Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1108
Willful child resistance, Alaskapox, what's the deal with Nvidia, beds have made it into the greenhouse, pretty meh edition if I'm being honest.
Good morning good morning! Shiny sunny day, happy and chrome. Listening to that Fauns album, it is great. Was six minutes late to school today, which changes the whole thing from a pleasant suburban dream to a nightmare of dysfunction and sadness. Incompetent traffic directing cops, commuters “packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes,” as Sting sang. Scofflaw parents who cheat the line and drop their kids in incorrect places. Jaywalkers galore. Rose-colored glasses fall away and everyone seems terrible. All because I was slightly weak and hit “snooze” a second time. It’s not Jane’s fault. I blame myself.
Which is distinct from last night, where Jane was absolutely terrible and broke both Emma and I in her willful resistance, so, you know, happy valentine’s day I guess. Emma went to the school yesterday to volunteer help with the valentine’s day party in Jane’s class, and she said Jane is an absolute angel at school and follows all instructions. But get her home? Lol, nope. And she was being so mean too. Threw things at me! And then I picked her up and dropped her on the bed and she was all like “ow ow you hurt my forehead you’re supposed to be kind” and Emma’s like “umm, you were supposed to be kind too and you were throwing things at daddy how is that okay?” But what’s the point. Kids are impervious to having their hypocrisy pointed out to them. Little Trumps in that way.
Dealing with a mean kid is so hard. What is right? One could focus on just getting through it, and I think there’s a lot of merit in that. Or changing their perspective, getting them out of their own head. But the problem is I didn’t want to reward her for being unkind, and even more deeply, I need this girl to come round and realize that “unkindly insisting on getting your own way” is not the correct approach. But then you could argue “well, talk about it later, when they’re not in the mood.” Which, sure, and I do, except the two never seem to meet! She can go on and on about how she will be kind and kindness is best when she’s feeling kind, but none of that clicks, at all, when she’s in a tyrannical mood. I just desperately want her to take a step, just a little step, on the journey of trying to stop it. I know she has taken those steps in the past, but when she chooses not to, well. It’s rough. There is no “best” way to handle it, I believe that. I think there are a lot of great coping approaches, but I don’t know that coping is the best thing to be doing. It’s a real dilemma for me.
Anyway she was great this morning so I will just pretend it never happened I guess.
Emma told me about ALASKAPOX yesterday, which is a thing I did not know about, a new disease that seems to have started in my home town, and made the leap from animals to humans. Seven people ever have had the disease, six have lived in the Fairbanks North Star Borough and, now, one has died. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about this! Fairbanksans, have you heard of it?? Know anyone who got it? Is everyone freaking out? Alaskapox! Terrifying!
What’s the deal with Nvidia? This company makes no sense to me. How is it the most valuable company in the world or some shit? Why has its stock grown so much? I mean, I get the basics: some AI researchers discovered that Nvidia’s graphics card chipsets were really good at doing LLM and GPT AI research, so they started buying as many Nvidia chips as they could get their hands on. The things are like gold these days, so they sell as many as they can make, and now their stock is up 3X and their P/E ratio up 2-3X and… okay cool but how is this some sort of new thing? I watched an interview with the CEO the other day and he was like “we are entering an age of accelerated computing (he kept using that word) and it’s gonna be crazy and people are going to have super computers on their desktops and it’s going to be just amazing what people can do” and it was 100% a speech that someone could have given at any time in the last 100 years. There was absolutely nothing new or different. It was Moore’s Law, pure and simple. And I get that apparently there is something technically more innovative about their chips, but… so? How is this not Intel in the 90’s? Except Intel actually manufactured their chips! Nvidia is fabless! How is it worth one point seven trillion dollars? This is like 10X Intel at its peak! Is the potential demand for AI chips really greater than the potential demand for all chips was in 2000? It seems inconceivable.
I must be missing something.
Yesterday was a big day because I got the first three beds into the greenhouse. They just barely fit in the space I allotted to them, and I had to sort of pound ‘em in a bit, but they are in, and the layout plan seems like it’s going to work. Gotta clean out the whole greenhouse before I can get the rest in there, but I think by Friday all the beds will be in, and I will spend the weekend filling them. I am so excited. We might get seeds into the dirt in the greenhouse this weekend! Also had to go deposit another pool check so I stopped at the Lowe’s Hardware and bought shelving boards and paint to put the shelves in the greenhouse: first test batch of shelf brackets arrives today.
We are so, so close to a functioning greenhouse I can’t wait.
Okay I think that’s about it today. I really want to complain about a specific plot conceit in season 4 of For All Mankind but it seems a bit spoilery so I won’t bother but if you have watched this season let me know in the comments or something and I will tell you my beef, because it’s kind of an interesting economic study and, like the Nvidia situation, I feel like I’m missing something. Sometimes when I’m missing something, it turns out that I am, in fact, missing nothing, and the thing is, in fact dumb. But sometimes it turns out that I am, in fact, missing a key insight, and then I understand it more. This is universal, despite people thinking they are all the way one way or the other. They are not. This is all simultaneously profound and crushingly obvious. The human brain, man. The human brain.
Today’s media of the day is this song by Logan and Isabel. Isabel is one of my youtube channel subscriptions — or, as your mom would say, my stories. She has been absentee for about a month now. She always gets a bit depressed late in winter just before the spring. Sometimes she travels. We shall see. One time she inexplicably said in a video she and Logan were gonna break up. She was off in Europe with a lady friend. Then in the next video she was back home with him and all was well and there was no explanation. One time she said she wasn’t going to make videos anymore and then just continued on like it didn’t happen. And now she has disappeared and I need my cinematic (just so, so well shot and graded. She grades!) cottage-core content. Anyway, they also have a band, Logan and Isabel, and it is great. They came on in the car this morning. Made me miss them. Here you go.
Sorry for the mediocrity of this edition they can’t all be bangers.
Great song, thank you!