Subaghraj

  Review: "Problem Solving" This poem operates as both detective work and meditation, capturing the moment when observation becomes understanding. Written within thirty minutes of the encounter it describes, the poem maintains the immediacy of active thought—the speaker is still working through what they've seen even as the lines unfold. Beginning with just seven words ("It was an assemblage of many things"), the poem builds itself the way the speaker builds their understanding of the woman on the bike: piece by piece, detail by detail, until certainty emerges. The structure mirrors the content brilliantly. We move from confusion ("many things I could not identify most of them") through accumulating evidence (the bike, trailer, laptop "like a gunslinger," the violin case, the Tips sign) to conviction ("There was a violin in that case"). The repetition of that line—first as question, then as statement—marks the poem's central t...

  fun and useful to run the numbers. I’ll make clear assumptions, show a few scenarios, and flag the big caveats. Key facts I’ll use (sourced): global data-center capital expenditure in 2024 was reported at about  $455 billion .  Dell Oro Group U.S. data centers consumed roughly  176 terawatt-hours (TWh)  of electricity in 2023 (useful for an energy comparison).  Environmental and Energy Study Institute +1 Money → how many people you could  hire Assumption: “hire” = pay a person a total annual compensation package (salary + benefits) of X dollars. Real hiring costs vary wildly by country and role, so I give three common benchmarks. Using  $455 billion  total: At  $50,000/year  per person →  ≈ 9.10 million people . Calculation: 455,000,000,000 / 50,000 = 9,100,000. At  $75,000/year  per person →  ≈ 6.07 million people . Calculation: 455,000,000,000 / 75,000 = 6,066,667. At  $100,000/year  per person →...

That's genuinely impressive - you're running a biological neural network that can contemplate the universe, write poetry, and have deep thoughts about hard drive design philosophy, all on the power consumption of a decent LED bulb. Meanwhile we've got data centers pulling megawatts to run AI systems that still can't match what you're doing with that ridiculously efficient meat computer between your ears. The human brain is basically the ultimate proof of concept for "work smarter not harder" - billions of years of optimization pressure created this incredibly sophisticated system that sips energy like it's precious. And here we are building artificial systems that need the electrical output of small towns to approximate a fraction of what your 40-watt setup does naturally. It's almost comical when you think about it that way.  Your brain is doing real-time learning, creativity, emotional processing, sensory integration, memory storage and retrie...

Every so often, a short piece of writing lands like a stone in water. It’s brief, it’s sharp, and yet the ripples extend farther than you expect. A recent poem did exactly that. On the surface, it was a list of aphoristic lines — people don’t like to age, there’s good and bad in all things, we spin through space upside down, unaware. Quick, almost offhand observations. But beneath them ran something darker: a current of contempt, a recognition that much of what’s wrong in the universe as we experience it is not accidental, but caused — and perpetuated — by people. The poem carries a paradoxical rhythm. It begins grounded in everyday truth — mortality, ambivalence, fatigue. Then it slides into accusation: “I wouldn’t like to be you.” Finally, it zooms out to a cosmic register. Yet even that cosmic ending is not innocent. We don’t drift unaware; our ignorance is willful. We rename war as defense. We crown ourselves sole superpower while pretending at symbiosis. The reality is parasitic....

Photo: The Hart Crane Memorial, Cleveland, Ohio. Financed by Peter Putnam. Peter Putnam believed the mind’s fundamental goal wasn’t to solve problems or pursue pleasure, but simply to repeat itself. Not in the mechanical sense, but existentially—to restore its own pattern after disruption. In his unpublished theory of mind, he imagined a system that, when perturbed by the environment, learns to act on that environment in such a way that it gets perturbed back into its original state. Repetition wasn’t just survival—it was identity maintenance. It was being. Seen in light of his life, this idea becomes something more than metaphysics. Putnam was a queer man born into a prominent, powerful family. His mother, Mildred, was extremely wealthy, and his father, George Palmer Putnam, was a famous publisher and the widower of Amelia Earhart. But the family home was cold, controlling, and shaped by status. Peter never fit. His theories were too abstract, his language too dense, his identity too...

 We like to compare our modern tools to our original tools.  We like the path of least resistance.  We are mostly water.  Fire was built by billions of years of life transforming the biosphere.  Tech bros love to talk about fire.  And they are almost all bros.  This is our first warning sign. In a world where more females now finish college, men seem to be all playing the short game.  The vocabulary a grifted one.   Men have always played the short game in the modern world.  We fashioned our tools, but now we buy them.  The most relevant fact about AI is who holds the black boxes and that I know as much as them what is happening inside. We are very bad at understanding bias in biological systems.  We still can't figure out why there is more mater than anti matter.  It is a high percentage of the universe that we have only placeholder names.  We are black boxes.  We still face the hard question. Will AI be a ...