Big milestone this month: the game now has one path where I can play all the way from start to finish without encountering any placeholder text.

A complete playthrough took me about 45 minutes, but that was with me skim-reading the text and not taking any time to think about the decisions, so someone playing it “for real” would probably take an hour or more.

After a long time with my head buried in individual chapters, this is the first time I've been able to step back and see what a playthrough of the game as a whole is going to be like...and I think overall I'm pretty happy with it! The gimmick of the whole thing being narrated by the villain works well, and the overall structure of the game is satisfying. There are lots of things wrong with it, but they're all things I can fix.

In particular I think the game could be a bit longer, but I think the way to fix that is to make the individual chapters longer rather than add more chapters to an individual path. I also want to add more puzzle-type content, so the player has to think harder to come up with the correct solution. (As I mentioned in January's dev diary, my new way of handling failure means I can be less merciful.) But there will be multiple solutions to at least some of the puzzles, as I want to strike a balance between making you work out the correct solution and letting you roleplay your space hero.

My plan now is to write the whole rest of the game to the same first-draft standard as this path. Then, once the structure is in place, I can go through and make the individual chapters actually good.

Can our hero complete a first draft of the entire game, or is his confidence misplaced? Find out in next month's exciting developer diary!

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary

I was invited to speak at The Global Education Conclave 2026, hosted by CGC University in Mohali, that gathered 120+ delegates from 60+ nations under the theme “EduVerse 2050: Rethinking Global Academia for a New Human Epoch.”

This is a written version of my main talking points, edited after the conference. The text therefore contains both the narrative of my talk, along with reflections from the actual events and meetings during these intense days in Mohali, India.

Quick Overview

• Unique delegate structure – diplomats, scholars, and activists.
• Geopolitical diversity – only a handful of participants came from the West, allowing holistic and varied perspectives from all over the globe.
• Peace‑building through education – amid rising populism, the conclave panels underscored education’s role as a bridge between conflicted societies.
• Exploitation in the AI pipeline – annotation work for Large Language Models (LLM) training is often outsourced to workers in the Global South who reap none of the downstream benefits.
• Call for local models and data – the argument that culturally relevant, locally trained models are essential to avoid the “US‑centric” bias of current LLM services.
• “AI” is not the same as proprietary LLM services.

These threads weave together a coherent narrative: the future of higher education cannot be outsourced to opaque, profit‑driven, monocultural LLM-based platforms. It must remain a public good, rooted in critical thinking, cultural pluralism, and open scholarship free from commercial gatekeepers.

The conclave was unusual in the best possible way: diplomats alongside scholars with different perspectives on peace-building. It was very interesting to hear voices that outnumbered traditional US and Western Europe perspectives by a wide margin. That composition mattered. It shaped what got said – and what I learned.

LLM ≠ AI

My background is in AI and information technology. I have a Master's in Cognitive Science and a PhD in Computational Linguistics with a focus on interactive AI. I have spent 25 years putting AI technologies into use, both as a practitioner and as a researcher. You might expect me to be an enthusiastic advocate for initiatives like Gemini for Students or ChatGPT Education. I am not, and I want to explain why – carefully, because the argument matters.

My point was not that everything that the ”AI” umbrella covers is bad. AI as a field is far larger than LLMs and has been developing for at least 70 years with a multitude of approaches.

Instead, I wanted to point out something more uncomfortable: that the products currently being sold to our higher education institutions under the name “AI” is being systematically misdescribed, that the people selling it know this, and that students are ultimately the ones who will pay the price.

What the “AI Product” Actually Is (Currently)

The problem begins with the word “intelligence.” When a company calls a product “artificial intelligence”, we fill in the gap with a meaning we already understand. Intelligence: the capacity to reason, to understand, to form genuinely new ideas. That is what the word means to us. It is not what it means in the products currently being labeled AI. This is not a subtle distinction. It is a central misconception – and in the context of institutional adoption, it is closer to actual deception.

