Hank Green on why AI scares him:
“People tend to prefer their choices to be taken away.”
(The link below will take you directly to that part)
It’s an hour and a half long video with a long introduction and a video thrown in the middle, probably one of the longer rants by Hank Green, with an interview in the middle by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University.
I’m still watching this conversation. It’s a lot to take in, but I think it keeps going back to the sentence I quoted above. It has been true for a while (forever?), on different platforms (not just AI), and one of the most apparent examples for me is dating apps. Tinder started the trend of “swiping people” left and right, emphasizing how people look and present, and not who they are.
It’s easy to blame the app, but we who use them are not much better. Going through profiles on a dating app (even those that allow more detailed ones), the person usually sums up their being into a single sentence, with a “bumper sticker” style emojis presenting whatever ideology is popular this time around.
The very concept of a dating app today is a joke when you think about how impossible it is to summarize who the person behind the profile is. Yet, this is what we prefer and what we use. We all have decision fatigue, and it only gets worse as we get bombarded by even more information, so we rely on technologies like AI to summarize that for us as we grow lazier and our capacity to retain information and make knowledge decisions based on that information is diminishing every day.
I find myself highlight gems like these every 2 pages or so. The Cunning Man
Of Frued:
mankind, as always through history, has half-heard the call of the prophet, half-understood what he says, and vulgarized and cheapened whatever of his teaching may come its way.
Oddly Satisfying. 📷
Yesterday morning, I imported an old-blog post of mine, which discusses org-id and UUIDs in org-mode. It’s a bit of a deep dive into how org-mode works. I find that I don’t do those as much anymore - probably because I mostly use Emacs “as is” with a few packages I use day to day, and my workflow has been pretty much the same (capture templates not included) for the last two years or so.
I was a paid subscriber to 404 media, but I decided to let my subscription run out this year around. They started to feel too one sided and tend to focus only on AI. Still excellent reporting though, for those things.
I found a post on my old blog that I wanted to bring over, but I ran out of time today. I could copy it as is, but I want to read it again and probably update it.
It was a jolt to get back to work today. Feels like my job is to poke different people to do different things, and they poke others. if you have one or two projects like that, that’s one thing. If your entire agenda revolves around email chains like this, nothing gets done.
At least I managed to exercise today, after a nap. Made some tofu and beans after. Nothing special, but nutritious and filling. Tomorrow is an office day.
Using AI to edit and polish posts
Tired of Grammarly ghosting me on Linux and inspired by Doctorow, I hired an AI editor (Kimi via Kagi). It edits my posts, checks for repeat rants, fixes links, and suggests hashtags. Here’s what it looks like.
A good day to have a blog
Since waking up early in the morning (sleep? What sleep?) I’ve been active around my blog and enjoyed dedicating time to this personal work that doesn’t get much attention during my day-to-day. Here are a few things I got into:
About Stable Products
I wanted to write a comment to Pete about his Stable Products post, but it turned into a whole rant, then a post with footnotes. Stable products can and do exist, but the US economy is not meant to support those (I told you it’s a rant).
Kagki just included a screenshot of my blog in their Kagi Small Web news! 🤯