From Extinction To Preservation

The new Trump administration appears determined to wage war on our planet. With the administration in full swing dismantling state infrastructure—including erasing climate change data—all CDC data sets prior to January 2025, have been uploaded to Archive.org.

As anyone who has ever lost a backup knows, this is a stark reminder that our data, our stories, are ephemeral. To this end, the international non-profit Crop Trust has created the Seed Vault.

The Seed Vault safeguards duplicates of 1,301,397 seed samples from almost every country globally, with room for millions more. Its purpose is to back up genebank collections to secure the foundation of our future food supply.

It amazes me that we have humans at such extremes. Some passionately believe that we will always be here, while others know we won’t and selflessly dedicate themselves to a labor for future generations. They plant seeds for trees whose fruit they will never eat.

Here’s another cool example: The Public Domain Image Archive is an initiative to bring together as many public domain images as possible. Currently, the archive holds over 10,000 out-of-copyright images. Be sure to check out the “infinite view” mode.

Somehow, all of this reminded me of these quirky erasers. Dubbed “Salaryman Erasers,” they gradually go bald the more you use them.

Before we close out, I stumbled upon a fascinating use case for LLMs like ChatGPT—building your own customer service agents. In LLMs and the Zen of Espresso Machine Maintenance I try to use the cleaning cycle on my coffee machine and, as a bonus, get a cool story - at no extra charge.

Finally, marvel at the amazingness of the best table tennis points of 2024.

Isn’t humanity amazing? And YouTube? I really hope someone, somewhere, is backing up all of it.

Thanks for reading along! Hope some of these were worth your precious time!

Till next time!

Leon