Now, LLM systems are technically large statistical models trained on enormous quantities of human-produced text. Text that were written by humans, for humans to read. The LLM learns the probability distributions of word (token) sequences. When given a prompt, they sample from those distributions to produce a plausible-looking continuation. That is the mechanism. Entirely. There is no reasoning. There is no understanding. It is pattern completion at massive scale.

The word “generative” has the same problem. In plain language it sounds like creativity, like something new being made. In the actual mathematical sense, generative only means the model approximates a distribution and samples from it. It cannot reach outside what it has seen. It interpolates and recombines within learned boundaries, and it does that with impressive fluency. But fluency is not understanding. When a model produces a coherent-looking summary of a historical argument, it has not understood the argument. It has produced a statistically plausible reconstruction of what a summary of that kind of argument tends to look like. It cannot tell you what the argument gets wrong. It does not know when it is outside its competence – which is why it fabricates citations and hallucinates facts with complete confidence.

The people building these systems know this.

The people selling them to our institutions and universities also know this.

The framing of “AI” as intelligence, as reasoning, as a thinking partner, is a marketing decision. And that marketing decision is now shaping academic policy at institutions that are supposed to be built on precision, source criticism, and rigorous thought.

Who Is Actually Selling It

When the conversation turns to “AI in education,” it is framed as if we were discussing a broad and open category of tools. We are not. In practice, we are talking about a handful of commercial services from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft. These are not education companies. They are among the largest commercial platform companies in history, headquartered in the United States, operating under US legal frameworks (like the CLOUD Act, for example), with business models built on lock-in, data accumulation, and scale. When a university integrates one of these services into its learning management system, it hands a portion of the university's knowledge infrastructure to a commercial actor whose systems cannot be audited, whose behavior cannot be reliably predicted, and whose terms of service reserve the right to analyze behavioral metadata regardless of what the headline privacy promises say.

The Monoculture Problem

There is a structural problem here. These models are optimized for English and an American textual culture. When millions of students at thousands of institutions worldwide are using the same two or three closed models to research, summarize, and draft, the result is a global homogenization of what knowledge looks like – and that homogenization flows outward from a single cultural center. This point landed hard in the conclave’s multicultural context, and rightly so.

The conclave's composition – delegates from across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America – foregrounded what is usually politely left aside in Western discussions of EdTech adoption: these tools were not built for most of the world's students, do not reflect most of the world's intellectual traditions, and the people doing the low-wage annotation work that makes them function are typically from the Global South and benefit from them the least.

Sitting next to two of my esteemed fellow panelists from Ethiopia and Nigeria – one of the most incisive points raised in my panel was the urgent need for local models, local data infrastructure, and local governance. The reason is simple: contemporary models carry very little meaningful context for the majority of their global users. This is a structural failure.

Education as Resistance

The researchers and educators who used to determine what counts as rigorous analysis are being gradually displaced by the probability weights of commercial systems optimized for plausibility, owned by companies optimized for growth.

Universities stand for open science, source criticism, and reproducibility. We risk building pedagogy on closed, non-replicable statistical systems that we cannot scrutinize and did not choose on educational grounds. The pressure to adopt these tools combines three forces: fear of being seen as behind, funding tied to adoption, and the absence of organized faculty resistance at the moment decisions were made.

None of those forces is an educational reason. And this is happening at a moment when higher education is already under attack from populist movements that question its value, its legitimacy, and its purpose. The Palestinian ambassador's framing – “education as resistance” – was not just a slogan. In a room representing 60 nations, many of them navigating serious political pressure, it summarizes what is at stake. Surrendering the epistemic foundations of universities to unauditable commercial systems is not a neutral administrative choice. It is a capitulation at exactly the wrong time.

