I loved this piece. I am a child of the Black Hills, so the place names were familiar, as was your description. The dude talking about the winters was spinning a yarn though. It is dry and warmer than the prairies around it.
I hope you can visit the Badlands on your way out.
Interesting. We're crossing paths. I leave in a few days to visit family in Sioux Falls. My sharp-as-a-tack aunt turns 90 and I'm there to capture some of her personal history. My family homesteaded in SD 170 years ago. Another crossed path, "Undaunted Courage" has been my nightstand read for the past 9 months. Lewis and Clark have just met the Shoshones and traded for horses. Guns, of course, or the promise of them figure in many of the trades they make.
I wonder if what you're experiencing in SD is similar to what I experience from moving in the opposite direction. I've worked in NYC, Atlanta, and Chicago for extended periods. But those experiences have always left me craving a return the wide open and minimalist spaces of Colorado. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram...these places have from their inception struck me as the NYC's and Chicago's of the digital world. The untamed and untethered weblog/blog world of the early 2000's feels like the Deadwood of the Intertubes - a marker in name only of a time long gone. replaced with addictive algorithms and blinky casino lights. In the real world, right outside my front door, I can find the uncrowded silent solitude I seek. In the virtual world, it's fences everywhere.
Excluded from my writings on AI so far is an idea I'm struggling to articulate, that the end game for AI will be to alienate and isolate us further. The cynic in me feels this won't be an organic process, but deliberate. No surprise that more and more people are seeking something they can't define and so don't know where to look. Rather than leave the smartwidget at home and go for a walk, they query ChatGPT "What will make me happy."
Some fine writing and thinking going on here; I like you in this daily journal mode ... I'd like to read more of your 'wandering' reflections, though 'wandering' is not the right word -- you always have thoughtful conclusions ... maybe it's the spirit of openness and travel that comes through; anyway, bravo Cobb ... your impressions of the Mississippi come across strong ....
I'm reading a new book released last week about a.i., THE COMING WAVE, authored by a co-creator of DeepMind. He says he's concerned about finding a way to inject ethics into the technology. ~eric. MeridaGOround.com
I loved this piece. I am a child of the Black Hills, so the place names were familiar, as was your description. The dude talking about the winters was spinning a yarn though. It is dry and warmer than the prairies around it.
I hope you can visit the Badlands on your way out.
Interesting. We're crossing paths. I leave in a few days to visit family in Sioux Falls. My sharp-as-a-tack aunt turns 90 and I'm there to capture some of her personal history. My family homesteaded in SD 170 years ago. Another crossed path, "Undaunted Courage" has been my nightstand read for the past 9 months. Lewis and Clark have just met the Shoshones and traded for horses. Guns, of course, or the promise of them figure in many of the trades they make.
I wonder if what you're experiencing in SD is similar to what I experience from moving in the opposite direction. I've worked in NYC, Atlanta, and Chicago for extended periods. But those experiences have always left me craving a return the wide open and minimalist spaces of Colorado. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram...these places have from their inception struck me as the NYC's and Chicago's of the digital world. The untamed and untethered weblog/blog world of the early 2000's feels like the Deadwood of the Intertubes - a marker in name only of a time long gone. replaced with addictive algorithms and blinky casino lights. In the real world, right outside my front door, I can find the uncrowded silent solitude I seek. In the virtual world, it's fences everywhere.
Excluded from my writings on AI so far is an idea I'm struggling to articulate, that the end game for AI will be to alienate and isolate us further. The cynic in me feels this won't be an organic process, but deliberate. No surprise that more and more people are seeking something they can't define and so don't know where to look. Rather than leave the smartwidget at home and go for a walk, they query ChatGPT "What will make me happy."
Some fine writing and thinking going on here; I like you in this daily journal mode ... I'd like to read more of your 'wandering' reflections, though 'wandering' is not the right word -- you always have thoughtful conclusions ... maybe it's the spirit of openness and travel that comes through; anyway, bravo Cobb ... your impressions of the Mississippi come across strong ....
I'm reading a new book released last week about a.i., THE COMING WAVE, authored by a co-creator of DeepMind. He says he's concerned about finding a way to inject ethics into the technology. ~eric. MeridaGOround.com