A regular feature is the main host picking a ridiculous/dystopic tech startup, reading some of their marketing blurb, and the co-hosts and guests have to try and guess what the product is.
Have you played Brogue?
I don’t post about games very often (though I do play them a lot), but since Blaugust originated in the gaming community I will talk about a relatively obscure game I like.
Brogue is a traditional roguelike originally developed by Brian Walker. A “traditional” roguelike is a turn-based RPG played on a procedurally-generated grid, where the player has only one life. Walker no longer maintains Brogue, but the “community edition” has continued to improve the game with bug, balance, and quality-of-life fixes.
While most traditional roguelikes are part of a long lineage, building on predecessors such as Angband and Nethack, Brogue takes its primary inspiration directly from Rogue. It’s aiming to be Rogue with modern design principles.
As the genre evolved to be played on a text-based terminal, ASCII “graphics” were the norm, a tradition carried on by many modern roguelikes including Brogue. In this article, I’m going to try and convince you to try a game that looks like this:
Forgive me if I have to a ramble about its virtues a little too hard; I can’t exactly show you pretty screenshots.
As in Rogue, the hero must enter the dungeon, descend through 26 levels, acquire the Amulet Of Yendor, and then return to the surface in one piece. A simple enough premise — let’s talk about the gameplay and design.
Weekly digest 7
Blaugust is getting challenging. I’m not fully committed to posting every single day, but if I don’t try to do that, I’ll skip too many.
Did a lot of nice things this week. Saw some friends, went out for anniversary dinner, took the little one to a country park.
Links
- Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships by L. M. Sacasas.
- One woman returns by The Void. It’s a crossword, not an article. I learned some new words and failed to get 16a.
- You (and I) can do hard things by Jarrod Blundy. Heartwarming.
- MNT Pocket Reform: first impressions by Andy Piper. Portable mini Linux laptop with build-in ortholinear keyboard. Making me covetous.
- Blog gardening by Jamie Thingelstad.
- Assassin’s Creed Shadows Bigotry Is A Huge Issue by Jaedia
Reading
I picked up Chiang’s other book Stories Of Your Life And Others, as well as a collection of stories by Borges, which I’ve just started dipping into.
Watching
This week I loved watching the Olympic climbing. After the women’s final I went climbing for the first time in months.
I also watched the channel 5 documentary on the Lucy Letby case.
On this blog
Reflecting on 10 years of veganism
This month I will have been vegan for 10 years.
How it started
Probably around about 2012 I began to feel bad about eating meat. I tried vegetarianism, but ultimately failed. For one, I was working in a pub kitchen and cashed-strapped. Being able to eat scraps of meat that would otherwise be thrown away was a small perk of the job. But the other reason was that I found vegetarianism too contradictory, knowing that the dairy and egg industries were hardly kind to animals either and — since only female animals produce eggs and milk — deeply intertwined with the meat industry. I perceived veganism to be too difficult and extreme, so to resolve the tension I ended up just eating meat again. I guess the psychology is interesting and fairly common — lots of people I speak to feel reducing animal harm has to be all-or-nothing.
In 2014, I’d just moved to Liverpool to begin my studies, and I generally felt in a mood for new beginning. My journey into veganism began when I started following the comments of a belligerent vegan advocate on Reddit. He showed up in any thread about animals and began arguing with anyone with an opinion about eating meat, and often appealed to his master’s degree in ethics. He was probably everyone’s stereotype of an annoying vegan, but I could not get around the strength of his arguments.
At one point he said “If you claim to care about animals but still eat them, then maybe you’re just a shitty weak-willed person”. Again, a rather abrasive style of argument, but I could not really refute this. I did think it was wrong to eat animals given I could be perfectly healthy without them, and yet I was eating them every day.
Stoicism vs existential commitment
The Stoics, especially Epictetus, teach about not allowing anything that is not under your direct control to have the power to cause you pain. This means not becoming attached to “externals”, as only things internal to us — our thoughts and intentions — are under our control. If we cease to identify our wellbeing with things outside our control, we can be happy.
However, there are certain externals that I assent to causing me pain. I want them to have the power to cause me pain. For example, the death of a family member. According to Epictetus, it is not something I control, so it should mean nothing to me. This is not a reductio ad absurdum against Epictetus — he literally says
If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that this is a human being […] and then, if one of them should die, you won’t be upset.1
By reminding ourselves that that this is a human being, we are supposed to remind ourselves that they are fragile and this fragility is beyond our control. This is right after advising us to remember that the pottery we like is fragile.
Most of us instinctively reject this. If we are not allowing the death of a loved one to cause us pain, in what sense can we say to be loving them? Isn’t the commitment to caring about someone’s life an integral part of love?
This is a central concept in Marten Hägglund’s This Life. For Hägglund, what gives our life meaning is secular faith, which could be briefly defined as “deep devotion to fragile things” — our own lives, the lives of loved ones, projects, moral and political causes. He describes vulnerability to grief as “a common denominator of all forms of secular faith”2. Hägglund’s project is to argue that is it is secular faith, not faith in eternal or unbreakable things, that gives our lives meaning, and from there develop political implications.
The Stoics have a lot of wisdom and advice for detaching yourself from external things that do not matter, rejecting unhelpful thoughts and emotions, and becoming a better person. But I think Epictetus misses the mark with his instruction to detach from all externals; there are some externals I willingly surrender my invulnerability to because they define the meaning of my life.
