Notes from the Chaos Garden: Three Things I've Been Turning Over
It's been a really busy summer acclimating to new household dynamics, keeping up with the homestead and of course, kids. Our pond, whose first year being filled naturally stayed pretty useful for the ducks until late June when the heat took over, presently functions as a dragonfly den and firefly haven which I definitely don't mind. There's been a huge dragonfly that likes to greet us when we pull up in the driveway after school pickup making its home in a seemingly lifeless dried out pond. Resilience of nature in front of my eyes! The duck couple never returned after they lost their nest, but it has served as a rest stop for several new passersby. The tomatoes, broccoli, radishes, and more have thrived in our chaos garden while I struggle to keep up with native thistle (rewilding's revenge, I guess).
Lots of time outside and on the go has meant less time for tech. But weeding does something useful. My hands get to work while my brain decouples from its usual loops. "Why won't this mega-thistle uproot?" interrupted with the sweat-filled annoyance of understanding the answer through the wrestle. Powerful root systems and network infrastructure, of course.
Here are three branches of random connective thoughts all made while running around the homestead in the Midwestern heat. None are fully formed essays yet, maybe never will be, but that's just how this summer is going so far.
Evolving local resilience. Bending, not breaking.
Our workstation build went sideways this year and took the shared Obsidian vault with it. A stale laptop backup became the canonical record of a 5-year plan by pure luck of sync timing. Sorting through what survived, I noticed how much of what we lost I didn't actually want back. Propane readings 3 revisions out of date, a watering schedule for beds we'd already torn out. The changelog had grown since day one on the theory that a complete record was a resilient one.
We already practice the opposite in the physical world. Seed packets have viability dates, and every winter we cull the ones that won't germinate, because an inventory where everything is kept forever is one you stop trusting. The cull is what makes the remaining packets mean something.
I found Willow scrolling through a community tech Slack the week I got back from a few days off around the Fourth. It landed mid-thought, right as I was realizing that leaning on Proton, ollama, and a home server was never going to run the vault the ways we needed it to. A techie friend reminded me of its similarity to peer to peer sharing days a la Napster. Resilience emerging from the system because no central copy was owned outright (unlike our home server). The spec definitely looks like a major level up for what I need it to do.
A tombstone in Willow is an instruction, honored by cooperating peers, that something is gone on purpose (Meadowcap handles the access side of that same trust). Retention should be a decision made per piece of data, not a default applied to everything. Take it from my inbox's word: it's full of junk. A system that can't tell entries apart produces an inventory nobody trusts and when faced with needing to restore it, what do you take?
Robin Sloan
Delighted to learn about this creative partnership, the makers of Willow
When a system does the growing up for you, nobody actually grows
This whole train of thought started because I landed on bookofkegan.com during a recent rabbit-hole of clicks. A familiar theme: honing judgment requires something to hone it against. A system, friction, some resistance. Skipping the system can mean never learning the ropes to begin with. It's slightly different than cognitive offloading. Offloading says a system does work you'd otherwise do yourself. This says the system was supposed to be the resistance itself, the tension through to learning, and removing it doesn't just save you a step, it removes the thing that would have made you sharper.
I noodled about this while wading through thistle taller than I am, getting the same scratch in the same place for the third time. Proactive upkeep versus catching up on it later, taught by a plant instead of a theory. Pull a weed by hand enough times and your hand starts recognizing the root before your eyes do.
Perserving disagreement as a form of coherence
A generative reconstruction model takes a thin signal, one that may not fully support an answer, and produces a coherent one anyway. In image generation, that confident completion is the product, coherence itself is what's being sold. Nobody complains that the model filled in something you didn't specify.
Point the same mechanism at the inside of a healthy body (as Midjourney's medical division is now attempting) and coherence stops being a virtue on its own. A single confident image asserts one ground truth, and the ground truth here was never singular.
I thought about the Lung Image Data Consortium dataset that I used for my undergrad research. 4 radiologists built disagreement into the dataset just by way of their individual expert interpretations if radiological scans. They each read the same scans blind, then revised after seeing each other's marks, and left whatever disagreement remained on the record. Of 2,669 flagged lesions, only 928 got agreement from all 4. Anyone can trace exactly which 1,741 lesions split the room, and how, because the protocol kept the seams visible on purpose. The dataset holds together as a usable, traceable reference precisely because it kept 4 reads as 4 reads.
Midjourney's scanner runs on the opposite footing. Its built to take a thin signal and sand it into one confident surface, the same trick that makes a generated image satisfying instead of a violation of what it's showing you. Point that mechanism at the inside of a body and the sanding doesn't stop at the ambiguity a radiologist would flag and preserve. It smooths straight through it, handing back a single clean image that looks the same whether the underlying tissue was actually clear or genuinely uncertain.
Preserving disagreement made the LIDC's coherence traceable. Midjourney's coherence has the same surface and a different footing: certainty with no seam left to check it against, generated by the same engine that makes its images sell.
And so it goes. Midsommar has come and gone, the homestead is shifting to late summer farming, and my brain marches on from scattered thoughts of weeds and wonder to school starting early this year 😱. Notes from the fields, over and out.