The problem then is with so much stuff coming out, whether it’s in the net or in the media or a million TV channels […], the problem is having filters, being able to get some kind of blinders and close your sight down and focus on what’s really going to have some meaning for you.
There’s a lot of things in my life that I have lost in the last maybe five years or so. But usually when you say you lose something, it’s a bad thing. I don’t eat nasty food as much. I don’t drink alcohol anymore. Well, not really too bummed out about losing that one. I’ve lost cigarettes, and that’s okay. I’m trying so hard to live more presently as time goes on. I think that my conception of what I find beautiful is changing. I don’t really care about being in cities that much anymore. I want the nature kind of thing, and family is becoming more important to me, and good friends. Maybe it’s because in my twenties I was kind of like, “Let’s go crazy, we’ll go on tour forever!” Even though I’m trying to be in the moment and be like, “Look at the mountain. The mountain is beautiful. There is the sun sitting behind the mountain.” I keep finding myself feeling like I don’t have enough time to look at the mountain. I want more time to look at the mountain.
Because inside companies, the incentives are clear and the measurements are easy. You can measure clicks and track whether they led to a “completion.” You can measure whether a nudge led to the next step in the funnel. You cannot easily measure the resentment. Or the rage clicks when they smash a button to dismiss another “did you know” pop-up. You cannot easily chart the moment a user thinks, “I used to like this product, and now it feels needy.” You cannot easily quantify the slow erosion of trust.
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Great tools get out of the way so the user can accomplish their goal.
A great post on the slow, inevitable and disappointing changes in software.
In some ways, the AI hype cycle has to be out of hand. It has to justify the ferocious level of investment, the uncountable billions of dollars in sunk costs. The massive data center buildouts with their massive environmental consequences created at massive expense that are seemingly keeping the economy afloat and threatening to crash it. There is so, so, so much money at stake.
We all need to transition to this way of cooking, because clearly this is where the future is going. I expect in a few short years kitchens will be much smaller. Gone will be stoves and ovens and flat tops. Restaurant kitchens will only be a small closet with a microwave. I predict this will happen by 1955 at the latest.
AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for. People who are terrible at their jobs (many executives), will tell their employees that they “need” to use AI, that their jobs depend on it, that they must become more productive, and that becoming an AI-first company is the strategy that will save them from the old failed strategy, which itself was the new strategy after other failed business models.
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But the people doing this well are doing so in a way where they are catching and fixing AI hallucinations, because the stakes for fucking up are so incredibly high. <…> I have little interest in policing other people’s writing processes so long as they are not publishing AI fever dreams or plagiarizing, and there are writers I respect who say they have their little chats with ChatGPT to help them organize their thoughts before they do a draft or who have vibecoded their own productivity tools or data analysis tools. But again, that’s not a business model. It’s a tool that has enabled some reporters to do their jobs, and, using their expertise, they have produced good and valuable work.
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There is no reason for an individual journalist or an individual media company to make the fast food of the internet. It’s already being made, by spammers and the AI companies themselves. It is impossible to make it cheaper or better than them, because it is what they exist to do. The actual pivot that is needed is one to humanity. Media companies need to let their journalists be human. And they need to prove why they’re worth reading with every article they do.
Calvin French-Owen published Reflections on OpenAI – I am saving this mostly for the organisational tidbits and insights into the work of a fast-growing company. It seems to be messy, chaotic and lacking any sort balance, but fun?
Frame of preference has been making rounds on the Apple blogs in the last couple of days and for a good reason – it is an absolute marvel of a website, enabled by web-embedded Mac OS emulations from Infinite Mac. I am looking forward to geek out and spend a bunch of hours there, poking around and finding some of the easter eggs.
Finally set up a micro.blog account, which I intend to use for more focused writing, a more “intentful” blogging. Let’s see how it goes!