What We Can Do

Three positions:

First, demand real technical literacy before adoption. Before your institution deploys any of these tools in a learning context, someone with genuine technical knowledge – not a vendor representative – should be able to answer in plain language: what does this system actually do? What are its known failure modes? What data does it collect, and what do the actual terms of service say? If those questions cannot be answered clearly, adoption should wait.

Second, protect the process. Design assessment for process visibility. Oral examinations. Iterative drafts with documented revision. In-person discussion of written work. Assignments that require engagement with specific sources a model cannot have accessed. These are pro-learning positions, and we know they produce the outcomes education exists to produce.

In the panel I offered: ”You do not send a robot to the gym to do the lifting for you. The friction and struggle are the point. An LLM service, used without reflection, is the direct opposite of that. It removes the resistance that builds intellectual capacity – and it makes students and scholars dependent in the process. Reading deeply and discussing even more deeply is what matters. That has not changed.”

Third, say out loud what you actually think. There is enormous pressure in academic institutions to perform enthusiasm for these tools, or at minimum to avoid being publicly critical. Push back on that pressure. When adoption decisions are being made in your departments, show up and say clearly what the evidence says and what your professional judgment is.

The companies selling these products are extremely loud. Educators and guardians of knowledge and critical thinking need to be louder.

In Closing

We are being pushed toward a version of higher education where knowledge is a product to be delivered, learning is a transaction to be optimized, and the university's role is to credential people who have learned how to prompt proprietary AI services. That is not higher education.

What happens next will not be determined by what OpenAI or Google builds. It will be determined by what you decide to defend — in your classrooms, your departments, your institutions.

Several delegates cited Nelson Mandela’s point that education is the most powerful weapon for changing the world. He was right. But such weapons require the person holding them to have judgment, skill, and the strength built from genuine effort. That strength does not come from outsourcing your thinking to machines. It comes from doing the intellectual work yourself.

The wisdom is already in our culture. Such as in novels, like this Frank Herbert quote from Dune in 1965(!):

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

The Global Education Conclave 2026 was held at CGC University, Mohali, India. My specific panel addressed the intersection of AI technology, pedagogical integrity, and global educational sovereignty.

Thank you to the wonderful organizers and CGC University Mohali for creating this international platform for conversation.

#002329 – 14 de Outubro de 2025

Regresso ao trabalho dentro de 6 dias. Ainda não recuperei completamente da ruptura muscular na perna e do problema com o ombro, mas vou voltar. Além do esforço físico, vai-me custar perder quatro horas por dia (uma hora de sono e três horas em transportes públicos) nos dias em que vou ao escritório. Mas de resto, vai-me fazer bem sair de casa, ter um ritmo e preocupações para além de me recuperar fisicamente. E ter menos tempo diariamente até me dará oportunidade de aprender a geri-lo melhor. Aqui está: é tão fácil regurgitar um discurso positivo, sem estar em sintonia com as palavras debitadas.

#002328 – 13 de Outubro de 2025

É mais difícil adormecer se o dia foi vazio. Talvez, ao sentir que um dia valeu a pena, tenha mais vontade que venha o próximo. Ou reste alguma esperança de que algo salve o dia, uma frase lida, uma palestra no youtube, um parágrafo escrito. A insónia é um sintoma, mas de quê?

Reading for me tends to be a thing of feasts and famines, done in fits and starts. While much of this month has been a dry spell. I did finish a book on Friday: Debit and Credit, a slim, early '70s collection of poems by the Sicilian author (and 1959 Nobel laureate) Salvatore Quasimodo, in translations by Jack Bevan.

From 'Only If Love Should Strike You':

...do not forget
to be animal, fit and sinuous,
torrid in violence, wanting everything here
on earth, before the final cry
when the body is cadence of shrivelled memories
and the spirit hastens to the eternal end:
remember that you can be the being of being
only if love should strike you right in the bowels.

It's a very short book, but a nourishing one, and it felt like it did me good.

