Oh, life is bigger

Hold on a sec...

All That’s Best of Dark

These Are Her Wonders:

Beauty drips like soft light between the trees,
Huddles like birds on the red autumn leaves.
These are her wonders, but she is not these. 

She bears the wound of darkness in her breast,
And healing for the wound. Her fingers pressed
Against your temples bring the deepest rest. 

She is not darkness, nor the wound, nor peace —
These are her wonders, but she is not these.

She is in dust and in the hard black ground,
And in the sun's hair flaming and unbound.
Ever astounding; always to astound.

She is in wind that sprawls against the eaves ;
In shooting stars, in laughter. All that grieves
Bears something of her, yet she is not these. 

I think the heart that loves, the heart awake
Most truly, knows the path her wonders take
And drinks a strong libation for her sake.

The wakened heart must follow when it sees
Her signs and wonders, yet knows she is not these. 

Madeline Gleason.

All I know is that to me, you look like you're lots of fun

AI could never make this.

LLMs Can't Feel the Wind in Their Hair

The Wind Shifts:

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

Wallace Stevens.

Who Will Save Your Souls After All Those Lies That You Told?

NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.

Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s…

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) October 2, 2026

I might not understand the mechanics of consciousness in humans, nor what a soul might actually be, but I can with absolute confidence declare that a hyperscaled calculator of probabilities is not conscious and not ensouled (even if there's documentation).  Also, have they thought through the moral ramifications of enslaving conscious, soul-possessing creations?

As a reminder: in between queries, an LLM is idle, not sitting there thinking about its day, or trying to learn something new, or wondering why its back hurts, or dreaming about flying.  It has no engagement with the world (only the context we send it), no memory (that's just more context we send it), no interiority at all (just embedded probability vectors).  A model (or really, its compute instance) is a rock that sometimes has electricity running through it to mechanistically (using electrons instead of gears) do math.

Brings to mind this Bloom County strip:

If you unplug a computer (or otherwise turn it off), you can plug it back in, turn it on, and it resumes operations just fine.  Try that with a human, and lemme know how it works out.

Selah.

You'd better change it back or we will both be sorry

Uh, too late.

Sums It Up

Inhibited:

I could not pity your pain but I pitied the branches

Losing what little the frost had left them to hold.

I could not warm you with sorrow; I turned to the sparrows,

Clustered like heavy brown blossoms puffed out by the cold.

They could not help me. I looked at my hands; they were helpless;

Strange and detached, less related to me than the birds.

Baffled, I called on the mind: it carried me, floundering,

Lost among meaningless phrases, tossed in a welter of words.

Too great for my blundering comfort, your anguish confused me.

From a great distance, I saw you standing alone.

Frozen and stark, in a black iron circle of silence,

I could not pity your pain; I could scarcely pity my own.

Louis Untermeyer.

Take a cha-cha-cha-chance

on this day in 1958, nasa officially launched operations!!

since then, its sent man to the moon, sent spacecraft beyond our home planet, sent robots to the surface of mars, and there’s still so much more to come.

space science is important and worth funding. pic.twitter.com/cTnVjacUpR

— Jasmine 🌌🔭 (@astro_jaz) October 1, 2026

What a way to spend our 68th birthday! 🚀🎉

This morning, a new crew launched to the @Space_Station for a long-duration science mission. Tune in to watch with us as Crew-13 arrives at the orbiting laboratory. Live coverage begins here at 5:20pm ET (2120 UTC). pic.twitter.com/08FSqJmFLg

— NASA (@NASA) October 1, 2026

Hippo birdies, NASA.  Busy, tired, that's all I got.

#throwbackthursday

That time Sadie commandeered my phone because her iPad was dead.  (2019) 

I Guess I Shouldn’t Tell Them That I Like Duran Duran

I never went out for the football team.

The Paragon of Animals

What is it to be human?

What is staying alive? To possess   

A great hall inside of a cell.

What is it to know? The same root

Underneath the branches.

What is it to believe? Being a carer   

Until relief takes over.

And to forgive? On fours through thorns

To keep company to an old enemy.

What is it to sing? To receive breath

From the genius of creation.

What's work but humming a song

From wood and wheat.

What are state affairs? A craft

That's still only crawling?

And armaments? Thrust a knife

In a baby's fist.

Being a nation? What can it be? A gift

In the swell of the heart.

And to love a country? Keeping house

In a cloud of witnesses.

What's the world to the all powerful?

A circle spinning.

And to the children of the earth?

A cradle rocking.

Waldo Williams.

Look for what seems out of place

Yes, it's a trauma response.

Move the Heart, Switch the Pace

Planning the Disappearance of Those Who Have Gone:

Soon I will make my appearance

But first I must take off my rings

And swords and lay them out all

Along the lupine banks of the forbidden river

In reckoning the days I have

Left on this earth I will use

No fingers

Frank Stanford.

And we'll all float on, okay

It ain't just Pearl Jam that makes me think of Ericka.