It was during the 17th month of the job search that I decided that my approach needed to change. All the good jobs were going to LLMs, I was sure of it. I decided to turn the tables and make my own LLM that could go get a job and then do the work for me. I dumped my digital life into Markdown: a few hundred tweets, a handful of college essays from my university-provided OneDrive, a protracted series of attempts to be funny in comments on high school acquaintances’ Instagram posts; a smattering of notes scattered across Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep, and Obsidian, a few dozen outbound emails, and about ten thousand words worth of arguments in Discord servers over whether Twenty One Pilots were ever cool. Then I got to work. Logically, to make an LLM whose work I could take credit for, I just had to make an LLM that was me.

Linus Torvalds is the legendary creator of the version control system “Git” and the kernel for the operating system “Linux,” which between them are used to develop approximately 125% of all software. He also gets mad on the Internet a lot. There’s a subreddit dedicated to his outbursts. He produces headlines like “Linus Torvalds on why he isn’t nice: ‘I don’t care about you’”. His feedback is often along the lines of:

So this patch is utter and absolute garbage, and should be shot in the head and buried very very deep. Please immediately delete it from the whole internet.

Or:

“Steven, stop making things more complicated than they need to be… You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN.”

Back when I worked on the farm, when it rained, it mattered. I have a lot of memories of ducking into a barn, or into the truck, or going all the way back to the house for an early lunch just because the rain had come.

Most people probably think that rain is generally good for crops, but unless the topography of the land is perfectly mapped out to drain excess rainfall away from them, things get dicey. Plants’ roots need to absorb oxygen; in other words, they have to breathe a little. Roots can get enough air to respire from between the gaps in clusters of soil, but they can’t breathe through water. Too much rain will make them wither away. The only solution is to change the landscape so that the water won’t build up where you have things planted; the simplest way to do that is to dig drainage ditches.

Not all drainage is visible on the surface. It’s common to dig a ditch, fill it in with highly porous gravel or drain tile, and then let the dirt cover it up again, instead of fighting to keep it from eroding away season after season. In my time, we mostly filled in ditches with heavily perforated black drain pipe. The fields also had an ancient network of old, brown square porcelain tubes (yes, square tubes) that were laid end-to-end under the soil. No one quite knew where they were laid, which was exciting when digging or plowing. My grandfather remembered the burying of them in trenches as a kid.

Tonight, I went on a walk to the gas station to buy soda and got trapped by the rain. It’s been a while since that happened. I mean, it has rained in the last five years, but it hasn’t really affected my life. It’s surprisingly pleasant to get trapped like that: there’s nothing you can do, and there’s nothing happening that’s not supposed to happen. It’s free peace.

Once I was at Wendy’s with my friend when we saw a stray cat out prowling the perimeter of the parking lot at night. She lured it over, captured it, and we took it to a vet to check for a microchip. A week of “lost cat” posts on Facebook later, we discovered the location of its home: a place right next door to the Wendy’s, where its family and owner lived. “I wouldn’t have done this,” I told her that first night, as we anxiously drove a strange cat on the highway to the 24-hour vet in the dark, “but I love that you did.”

It’s funny, or perhaps a shame, how humor, once you realize it’s a tool to communicate, slides headfirst into seriousness: I find myself constantly exaggerating, in the manner of a joke: “I haven’t had a vacation since the late 1800s;” “no one outside of this university has used this software in 79 years;” “time to go home for Christmas and hear about all the orphanages my family members have burned down lately.” All with the fear that if I said a simple truth, people would take it literally but not seriously, and so I have to say something that’s a little bit realer (but sounds more like a joke) than the actual truth

Author’s note: I originally wrote this on a different platform (as the date says, in 2019), and am transplanting it here. I dug up the originals of all of the photos and wrote alt text for them, but the text of the post remains completely unchanged. As a matter of fact, I haven’t even re-read it.

This is a story about farming. It is quite long. I think it may be worth reading anyway, but unfortunately I have no way to prove it. I’ve also tried my best but I still don’t know if it actually makes perfect sense in every way? But it did all actually happen; so it all kind of has to make at least a little bit of sense, even if doesn’t really seem like it.