The horror of teeth
CW: teeth, death
I have always had a mild anxiety about teeth, which I imagine is commonly felt. Unlike other body parts, teeth do not regenerate or heal. They only wear over time, and sometimes break; the damage is permanent. The state of my teeth is a constant reminder of my mortality, that I am a decaying thing and, once my heart stops beating, the rest of my body will meet the same fate as my teeth.
Every filling, chip, and extraction (yes, my teeth aren’t great) brings this process further into relief. The moment a tooth is damaged or drilled I am filled with dread, a sense of irretrievable loss.
I think this is why tooth-loss dreams are so common. They’re an anxiety about losing something irreplacable, perhaps one’s own life or that of a loved one.
Reflecting on one’s own impermanence and mortality is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be motivating, and a reminder to treasure what you have now. Memento Mori (“remember you must die”) is a recurring motif in art and philosophy, often accompanied by the image of a skull, teeth by-necessity bared.
Strangely, this perception may be soon tbe challenged by modern technology. New drugs and therapies are in development that effect the regeneration of teeth, which seems like magic to me. Future generations maybe regard broken teeth like broken bones.
Rucking along
While I’m lucky that my job as a teacher means I’m not usually simply sitting down all day, I’ve always struggled to find the right cardio for me. Swimming is too much hassle. Cycling on these country roads with cars going up to 60 mph feels too dangerous. And I just never could get into running. So while this year I’ve started to take strength more seriously, my cardio health had not been given much love.
That is, until the last few weeks, during which I’ve “discovered” rucking from trainer winny. It’s a simple premise. You put something heavy in a rucksack and then go for a brisk walk. It’s far from a new idea — soldiers have trained in this manner since forever. But in the last decade or so it has surged as a fitness exercise for civilians too.
The advantages of rucking as compared to other cardio activities for me are:
- It’s super convenient. If you have an okay pair of shoes and a backpack, you’re good to go. For weight, you could use a book, a bottle of water, or one of the old bricks every British person has lying in their garden for some reason. I use a couple of weight plates wrapped in towels for comfort.
- The injury risk is very low. The impact on your joints is very small compared with running. In fact, my chronic pain feels better after a ruck.
- It’s perfect for “headspace”. Walking is so natural and doesn’t leave me completely breathless, so I can actually let my mind wander and just enjoy being outside with my own thoughts — while still getting a great workout. This is a serious benefit that should not be overlooked.
The only real rules seems to be to start small and work up. Ideally the weight should be as close to your back as possible, and high up. Maintain good posture with an open chest — don’t hunch over. You can modify the exercise to your needs by varying the weight, distance, pace, and gradient of the walk.
For me, I’ve settled on 10kg (+ towels), and a fairly hilly 45-minute walk to the nearest village and back, about 3 miles total. The different inclines give me a nice burn in different parts of my legs, and the 10kg feels about right that I’m feeling the benefit but not risking any injury. Usually I’ve not taken my phone, but last time I brought it for some relaxing music. I think I’ll stay away from podcasts though, as part of the value is that mind-wandering time.
Having said all this, I do see the funny side of modern fitness content creators (and me, in this post) promoting the radical idea of going for a walk while carrying something. For all the complex training programmes and exercises out there, sometimes simple really is the best.
Let's just have less
Many AI critics have pointed out the environmental cost of LLMs. The rapid expansion of data centres, running energy-intensive operations such as training, have led to Google’s emissions jumping by almost 50% in the last 5 years, with similarly high figures for other AI companies.
Defenders of these companies point out that renewables and nuclear will be deployed to meet this energy demand, as well as making the (frankly implausible) claim that LLMs will contribute to new ways to reduce emissions.
Critics have several responses. The first is to point out that here in the present, AI is being powered by fossil fuels — and in at least one case, a coal plant has had its decommissioning postponed due to AI energy demands. Second, renewables aren’t free — they require land, labour, time, and resources to construct. If renewables in some area are simply going to power rapidly expanding AI data centres, then they’re not meeting the existing energy needs of that area — so everyone else will be left continuing to use fossil fuels.
Moreover, efficiency improvements in AI technology can’t solve the problem. Jevons' paradox points out that efficiency gains often lead to higher total consumption of a resource, because greater efficiency = more bang for your buck = higher demand.
AI is not currently providing many benefits for many people — sure it’s helping some people write email more efficiently, and it is assisting some programmers. But most people don’t use AI, and don’t have a use for AI. All AI is doing for them is putting more spam and fake news into their feeds, and making search results worse.
So the obvious way to bring down the emissions from AI is less AI. We don’t need it. Many (most?) of us don’t want it. And if the market doesn’t bring about this change, then we can use policy.
But why limit this critique to AI? There are plenty of industries providing very limited social benefit while being environmentally destructive. These sectors are competing with the more socially necessary ones for the same energy and materials, using up renewables and preventing the decommissioning of fossil power. A big part of the solution is less of the bad stuff, rather than trying to outpace its growth with renewables.
My life through 6 possessions
The theme for this Blaugust week is “introduce yourself”, but I didn’t really want to just do a standard “About me” post. I decided instead to share some treasured possessions of mine that say a bit about me. Since each possession came with its own little story, this post has ended up being rather long!
Each item represents a different phase of my adult life, and I’ve tried to order them roughly in order, so it’s kind of a biography. But since these are treasured possessions, it’s quite a one-sided, only-the-nice-parts biography — not that I haven’t been very fortunate; I have.
GameCube controller
The most important gaming community I have ever been involved with is the UK’s Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament scene.