I am grateful — genuinely — for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much ease carries a cost. I was lulled into the belief that I didn’t have to make decisions. Now my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combining maximal storage with minimal intention.

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.

This is an example of what AI, in its most optimistic state, could help us with.

We already see companies doing this. In the Apple ecosystem, the Photos widget is perhaps the best piece of software they’ve produced in years.

Every single day, I am presented with a slideshow of a friend who is celebrating their birthday, a photo of my kids from this day in history, or a memory that fits with an upcoming event.

All of that is powered by rudimentary¹ AI.

Imagine what could be done when you unleash a tuned large language model on our text histories. On our photos. On our app usage.

AI is only as good as the data it is provided. We’ve been trusting our devices with our most intimidate and vulnerable parts of ourselves for two decades.

This is supposed to be the payoff for the last twenty years of surveillance capitalism, I think?

All those secrets we share, all of those activities we’ve done online for the last twenty years, this will be used to somehow make our lives better?

The optimistic take is that we’ll receive better auto suggestions for text responses to messages that sound more like us. We’ll receive tailored traffic suggestions based on the way we drive. We’ll receive a “long lost” photo of our kid from a random trip to the museum.

The pessimistic take is that we’ll give companies the exact words which will cause us to take action. Our own words will be warped to get us to buy something we’ve convinced ourselves we need.

My hunch is that both takes will be true. We need to be smart enough to know how to use these tools to help ourselves and when to put them down.

I haven’t used Gmail as my primary email for years now², but this article is giving me more motivation to finally pull the plug and shrink my digital footprint.

This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to be a garden I tend, snipping back the weeds and nourishing the plants.

My wife and I spent the last week cleaning out our garage. It reached the point where the clutter accumulated so much that you could only park one car in it, strategically aligned so you could squeeze through a narrow pathway and open a door.

As of this morning, we donated ten boxes of items and are able to comfortably move around the space. While there is more to be done, the garage now feels more livable, useful, and enjoyable to be inside.

I was able to clear off my work bench and mount a pendant above it. The pendant is autographed by the entire starting defensive line of the 1998 Minnesota Vikings.

Every time I walk through my garage, I see it hanging there and it makes me so happy.

Our digital lives should be the same way.

My shame closet is a 4 terabyte hard drive containing every school assignment since sixth grade, every personal webpage I’ve ever built, multiple sporadic backups of various websites I am no longer in charge of, and scans of documents that ostensibly may mean something to me some day.

Scrolling through my drive, I’m presented with a completely chaotic list that is too overwhelming to sort through.

Just like how I cleaned out my garage, I aught to do the same to this junk drawer.

I’ll revert to Ezra’s garden metaphor here: keep a small, curated garden that contains the truly important and meaningful digital items to you. Prune the rest.

(Shout out to my friend Dana for sharing this with me. I think she figured out my brand.)

Because we’re social animals we tend to go along with the trend, and because we live under capitalist acceleration the trend is always one way, because our system only has one gear. We also have the ability to edit our memories, so can find ways to convince ourselves that this was all our own choice. That very same adaptability, though, prevents us from using the new tech to save time, because – under a system with a growth fetish – we’ll be expected to adapt to a new normal in which we have to do more stuff and get more stuff in the same amount of time.

The dark irony then, is that it is the introduction of the new tech that inspires the subsequent irritation at its absence. Twenty years ago nobody fidgeted in agitation if they had to wait ten minutes for a taxi. Now you’ll check your phone incessantly if the Uber is running three minutes later than you expected. And god forbid the driver cancels, because you’ve probably algorithmically planned everything down to the last minute. We increasingly live a ‘just in time’ life because, at a systemic level, there’s pressure to pack in as much stuff as possible at both a consumption and production level. We’re just as dissatisfied, only busier.

The more I dig into the reasons behind my anxiety and depression, I keep coming back to some form of “it’s the system, maaaan.”

And that thought often leads me down two paths:

The first path is wallowing in anger around our horrible healthcare system, our completely corrupt political system, and our inability to have a rational conversation around solutions to all these problems (often with people whom I actually deeply care about).

The second path is spinning around solutions for these problems. How can I tone down the heat in conversations with my loved ones? How can I push back against a culture hellbent on incessant and mindless consumption?

