Put simply, writing with AI reduces the maximum strain required from your brain. For many commentators responding to this article, this reality is self-evidently good.“The spreadsheet didn’t kill math; it built billion-dollar industries. Why should we want to keep our brains using the same resources for the same task?”

My response to this reality is split. On the one hand, I think there are contexts in which reducing the strain of writing is a clear benefit. Professional communication in email and reports comes to mind. The writing here is subservient to the larger goal of communicating useful information, so if there’s an easier way to accomplish this goal, then why not use it? 

But in the context of academia, cognitive offloading no longer seems so benign. In a learning environment, the feeling of strain is often a by-product of getting smarter. To minimize this strain is like using an electric scooter to make the marches easier in military boot camp; it will accomplish this goal in the short term, but it defeats the long-term conditioning purposes of the marches.

I wrote many a journal entry in college complaining about this exact point, except we were still arguing about graphing calculator and laptop use.

Now that I’m older, I understand the split that Cal talks about here.

When I’m writing software to accomplish a task for work, then it’s more important for me to spend my brain energy on building the context of the problem in my head.

When I’m writing an essay and trying to prove that I understand a concept, then it’s more important for me to get the words out of my head and onto paper. Then, I can use tools to help me clean it up later.

Maybe this points to a larger problem I’ve had with our education system. Imagine a spectrum of the intent of college. The left end of the spectrum represents “learning how to critically think about ideas”. The right end represents “learning skills that will help you survive in the real world”.

When someone makes fun of a film studies major, it’s because their evaluation of the spectrum is closer to the right end.

When someone makes fun of students using ChatGPT for writing their essays for them, it’s because their evaluation is closer to the left.

The real threat to creativity isn’t a language model. It’s a workplace that rewards speed over depth, scale over care, automation over meaning. If we’re going to talk about what robs people of agency, let’s start there. Let’s talk about the economic structures that pressure people into using tools badly, or in ways that betray their values. Let’s talk about the lack of time, support, mentorship, and trust. Not the fact that someone ran a prompt through a chatbot to get unstuck. Where is the empathy? Where is your support for people who are being tossed into the pit of AI and instructed to find a way to make it work?

So sure, critique the tools. Call out the harm. But don’t confuse rejection with virtue. And don’t assume that the rest of us are blind just because we’re using the tools you’ve decided are beneath you.

(via Jeffrey)

Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.

Before I give a counterpoint, I do want to note the irony that even now people do not understand how this stuff works. It’s math, all the way down. It shouldn’t work, frankly… but it does!

I think that is so beautiful. We don’t really understand much about our universe, like dark matter, gravity, all number of naturally-occurring phenomena.

But just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean we can’t harness it to do amazing things.

As far as the students using ChatGPT… I mean, yeah, it’s painfully obvious to most teachers I chat with when their kids use the tech to get by.

I would posit, though, that this is the history of education in general. We teach students truths about the world, and they go out and show us how those truths are not entirely accurate anymore.

Sure, some kids will certainly use ChatGPT to compose an entire essay, which circumvents the entire point of writing an essay in the first place: practicing critical thinking skills. That’s bad, and an obvious poor use of the tool.

But think of the kids who are using AI to punch up their thoughts, challenge their assumptions with unconsidered angles, and communicate their ideas with improved clarity. They’re using the tool as intended.

That makes me so excited about the future. That’s what I hope teachers lean into with artificial intelligence.

(via Simon)

How did we get here? What can we do? Maybe it starts by trying to just... be normal about technology.

There's an orthodoxy in tech tycoon circles that's increasingly referred to, ironically, as "tech optimism". I say "ironically", because there's nothing optimistic about it. The culture is one of deep insecurity, reacting defensively, or even lashing out aggressively, when faced with any critical conversation about new technology. That tendency is paired with a desperate and facile cheerleading of startups, ignoring the often equally interesting technologies stories that come from academia, or from mature industries, or from noncommercial and open source communities that don't get tons of media coverage, but quietly push forward innovating without the fame and fortune. By contrast, those of us who actually are optimistic about technology (usually because we either create it, or are in communities with those who do) are just happily moving forward, not worrying when people point out the bugs that we all ought to be fixing together.