---

Lately I've been listening to and enjoying an increasing amount of what might be termed 'jazz for the elderly, by the elderly'. For instance, when they recorded their wonderful album Jasmine, Keith Jarrett's and Charlie Haden's combined age was about 130. Charles Lloyd was an impressive 85 when recording his record The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow. And Carla Bley was in her mid-70s when her album Trios was made, with neither of her bandmates spring chickens either (this one is a new addition to my collection, arriving on Friday). Moderate tempos predominate, with reflective and nostalgic moods the norm. I can certainly see myself getting more of this kind of thing.

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Cheese of the week has been Fourme d'Ambert. I'd been recommended it a few months ago but hadn't spotted any until a visit to Madame Fromage in Abergavenny on Saturday. Creaminess and 'earthiness' in a cheese are characteristics I particularly prize, and this one has both in equitably balanced abundance. I suspect my piece may be verging on maximum ripeness. Amid its rich blend of mild flavours I can sometimes discern an intriguing anise-like note.

Death (Water) — What am I meant to let go of? What of my habits, or what part of my ego, should I allow to die? I sense this has something to do with my materialism and past attachments to ideas, things, life. Especially as I have been moving in such a swift way with my objects and letting go. I intuit that this is the correct path.

Valour (7 of Wands) — The momentum for me to put my all into this transformation and shift is here. What will I do with it? What could prevent me from my ascension or advancement towards my goal? I am being asked to give it all I got and to fight.

Queen of Disks — How do I begin to value myself? Today, I spent $20 on my food for the rest of the week. I made myself a lovely fried rice with my favourite shrimp. Am I remembering to take care of my body in other ways? How will I fulfill and enact my transformations if I don’t take good care and consider my body?

日本語で誰かと話すと、すぐ詰まっちゃう。

(にほんご で だれか と はなす と、すぐ つまっちゃう。)

Ni hon go de dare ka to hanasu to, sugu tomatchau

言葉をちょうどいいタイミングで選ぶのがめっちゃ難しい ことば を ちょうど いい タイミング で えらぶ の が めっちゃ むずかしい Kotoba o chōdo ī taimingu de erabu no ga metcha muzukashī

You adjusted your cal-mag for two weeks. The yellowing got worse. Then you saw the webbing.

That's how most growers discover spider mites – not when the problem starts, but when it's already out of control. The early damage looks so much like a nutrient deficiency that your first instinct is to adjust the feed. Meanwhile, a single female mite is producing thousands of descendants in a month.

Spider mites are the most destructive pest in indoor cannabis cultivation. Not because they're hard to kill – they aren't, when caught early – but because their early symptoms mimic nutrient problems so convincingly that growers lose their detection window treating the wrong thing entirely.

This guide covers visual identification at every stage, how to tell mite damage from a deficiency, and what actually works for treatment.

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Quick Identification

Spider mites on cannabis produce tiny yellow or white speckles (stippling) on upper leaf surfaces where mites feed from below. Unlike nutrient deficiencies – which cause broad, uniform color changes across leaves – stippling appears as distinct pinprick dots scattered irregularly across the leaf. The damage is caused by Tetranychus urticae (two-spotted spider mite), an arachnid that punctures individual plant cells and drains their contents. By the time webbing is visible, the colony has been feeding for weeks.

Quick checklist: – Tiny yellow/white pinprick dots on upper leaf surface – Dots are irregular and scattered, not following veins – Leaf undersides show tiny moving specks (mites are 0.3-0.5mm) – Fine webbing between leaf tips or at branch junctions (advanced) – Damage starts on lower/inner canopy where airflow is poorest – Leaves eventually bronze, curl, and drop

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Why Spider Mites Are So Hard to Catch

They look like a nutrient deficiency

The single most common spider mite mistake has nothing to do with treatment. It happens at identification.

