I was washing the dirt off my hands and arms from working out in the garden when it hit me that I have not posted on here in a hot minute. The phrase “consistently inconsistent” entered my head and I chuckled, thinking that it describes me pretty accurately. I come up with all these plans to regularly make content and then life happens, I get distracted, and only later remember my plans when some random neuron in my brain wakes up enough to poke me.

Slop Farms

When I started this year, I had the idea of returning to the well of content creation with a focus on educational videos for technology professionals. I think I made a dozen or so videos and shorts along with a podcast. It was fun for a while, but I quickly came to dislike the grind. Setting up AWS and GitHub and VSCode and GitLab and ArgoCD is cool and all, but it isn’t very satisfying. Then you add all these tech companies cramming AI stuff into their products, with spammy advertising to upgrade your subscription to get the AI features, and it all became very not fun. Not fun at all.

I view YouTube these days and see it absolutely drenched in AI slop. At first it was mostly advertisements using slop. Videos of Elon Musk saying he wants to make 10 millionaires each day and to click a link, or of some retiring watchmaker having a sale on his vintage watches that were obviously AI generated drop-ship junk. But then it became full YouTube channels of slop, like all the “cave death” channels being narrated by AI voices with little stick figure drawings. And now I’m seeing the wave of Sora generated slop being shoved into YouTube.

I’m the type of YouTube viewer who uses his Subscriptions tab. I rarely use “the algorithm” to find things. But I do see what it recommends after viewing a video, along with sometimes looking at the home page of YouTube. And it’s recommending the slop. It’s just a big slop sandwich these days – slop content filled with slop ads with shorts feeds of more slop.

Seeing this really takes the wind out of my sails. Why would I want to make content for this environment? What even would my content be? The stuff I made earlier this year took a ton of time, energy, and money, and I don’t think people are even watching it anyway. I’m not looking to make money on YouTube and could not care less about advertisement revenue. I make about $200 a year from viewership. But if I’m going against an army of slop machines for people who are actually putting eyeballs on that garbage, I don’t feel like I have any sort of ability to succeed as a content creator. It keeps me on the sidelines.

With that said, I do have some content I’d like to make and some irons in the fire. But I’m determined to avoid using AI in the ideation, generation, curation, audio, or production of the content. People will either consume the content, or they won’t, and I’m trying to stop worrying about that part.

More Plant Stuff

I’ve been busy, but in a completely different way than what I think people mean when they say they are busy. “How’s it going?” we tend to ask one another. “Keeping busy!” is the typical reply. I think it’s a way to avoid answering and more of a social norm verbal handshake that then frees up one another to move on to the topic(s) at hand.

For me, it’s Fall planting time, and so I’ve been busy with learning just what the heck that means here in Texas. My “micro farm” has continued to grow, with another 400 square feet (about 38 square meters) of garden beds planned. This will be the new home of my tomato and pepper plants, along with many, many others that will provide food for my family.

In the 8×4′ bed shown above, I’m using 2×6″ boards for the frame, 4×4″ boards for the corner and mid supports, and cedar fence pickets (with the tops removed) for the sides. Once completed, I added a railing, sealed everything with food grade sealer, and then built a layer of limestone pavers to deter potential termites in the ground from snacking on the wood. I’m much happier with this design compared to my first bed shown in the Growing Organic Food post, but that comes with experience. I’m sure there will be further tweaks made as I build more of them.

I had a moment of clarity a few weeks back. Many of my tomato flowers were not turning into tomatoes. I made the assumption they were not being pollenated. I think the bees just have better options nearby as I have several beds with roses, sage, Purple Heart, Mums, and more that keeps their attention. So, I dropped in a dozen Gerbera Daisies in between my basil and tomato plants like a “help wanted” sign for nearby bees.

Success!

All of my tomato plants (Roma and Sun Sugar) are now fruiting like gold medal champions.

The Sun Sugar plants are absolutely laden with “string of pearl” fruits with as many as 8 cherry tomatoes per string. I ended up “topping” the vines a month or so back to discourage any further vine growth, causing the tomatoes to switch into fanatical fruit growing mode.

Here’s another picture showing the full lifecycle from flower to fruit in a single shot. The garden glove in the background is there to help my phone lens focus correctly. 😄

Growing organic food and using my expanding carpentry experience continues to feed my belly and my soul. It scratches the itch to “make things” like I did in the Cloud, but with a tangible sense of accomplishment that was missing from deploying software.

I’m very excited to finish up these new planter beds, drop in an irrigation connection to my Rachio (water system), and then start exploring methods to use IoT sensors to start trending temperature, moisture, light readings, nutrients, and more in the future.

✌️ & 🩵

I hope you, dear reader, have a lovely rest of your day.