Gemini's "uselessness" is its killer feature

# · 🔥 242 · 💬 193 · 2 years ago · alex.flounder.online · Melchizedek · 📷
Oakland has two famous trees: first is the Jack London Tree, a gigantic coast live oak in front of City Hall, from which the city gets its tree-shaped logo. People in Oakland assumed that all of the old-growth trees were gone, until a naturalist happened upon Old Survivor towering over the other trees. The ancient tree has figured in the collective imagination, prompting articles, group hikes, and even a documentary. In other words, Old Survivor survived largely by appearing useless to loggers as a timber tree. The tree appears to him in a dream and asks, "Are you comparing me with those useful trees?" The tree points out to him that fruit trees and timber trees are regularly ravaged. Uselessness has been this tree's strategy: "This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large?" The tree balks at the distinction between usefulness and worth, made by a man who only sees trees as potential timber: "What's the point of this-things condemning things? You a worthless man about to die-how do you know I'm a worthless tree?" It's easy for me to imagine these words being spoken by Old Survivor to the nineteenth-century loggers who casually passed it over, less than a century before we began realizing what we'd lost. This is how I view Gemini's value: "The Useless Tree" of the internet.
Gemini's "uselessness" is its killer feature



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