We don't actually have to follow along with the narratives that tech tycoons make up for each other. We choose the tools that we use, based on the utility that they have for us. It's strange to have to say it, but... there are people picking up and adopting AI tools on their own, because they find them useful.

Is there a “law” that says the amount someone actually knows about a given technology is inversely proportional to the amount that they hype it?

ChatGPT says it’s called “Clarke’s Law of Hype” but I don’t see that anywhere in a Google response.

Looking things up on the internet in 2025 sucks.

I’m writing about this today because it’s been one of my “can LLMs do this reliably yet?” questions for over two years now. I think they’ve just crossed the line into being useful as research assistants, without feeling the need to check everything they say with a fine-tooth comb.

I still don’t trust them not to make mistakes, but I think I might trust them enough that I’ll skip my own fact-checking for lower-stakes tasks.

This also means that a bunch of the potential dark futures we’ve been predicting for the last couple of years are a whole lot more likely to become true. Why visit websites if you can get your answers directly from the chatbot instead?

The lawsuits over this started flying back when the LLMs were still mostly rubbish. The stakes are a lot higher now that they’re actually good at it!

I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already. I expect a bumpy ride as a new economic model for the Web lurches into view.

I keep thinking of the quote that “information wants to be free”.

As the capabilities of open-source LLMs continue to increase, I keep finding myself wanting a locally-running model at arms length any time I’m near a computer.

How many more cool things can I accomplish with computers if I can always have a “good enough” answer at my disposal for virtually any question for free?

Maybe, like a lot of other middle-aged professionals suddenly finding their careers upended at the peak of their creative power, I will have to adapt or face replacement. Or maybe my best bet is to continue to zig while others are zagging, and to try to keep my coding skills sharp while everyone else is “vibe coding” a monstrosity that I will have to debug when it crashes in production someday.

I enjoyed this piece because I think it represents the feelings I hear from artists. You might not consider computer programming an art form, but if art is humans expressing themselves, then writing code absolutely qualifies.

And like a lot of other artists, many of us "computer people” make money by doing our art for other people. It turns out that for the last fourty years, we could do our art for other people and we'd get paid quite well to do so.

But now that anyone can basically vibe code solutions to basic problems¹, a increasing set of non-nerds is able to use computers themselves. That naturally will drive down our value.

I use "value" here in a cold, hard, capitalistic sense. Maybe it's our turn, as artists who care about making efficient, beautiful, artistic computer programs, to worry about how we'll derive value in a world where anyone can vibe code their ideas to life.

In some sense, it’s impressive that Claude can play Pokémon with any facility at all. When developing AI systems that find dominant strategies in games like Go and Dota 2, engineers generally start their algorithms off with deep knowledge of a game’s rules and/or basic strategies, as well as a reward function to guide them toward better performance. For Claude Plays Pokémon, though, project developer and Anthropic employee David Hershey says he started with an unmodified, generalized Claude model that wasn’t specifically trained or tuned to play Pokémon games in any way.

“This is purely the various other things that [Claude] understands about the world being used to point at video games,” Hershey told Ars. “So it has a sense of a Pokémon. If you go to claude.ai and ask about Pokémon, it knows what Pokémon is based on what it's read… If you ask, it'll tell you there's eight gym badges, it'll tell you the first one is Brock… it knows the broad structure.”

This is the camp I’m in with AI. Is it super human? Obviously not in this specific instance, but still, undeniably impressive that a large language model is able to get as far as it can.

Yeah, I know... February's almost over. But I finally sat down and wrote this out this weekend, so good enough, eh?

Family

• My boy is crushing it at swimming lessons.

• The other night during dinner, I unconsciously started drumming on the table. I was startled when my son started singing Imagine Dragon's "Believer," and then my daughter joined in on the drums and vocals as well. It was supremely dope.