Early stippling – those tiny yellow dots where mites have punctured cells – looks like the beginning of a calcium deficiency or light stress. The dots are small, scattered, and appear on older growth first. A grower sees yellowing dots on lower leaves and reaches for the cal-mag bottle. Two weeks of feed adjustments later, the dots have spread, the plant looks worse, and then the webbing appears.

This is not a knowledge failure. It's a pattern recognition problem. The visual difference between early mite stippling and early nutrient deficiency is subtle enough that experienced growers miss it regularly.

Feature	Spider Mite Stippling	Calcium Deficiency	Magnesium Deficiency
Pattern	Irregular pinprick dots	Irregular brown spots	Interveinal yellowing
Distribution	Scattered randomly across leaf	Concentrated on newer growth	Starts on older leaves
Symmetry	Asymmetric, random	Roughly symmetric	Symmetric between veins
Leaf underside	Tiny mites or eggs visible	Clean	Clean
Texture	Leaf feels slightly rough/gritty	Spots may feel crispy	Leaf stays smooth
Progression	Dots multiply, never merge into bands	Spots expand and merge	Yellowing expands between veins
Touch test	Gritty feel from mite debris	Normal	Normal

The diagnostic key: flip the leaf over. Nutrient deficiencies don't leave anything on the underside. Spider mites leave everything there – adults, eggs, shed skins, webbing. A 10x loupe makes this definitive, but even a phone camera zoomed in on the leaf underside will show the difference.

They breed fast enough to outrun your diagnosis

Spider mites reproduce faster than almost any pest a cannabis grower will encounter.

• Generation time: 7 days at 30°C (86°F). Egg to egg-laying adult in one week.
• Reproductive rate: A single female lays up to 100 eggs. Her daughters start laying within a week.
• Population math: One mite becomes thousands in a month at optimal temperatures. Two months of unchecked growth reaches millions.

This is exponential growth in the literal sense. The population you can't see on Monday is visible by Friday and webbing by the following Monday. The detection window – the gap between “early enough to treat easily” and “too late for simple solutions” – is approximately 5-7 days.

Every day of misdiagnosis as a nutrient issue is a day lost in that window.

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Visual Symptoms by Stage

Days 1-7: Invisible Phase

Mites have arrived but the colony is small. Fewer than 10 adults on the plant. No visible damage to the naked eye.

What to look for: Nothing you can see without magnification. Preventive inspection with a 10x loupe on leaf undersides is the only detection method during this phase – or an AI that can catch the earliest stippling pattern in a leaf photo before your eye does.

Days 7-14: Early Stippling

What you see: – Scattered yellow-white dots on upper leaf surfaces – Dots are pinprick-sized, irregular spacing – Lower and inner canopy leaves affected first – Leaves may appear slightly dull or dusty

This is the critical detection window. The damage is visible but the population is still manageable. Treat now and you win. Wait, and you're chasing exponential growth.

What growers confuse it with: Calcium deficiency, magnesium deficiency, early light stress, pH fluctuation damage. The distinguishing test: check the leaf underside with a loupe or zoomed phone camera.

Days 14-21: Moderate Infestation

What you see: – Stippling thickens into visible patches of yellow/bronze discoloration – Fine webbing appears at leaf tips and where leaves meet stems – Leaf edges may curl upward – Multiple plants now show symptoms (airborne spread via “ballooning” on silk threads)

Webbing marks the transition from “problem” to “crisis.” The silk isn't just housing – it protects colonies from predators and spray treatments. Once webs are established, contact sprays have to penetrate the silk to reach the mites.

Days 21+: Severe Infestation

What you see: – Dense webbing covering bud sites, connecting leaves – Leaves are bronzed, curled, and dropping – Mites visible as tiny moving dots on webbing – Plant growth has visibly slowed or stopped – Webbing on flowers makes bud unusable

At this stage, the plant is losing more photosynthetic capacity than it can replace. During flower, this level of infestation is often a total crop loss for affected plants. The mites are feeding on sugar leaves and bract tissue, leaving webbing embedded in the flower structure. Even if you kill every mite, the webbing and fecal matter remain.

