The Art Of Not Asking Why

Micro.blog did it again: sneaking another good thing unnoticed. Everyone’s recommendations are in their profile.

So people I already follow and find interesting automatically recommend other interesting people I should follow. In a way, this comes to remedy my grump from yesterday, which amounts to not finding enough people to follow.

Another excellent update from the online community I enjoy being a part of.

It seems like I slept more than 7 hours today, but I don’t believe it. I don’t remember any of it.

…Which is a very good sign. Days like these are like small miracles 🛏️

In my search for independent blogs, I’ve encountered 1.5 depressing patterns. I’ll start with the 0.5 because that’s probably what you’re wondering about.

Most blogs I encounter belong to techies (programmers, web developers, etc.) and discuss tech stuff. We live in an age where everyone talks tech and everything is tech, so that doesn’t say much; hence the 0.5.

The other more problematic thing is the once-a-month blogs. It goes like this: I find someone interesting. They have something to say. I want to read more, but there’s only a handful of posts starting somewhere toward the end of last year.

At some point in time, I made up a rule: don’t follow blogs that don’t publish a blog post at least once a week. This might sound harsh, but this is my rule, so bite me. But there’s more to it. When I find someone interesting online, I get curious not just about what they write but also who they are. The ordinary things that are scattered around the more readworthy stuff. It feels more human to me, like meeting a friend. I enjoy thinking, “Hey, I wonder what platform Jack is experimenting with today,” or “Let’s see what’s on Brandon’s mind this morning.”

If I don’t write for more than two days, I find it difficult to write again. Suddenly, it’s not just a matter of writing whatever’s on my mind; I have to have something important to say, I can’t just write. And that’s where things get stuck: it’s not that I don’t have what to write about; it’s that there are too many things competing, so I rather just get up and check if I need to do dishes instead. With too many options, writing becomes a chore.

Take this post, for example. I was browsing through the referrals of this blog, found two personal blogs that I liked (from software developers, of course), and a mere collection of 5 - 6 posts leading back to the beginning of the year. I signed, felt sad about it, and before I knew it, I was writing about it. That’s it. No choosing, no thinking, and here we are.

So hey, if you’re one of those once-a-month folks who struggle to express yourself, do me a favor: don’t wait for that something. It ain’t coming because it’s already there. Just spit it out already.

Trust the readers to navigate around your morning coffee or your dog pictures to find your important stuff, because they will, and they’ll get to know you better along the way.

Gave up on Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow 📚 at about 80%.

Started OK and never got better. This book could benefit from focusing on the story or the technical knowledge, but Doctorow tries to do both, ending up with a lukewarm plot and online privacy techniques that should be explained further.

Growing up you were probably asked by your parents “If everyone jumps off a cliff, will you jump too?” when you did something stupid. The idea is to appeal to your logic and critical thinking, which should (hopefully) prevent you from doing something stupid you know is stupid because everyone else is doing it.

So if Google’s new brilliant AI tells you to put glue in your pizza, you wouldn’t do it, right? Because some reporters would do what it takes to draw more eyeballs to their articles:

Google AI said to put glue in pizza — so I made a pizza with glue and ate it

I knew my assignment: I had to make the Google glue pizza. (Don’t try this at home! I risked myself for the sake of the story, but you shouldn’t!)

Hey, at least she’s telling us we shouldn’t do it. Not that it’s going to help: some people are just dumb.

She also did the research:

I did use Google to make sure that “nontoxic” glue was indeed semisafe to eat. Google’s AI answer said that small quantities might lead to an upset stomach but not, say, death. That’s good enough for me.

And since it was good enough, she made the pizza and ate it. Google said so.

What does this all mean? For me personally, this means that I’m an idiot who eats glue. But what does it mean for Google and the future of AI-powered search?

I don’t doubt Katie Notopoulos is smarter than what she pretends to be for this article. Her article is now trending all over the place, and hey, she even made it to this blog.

It’s time to stop blaming Google for what it’s supposed to do, minimum work for maximum profit, and to apply common sense. And tech journalism… well. Tech journalism. What can I say?

With Memorial Day around the corner, work should be slow enough to allow me to explore ComfyUI. This is a good time to visit image creation in AI if you’re curious about Stable Diffusion. No big tech involved, just a cup of coffee and a bunch of hungry brain cells.

After three weeks of using Kagi, it’s growing on me. It took a while to figure out how: I’m searching the web directly more than I used to.

With DDG, searching would be one of the tabs. I’d often open other tabs automatically, like a dictionary tab, Reddit and Wikipedia. With Kagi, I’m not doing that because there is no need.

Another big difference is how they use AI in Kagi. Here’s a picture to illustrate:

The search ends with a question mark, which is how I ask for AI to show. No question mark, no AI. Simple. That idea of initial consent like that before shoving AI in your face (looking at you, Microsoft!) already makes all the difference.

Then, the AI lists the sources it uses, and not only that, it offers links to those. A quick scan tells me if something in the sources doesn’t make sense (for example, if I search for something debatable and Twit-Ex shows up as a source). To me, that’s a responsible use of AI.

Kagi’s shortcuts and bangs also grow on me slowly. If I want to go to the website instead of searching about that website, all I need to do is start the search with an exclamation point, like “!twitter”. If I want to read a full-length Wikipedia article about something, I can type in “!w twitter”. Image results are also better than those of DDG, especially with the filters.

I keep discovering value in Kagi, and even though it feels a bit on the expensive side to me, for now it’s worth it.