• Following an unbelievable burst of motivation, I cleaned out the crawl space in my basement. It honestly didn't take that long (maybe a total of 10 hours), and it is so much more usable now! I'm trying to figure out a way that I can wire up some outlets in there so I can turn it into a little cave for jamming and 3D printing lol

• I get so mad when I'm in flow and my kids come up and interrupt me. I think it's because achieving flow is painfully Sisyphean; it takes so much effort these days to get into that state, and when I'm suddenly yanked from it, the ball rolls to the bottom of the hill and I have to start all over again. It's probably how my kids feel when I make them stop playing Minecraft.

• I was trying to explain the concept of money to my son, and after I stopped talking, he looks at me with the most confused look and says, "Dad, you keep expanding my thinking bubble, and I don't like that." I hear ya, bud.

Recommendations

• I thoroughly enjoyed watching It's In The Game, a documentary about the history of the Madden NFL video game franchise. In one scene, they bring a full body capture setup to the NFL combine and scan every player. As they go in and out of the rig, you can tell how honored these guys are to be included in the game. It reminds me of seeing people use my apps out in the real world. Saying "I see you" is one of the dopest honors we can bestow on our fellow human.

• I highly recommend Puttshack. I was geeking out over the use of technology, it's brilliant.

• The bourbon wings at the Minnesota Burger Company in Apple Valley instantly landed in the top 3 wings I've ever had.¹

Work

• SEO is the digital equivalent of snake oil. I've held this position for more than two decades, and I'm waiting for someone to convince me otherwise.

• You can hit a nail into a board with a hammer, or you can use a nail gun to go faster. But you still need to combine two boards. No tool is going to take that assembly step away, that's simply part of the deal. Similarly, AI isn't going to take my job away; AI is simply a(n extremely powerful) nail gun. It takes the sting out of the parts of my job I find arduous and makes them go faster so I can get back to doing what I enjoy doing: building cool things.

The new car

• 30% of me still feels like a tool for buying a brand new 2024 Toyota Prius. The other 70% is loving it.

• The car is one of my only outlets for anger, and that's not something I'm proud of. It's weird that it took buying a new car to evaluate that, but I guess it's better than continuing to take my anger out while wielding a 10,000 pound death machine.

Self-improvement

• For the first time in my life, I looked up at the stars and noticed that one looked a little different. Turned out to be Mars! For the last several nights, when we get a clear sky, I look up and see if I can find it. That might be the thing I'm the most proud of from this past month.

• A couple years ago, I decided to get back into broomball. I ended up joining a rec league and played every Friday this month. I'm certainly not as fast as I was 20 years ago, but man, the feeling of running on the ice is as exhilarating as ever.²

• I've been walking up to the library near my house to get work done during the week. During one of those walks, it started snowing, and the flakes were huge and fluffy. I stopped and caught a few on my tongue, and it reminded me of when I used to do that during football games.

• Lately, when I go on walks around my block, I've felt like I'm walking with some loved ones who have passed away. I can't explain it, and it could totally be a hallucination... but at the same time, who am I to keep denying my feelings? If there's one thing I've learned over the past couple of years, it's that I need to lean more into my feelings and trust them.

• I wrote this down during a meeting at work: "You listen to the very first thing someone says and then your mind runs wild." Is this normal?

• "I looked in the mirror while showering today and I saw a 37 year old. And I was really proud of him. The dude is happy. He’s out still playing broomball. He plays with computers all day. He listens to a ton of good music, watches interesting/compelling movies, has a sense of purpose and direction, knows what he wants his house to feel like... And I saw the whites in my beard, and I thought it looked pretty damn good. I’m here! I’m aging, and I’m successful, and I’m comfortable, and I will try my hardest to feel this content every day for the rest of my life."

• I saw a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial that said, "We live in a time that you can get into a vehicle and go to a place where you give someone a piece of plastic and they will give you a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup." I think about that all the time.

• This line from Anh's blog feels ironic to post here given how long these posts become, but for future reference: "not every thought needs to be immortalized on my website."

