When I moved from the Northwoods of Wisconsin to Los Angeles (Burbank), a lot of changes were to be expected… The one I didn’t expect was the total lack of thunder n lightning despite rain storms that would flood the streets. I think I was out here at least 6 years before I heard any thunder and that was a one-time event. Been here for almost 29 yrs now, and I can probably count the number on one hand.

This is the way

One of my favorite versions of This Land by Las Cafeteras (just because I’m sure it upsets certain folks to hear Latinos singing the song) https://youtu.be/dS0OQ9HP3Oo

The wilds; they call… Pretty sure I could be a happy well-adjusted hermit, but my wife and family keep me from running off to amass my racoon army. I focus my energy on creating a backyard jungle that lets me pretend that I’m not trapped in suburbia.

Can you please fix me so that I can say “no”?

Heck of a way to find you that you’re immortal.

I have a friend who had developed an expert system for scoring certain lab samples (for cancer). It was a very good system that had few errors and was used for a couple decades. Somebody decided to replace it with an AI system (undefined what sort of AI) and it ended up doing a lot of false negatives, so the lab got sued for missing a lot of cancer diagnoses. Friend’s final task before leaving the company was to update his old model and hire somebody whose primary job was to maintain the old model. On the other hand, a trained monkey (and I’m assuming a LLM) could have done better than the radiologist who looked at my CT scan and said there was no problem, when I could look at it with the basic software they put on your scan DVD and see a fracture across all but a few mm of my sternum. When a different radiologist looked at the scan, he also ID’d several other minor things to follow-up on.