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Where to Look: Detection Hotspots

Spider mites prefer warm, dry, still air – the conditions that exist in the center and lower canopy of most indoor grows.

Check first: – Undersides of lower and inner canopy leaves – Where two leaves overlap (creates still-air microclimate) – Near intake vents (common entry point) – Any plant closest to heat sources

Check second: – Leaf undersides on middle canopy – Branch junctions where stems create sheltered pockets – Nearby houseplants, clones, or recently introduced plant material

High-risk conditions: – Temperature above 27°C (80°F) and rising – Humidity below 40% RH – Stagnant air in lower canopy – New clones or plants introduced without quarantine – Adjacent rooms or gardens with ornamental plants

One fact most growers don't realize: spider mites travel on clothing, pets, and skin. If you've been in a garden with mites and walk into your grow room, you may be the vector. This is why quarantine protocols matter even for indoor-only grows.

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They're arachnids, not insects

This matters more than you'd think. Spider mites aren't insects. They're arachnids – closer to ticks and spiders than to aphids or thrips. A lot of insecticides just don't work on them, and growers figure this out the expensive way: they buy whatever pest spray the grow shop recommends, apply it twice a week for a month, and the mites keep spreading.

If a product label says “insecticide” but doesn't specifically list mites or arachnids, it probably won't work. You need a miticide (specifically targets mites) or a broad-spectrum acaricide (targets arachnids generally). Some biologicals and organic options work by physical mechanisms – suffocation, desiccation – that don't depend on the pest's taxonomy. These are often the safest first-line choice.

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Treatment Strategies

They evolve faster than you can spray

Spider mites develop pesticide resistance at a rate that makes most agricultural pests look slow. With a 7-day generation cycle, resistance emerges in weeks, not seasons. Some strains of T. urticae are resistant to dozens of active ingredients simultaneously.

Worse: some pesticides cause “mite flaring” – the surviving mites respond to the chemical stress by increasing their reproductive rate by up to 30%. The intuitive response of “spray harder, spray more” can accelerate the infestation rather than control it.

Single-product treatment strategies fail. Always rotate between different modes of action.

During Vegetative Growth

Immediate response (first 48 hours): 1. Isolate affected plants if possible 2. Remove and dispose of heavily infested leaves (bag them, don't compost) 3. Spray leaf undersides thoroughly with a contact miticide or biological

Biological controls: – Phytoseiulus persimilis – predatory mite that feeds exclusively on spider mites. Effective in vegetative growth and early flower. Needs humidity above 60% to thrive. – Neoseiulus californicus – predatory mite that tolerates lower humidity and also eats thrips. Better for dry grow rooms. – Amblyseius andersoni – generalist predatory mite, survives without prey by eating pollen. Good for preventive releases.

Organic sprays (moderate infestations): – Neem oil (azadirachtin) – disrupts feeding and reproduction. Apply to leaf undersides only. Do not use in flower – affects taste and may not fully degrade. – Insecticidal soap (potassium salts of fatty acids) – kills on contact by desiccation. Must directly contact the mite. Repeat every 3-5 days for 3 applications to catch new hatchlings. – Spinosad – organic-approved, effective on thrips but weak against mites on its own. Can supplement a rotation but shouldn't be a primary miticide.

Spray rotation protocol: – Week 1: Product A (e.g., insecticidal soap) – Week 2: Product B (e.g., neem oil) – Week 3: Product A again (or a different miticide) – Never use the same active ingredient twice in a row

During flower

This is where most growers panic, and for good reason. During flower, almost everything that kills mites also ruins buds.

Safe in flower: – Predatory mites (biological control – no residue, no taste impact) – Water rinse with slightly elevated pressure (dislodges mites physically, must reach undersides) – Cold snap trick: drop temperature to 15°C (60°F) for 3 days if possible. Mite reproduction nearly stops below 18°C (65°F). This buys time for predatory mites to work.