• My only resolution for this year: find more ways to open my heart.

100 sit-ups a day for 100 days Project

• At day 50, I don't feel too terribly different. It still sucks to knock out the first one, and it still rules when I hit the hundredth one.

• The only noticeable improvement so far is that I no longer make old man groans when I get up from a prone position.

Music Clean Up Project

• It's annoyingly hard to let go of things for some reason. Even if it's an MP3 of an artist you never actually liked. Am I mourning the loss of the part of me that really wanted to be into Tiesto?

• The more I prune my digital garden, the more I find myself wanting to spend time in it. The more I hit shuffle on all 28,000 tracks in my library, the less frequently I run into turds.

YouTube Videos I liked that I didn't already link to

Bobby Fingers - Joe Rogan and The Black Keys Diorama

Movies I watched

Saved! (2004)

• Glad I watched it? Yes. It was a lot better than I remember, probably because I have far more context for the religious hypocrisy stuff.
• Will I watch it again? Probably not. I'm finding that if I actually pay attention during a movie and absorb whatever I need to absorb, I can set it aside. No need to carry all this media around with me, right?

Hey Arnold!: The Movie (2002)

• Glad I watched it? Yes.
• Will I watch it again? Unlikely. It was too predictable, but I sure do love Arnold and Gerald and the crew. Makes me excited for our upcoming Nick Resort trip.

Recess: School's Out (2001)

• Glad I watched it? Yes.
• Will I watch it again? Yes. I regret not owning this one. It's fun watching movies I never got to watch as a kid with my own kids.

American Fiction (2023)

• Glad I watched it? Yes.
• Will I watch it again? Yes. Very smart, very funny, exceptionally high-brow. Best enjoyed with a glass of wine in a fancy wine glass.

Music I enjoyed

Current Vibes in January 2025:

Books I read

• Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler. I felt like I could identify with nearly every character's brand of "crazy." Strongly recommend.

We assume that technology must have begun with a weapon (and that the first inventor must have been a man). But as the science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin pointed out, “the spear” was probably not the original technology. Archaeologists and anthropologists now increasingly believe that sharpened sticks were invented by women to gather foods, and were adapted for hunting only later. If the first tools weren’t hunting tools it isn’t clear that technology must always seek to crush, dominate and exploit. Female science-fiction authors have often been criticised for not writing “hard” science fiction precisely because they have defined technology in this more neutral sense. As Le Guin put it: “Technology is just the active human interface with the material world.” There is nothing inherently violent about it. Unless we want it to be. But the patriarchal imagination doesn’t seem to think it will be up to us to decide this.

There are many justifiable concerns around artificial intelligence, but to say it’s all gloom and doom is a severe failure of imagination.

I also loved this closing paragraph:

We talk as if the machines were the active participants in history, and humanity the passive ones. We dance around the machines as if they were deities. Forgetting that we have created them with our own hands. Fed them with data from our own minds. It is a narrative that leaves us both powerless and without responsibility. Owned by our own creations.

I got a message from my group chat with my boys. I looked at the Apple Intelligence-generated summary and it said:

(3) Flying too close to the sun, experiencing AI chaos.

I think this is my current favorite implementation of AI because it makes the messaging experience completely unpredictable.

Like, what could that summary actually be about?

What series of three messages could that unravel to?

Apple Intelligence (and most generative AI tools) work really well when the text is predictable. Business cases are perfect for these summarizations, because business talk is relatively predictable (what with its “action items” and “agendas” and whatnot).

A group chat filled with inside jokes is not gonna make sense to an AI unless it’s been trained to do so.

Which has led to one of the best messaging experiences I’ve experienced in decades: trying to guess from the AI-generated summary what the individual texts will actually say.

Some examples:

(3) Tired and wants candy before 8:45am, stuck on a song.

(3) Item unavailable due to legal holding period for used goods.

(9) Kirk on 8th, guest room set up, Sam may forgive Pat, Aldi groceries ordered.