Bushwacking up Signal Mountain (Vermont) | New England Fifty Finest

I couldn't think of a better way to start my attempt at hiking the New England Fifty Finest than with a bushwack of a trailless summit in the Northeast Kingdom. Signal Mountain stands at over 3,300 feet and is the highest point in the Groton State Forest.

Inspired by this trip report from Quincy Koetz, who hiked it over 10 years ago, I had to find out if that red nalgene was still there at the summit.

Unlike Quincy, I drove all the way to the base of the climb—at the bottom of the mountain's south face—taking Gore Road just past the bridge over the Waits River. I'm glad I did because I didn't get going until the afternoon and walking the extra several miles of logging road would've eaten up too much time.

I parked on a shoulder and immediately heard two rifle shots in the distance when I stepped out, making me wish I'd brought some orange.

The initial climb was steep and I was winded within the first few minutes.

However, using the terrain view on Google Maps, I found some flatter areas about halfway up that provided some relief from the grade. These flatter areas turned out to be fern-filled plateaus—very peaceful.

Not far from the summit, I stumbled upon an old ATV trail. I crossed my fingers hoping it would take me the rest of the way to the top and stayed on it.

My faith was rewarded as I cruised just another half mile, past abandoned hunter campsites and boulder caves, until it was clear I could go no higher.

It took me a minute but I found the red nalgene. There were just a few sheets worth of register inside, going back to spring of 2024. The last person to sign their name did so three months ago, in June.

Unfortunately there was nothing to write with and I didn’t think to bring my own pen, so my own ascent won’t be register-official. Nevertheless, it is a cool feeling standing on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere that only about 10 sickos reach each year. I might’ve caught the bushwack bug right then and there.

After a long break to rest and eat...

David Lynch: the weirdo who made it in the mainstream

Joshua Rothman commemorates David Lynch in the New Yorker:

When Lynch was fourteen, his family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. There, a friend named Toby Keeler mentioned in passing that his father was a painter. As soon as Lynch visited the studio, he knew that he wanted to live “the art life.” With a friend, Lynch rented a studio of his own and all but dropped out of high school to make dark, Expressionist paintings.

I've noticed a lot of great auteur filmmakers start out in more "primal" art mediums—painting, sculpting, etc. I think they're just people who are drawn toward aesthetic beauty and meaning like moths to a flame, and can't imagine living for anything else.

In 1964, Lynch went to art school—first at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, and then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. Boston left him uninspired; he preferred Philadelphia’s industrial wastelands and abundant lunatics. In Philly, his neighborhood was so dangerous that, when he went out, he carried a wooden stick studded with nails. An apartment he lived in was near a morgue, and Lynch met someone who worked there at a diner; the man offered him a tour, after which Lynch sat among the corpses.

Some places and experiences are just more inspiring.

Lynch’s ideas weren’t pictures on a mood board. They were experiences, which could only be realized cinematically, through combinations of performance, visual composition, music, sound, and an often dilatory use of time. Because the ideas went beyond language, it wasn’t easy for Lynch to explain them to collaborators; he developed strategies for helping them embrace his vagueness. Transcendental Meditation, which he began practicing in the seventies, had both a creative function—it helped Lynch regard his ideas nonjudgmentally—and a social one: it smoothed out his rough edges, lending him the aura of a benevolent guru. (“Your anger. Where did it go?” Reavey asked him, a few weeks after he began meditating.) Practitioners of T.M....

Prior to true AGI, how is AI ever going to be good business?

From a New York Times article about the new AI chatbot from DeepSeek, a Chinese startup:

The DeepSeek chatbot answered questions, solved logic problems and wrote its own computer programs as capably as anything already on the market, according to the benchmark tests that American A.I. companies have been using.
And it was created on the cheap, challenging the prevailing idea that only the tech industry’s biggest companies — all of them based in the United States — could afford to make the most advanced A.I. systems. The Chinese engineers said they needed only about $6 million in raw computing power to build their new system. That is about 10 times less than the tech giant Meta spent building its latest A.I. technology.

After the recent Stargate announcement from the White House where tech leaders, standing with Trump, announced a gargantuan $500 billion investment in "AI infrastructure," I just couldn't help but wonder if all this money being thrown at AI, in this very short period of time, is just going to get torched. It all just feels very hype-y and gold-rush-y.

I don't see how it makes sense from a business perspective, unless the investment directly leads to actual AGI—which is highly unlikely in any reasonably short time frame.

It makes sense from a national security perspective—not wanting to be dependent on foreign countries for critical tech, etc.—but it's just a lot of money, really fast. Not to mention that, for some crazy reason, they have invited possibly the greatest money torcher/bullshit artist in corporate history, Masayoshi Son (the guy who invested billions into WeWork, lol), to help lead the charge.

And now I've just found out about DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that appears to be in the same ballpark as the leading American LLMs/chatbots, who accomplished their feat at a fraction of the cost and using a fraction of the advanced chip tech that we've all been led to believe–thanks to the emerging NVIDIA-industrial complex—is necessary in orde...

Quote: Ira Glass on taste

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” - Ira Glass

Quote: thinking inside the box

"When we first started the band, we wanted to have a formula,” he says. “It’s like, ‘This is what we do, and we’re not gonna try and go outside the box too much. We’re gonna explore the box we’re in. I’ve always been a big fan of that. I used to be in bands where was like, ‘Man, we’ve gotta think outside the box!’ And all I’m thinking is: ‘You guys don’t even know.’ Music should never be just for the sake of being experimental. Before you even start, you have to know what you’re experimenting with first.”

- Mark Speer, lead guitarist of Khruangbin