Avoid in flower: – Neem oil (taste contamination, doesn't fully degrade on flower tissue) – Pyrethrin sprays (residue on buds) – Sulfur (burns trichomes, affects terpenes) – Any systemic product (absorbed into plant tissue including flower)

If webbing is on buds: The honest answer is that those buds are compromised. Webbing contains fecal matter and shed mite skins that don't wash off. You can salvage the plant by removing affected flowers and protecting remaining buds with predatory mites, but heavily webbed buds should be discarded.

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Prevention

A few euros spent preventing mites saves hundreds in lost crop. Prevention beats treatment every time, especially with a pest that breeds this fast.

Environmental controls: – Keep humidity above 50% RH during veg (mites thrive in dry conditions) – Ensure airflow reaches the lower canopy (oscillating fans, open plant structure) – Run temperatures below 27°C (80°F) when possible – HEPA filter on intake if growing in an area with outdoor mite pressure

Good habits: – Quarantine new plants for 7-14 days before introducing to your grow – Change clothes before entering grow room if you've been in other gardens – Inspect leaf undersides weekly with a 10x loupe – make it routine, not reactive – Remove dead leaves and debris from the grow space (harboring sites) – Avoid overly dense canopy – defoliate lower growth that gets no light and creates still-air pockets

Preemptive predators: – Release Amblyseius andersoni or N. californicus at transplant. These predatory mites establish a background population that intercepts spider mites before colonies form. Cost: roughly €20-30 per release for a small grow, every 4-6 weeks.

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How AI detection changes the timeline

Here's where I'll be honest about what we built and why.

The spider mite problem is a timing issue. The window between “just arrived” and “exponential growth” is about 5-7 days. Most growers catch mites after stippling is already obvious, which puts you right at the edge of that window – or past it.

PlantLab's model was trained to identify spider mite damage among 31 cannabis conditions. It picks up the stippling pattern at the 10-dot stage, in a routine photo of your plant. The kind you're already taking. It won't replace the loupe or the hands-on inspection. But it flags the pattern before you've mentally filed it as “probably cal-mag” and moved on.

Catching mites at day 7 instead of day 14 is the difference between wiping down some leaves and losing a crop.

Free at plantlab.ai – 3 checks a day.

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FAQ

How do I tell spider mite damage from a nutrient deficiency? Flip the leaf. Spider mite damage shows as scattered pinprick dots on top with mites, eggs, or webbing underneath. Nutrient deficiencies cause broader color changes with clean leaf undersides. A 10x loupe on the underside is the definitive test.

Can I see spider mites without a magnifying glass? Adults are barely visible to the naked eye (0.3-0.5mm) as tiny moving specks on leaf undersides. Eggs and juveniles are too small to see without magnification. By the time mites are easily visible, the colony is large. Use a loupe or phone camera zoom for early detection.

How fast do spider mites spread between plants? In optimal conditions (above 27°C / 80°F, below 40% RH), mites can move from one plant to adjacent plants within 24-48 hours. They also “balloon” on silk threads carried by air currents, reaching plants across a room. A single infested plant can become a room-wide problem in 5-10 days.

Will neem oil get rid of spider mites? Neem works as part of a rotation, not as a standalone. It disrupts feeding and reproduction but doesn't kill on contact, and mites build resistance to it quickly. Rotate with insecticidal soap and other modes of action. And never use it during flower – it doesn't come off.

What kills spider mites instantly? Insecticidal soap and pyrethrin kill on contact, but only what they touch. You'll miss eggs. Plan for 3 rounds over 2 weeks to catch hatching cycles.

Reminder to everyone today:

If you are trans, visibility is not a responsibility. If you need to be stealth or closeted because you can't handle being visible, that's okay.

For those of you brave or safe enough to be visible: remind the world that we exist.

Because we do exist.

We have a right to live our lives the way we want to, regardless of what this generation's expectations of us may be. We have been around longer than this society, and will still exist after it has crumbled into dust. Which society? All of them.

We are not a fad. We are not a mental illness. We are not trying to corrupt children. We are trying to exist as ourselves.

They can try to erase us, but we are written in ink and will never fade.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility, everyone. You will be okay.

And remember, in the whole world, there is only of you, and you are beautiful just the way you are. So please, take care of yourself, friend.

#TDOV #TransDayOfVisibility

Rangers vs Orioles.

Tuesday's MLB game of choice has my Texas Rangers playing the Baltimore Orioles and has a scheduled start time of 5:35 PM CDT.

And the adventure continues.

So much for writing here more often. You know how it goes. Not only did I think I would write here at least once a week if not more, but also I thought I might actually be able to write about something besides sadness and grief. Welp, chalk another failure up on the board. Today's entry is brought to you by that old classic: melancholy.

I threw away my pair of old red Asics today. And it messed me up.

I've always been too stupidly sentimental about things. It's just stuff, I know. There was nothing particularly special about this pair of red Asics. I don't even know what model they were, I think H saw them on sale online and sent me the link. I bought them because of the price and not much else.

They were definitely just casual, everyday shoes. They weren't particularly suited to running or any sport, but they were comfortable enough until I wore through them, destroying the rubber soles. Usually, when a shoe is no longer watertight, I'll throw the pair away. It's not that hard for me to let go of worn out shoes, despite my previous claims of being overly sentimental.

Unless. Unless the particular pair of shoes was the last pair I wore to go on walks with you. Unless this was the particular pair I was wearing the day you died. Unless this particular pair seemed inextricably linked with what used to be so much of our time together.

I still wore them when I went on the walks that I now dub “memorial walks,” as much as I hate the idea that you are only a memory. The memorial walks I still do every day, still unable to fully break myself of this habit.

Don't get me wrong, I had long since bought new shoes. Several pairs. I wore different shoes to work, different shoes when going on normal, non-memorial walks, etc. But when I was going on that special daily walk to remember you, I'd always put on the red Asics.

They were already old when you passed. Despite only wearing them for maybe half an hour a day, they were soon past the point of usual shoe retirement. These shoes waved goodbye to being watertight a long, long time ago. Yet I continued to conscript them into service daily for the walk. I pushed them beyond being comfortable to wear. The hole in the bottom of the shoe continued to grow, starting to look like worn out shoes in cartoons that are exaggerated for comic effect.

I still couldn't let go of them. But this week I'm going on a trip, in memory of another loved one who has passed. Seems like there's way too much of this in my life, but that's how it goes as we get older, I guess. I needed a pair of shoes that would be better suited to more outdoorsy kinds of activities. So I got them, but upon getting home, I realized there was no more space on my shoe rack.

Sometimes, I can only deal with something like this as if it were a bandage. Rip it off quickly and brace for the sting. Almost without thinking, I grabbed the red Asics and placed them in the trash can. And then jammed them down, as if to tell myself there's no going back. And that was that. The red shoes are gone.

I wore a different pair of shoes on the memorial walk today. It's not the first time, there have been days where I was too busy to change out of shoes after work or just forgetful or whatever. But, never again shall those red Asics tread those grounds.

I was surprised I was able to throw them away. Then I was surprised at how it was bothering me, hours later, almost to the point of tears. I was almost crying over shoes. I was almost crying over something that happened over a year and a half ago.

But I managed to toss the shoes. And I didn't actually cry. So, is this progress or not? I don't know, but I'm not dead, FYI. I managed to write a post in March, even! Although I had to pound it out in one quick pass as there is less than an hour left in the month here. I guess that's my way of excusing the writing for being worse than usual. Which is saying something. See you in April, hopefully.

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