How do we all just slow down?

Lately, I’ve sometimes turned to ChatGPT for research. But I’ve stopped having it generate prose to stand in for my own. If my writing is an expression of my particular consciousness, I’m the only one capable of it. This applies, to be clear, to GPT-3’s line about holding hands with my sister. In real life, she and I were never so sentimental. That’s precisely why I kept writing over the AI’s words with my own: The essay is equally about what AI promises us and how it falls short. As for Sudowrite’s proposal to engineer an entire novel from a few keywords, forget it. If I wanted a product to deliver me a story on demand, I’d just go to a bookstore.

But what if I, the writer, don’t matter? I joined a Slack channel for people using Sudowrite and scrolled through the comments. One caught my eye, posted by a mother who didn’t like the bookstore options for stories to read to her little boy. She was using the product to compose her own adventure tale for him. Maybe, I realized, these products that are supposedly built for writers will actually be of more interest to readers.

I can imagine a world in which many of the people employed as authors, people like me, limit their use of AI or decline to use it altogether. I can also imagine a world—and maybe we’re already in it—in which a new generation of readers begins using AI to produce the stories they want. If this type of literature satisfies readers, the question of whether it can match human-produced writing might well be judged irrelevant.

I think this is a good example of exactly why I think software engineers are in trouble for many roles.

People hire nerds to get computers to do things for them. Things that are not especially novel to those of us who program computers, but extremely valuable to those who cannot.

Will AI be able to create bespoke, artisanal software better than a creative engineer?

Will AI be able to create bespoke, artisanal music better than a create musician?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But it will surely be able to create adequate software and music faster than humans can.

I’m afraid the days of being paid insane amounts of money because I can get computers to do what I want are approaching an end.

The reason that I’ve been looking for positive future visions is because I feel that the environmental and social movements here in the UK seem to be increasingly pessimistic, driven more by fear and despair than by hope and inspiration. Naturally these movements always have their roots in the challenges that we face, but when I first got involved as a teenager there seemed to be an atmosphere of genuine hope. That hope was inspiring and energising, a wonderful thing to be a part of and hugely motivational. In the last few years though, I have been disheartened to hear many people I admire and respect confess to me in private that they have given up hope.

And I don’t blame them. I have struggled with hope too. It’s been a very long time since we had a political leader who could inspire us with a meaningful vision for a better future, and despite repeated claims by activists that “we already have all of the solutions“, the elephant in the room is that they don’t seem to be working. Even Patagonia's founder, Yvon Chouinard, when changing the company's mission statement to “We're in business to save our home planet”, apparently also said in private that it’s because he thinks it's already too late for humanity.

To me, this is an untenable situation. Hope is the fuel that drives life forward. It's what gets us out of bed in the morning, enables us to face the struggles of life and gives us all something to aim for. Without hope, there is only darkness.

As we travel through the vast expanse of space on our tiny blue marble called Earth, we must remember that it is the tiny points of light out there in the darkness of the universe that give birth to all the wonders of life. Hope is light, and we only need a little bit for great things to happen.

I am constantly inspired by Tom Greenwood’s posts. This one was chock full of new-to-me concepts like New Earth, the Age of Aquarius, the ancient Indian Yuga Cycle, and Tom’s vision called Harmonium.

I also like his three step process for reigniting hope (allow yourself to dream, work on yourself, move forward). This is the precise process I’ve been undergoing in my own life since getting laid off at the beginning of the year.

So much of being Jewish is explaining yourself. There's only about 16 million Jews on Earth, a pittance of the global population, which means that, unless a Jew in the United States stays in the tiniest of bubbles—and, look, it is possible—you at some point invariably end up explaining yourself. Yes, usually it's to well-meaning people who just want to know Why is your new year on a different day? and Why are your holidays always moving around? and How come some of you don't eat pork but some of you do?

And sometimes it's not as simple as that. It's also Why do some of you wear funny hats? and Why do so many Jews work in media? and Why are so many of you rich? and What's up with that George Soros? Even the well-intentioned questions get exhausting after a while, as does smiling through the 10,000th person asking if you had a good Yom Kippur—it's a day of fasting and atonement, it's never good—because being a polite, kind, unthreatening Jew feels like the only defense against people thinking we [checks notes] control all the banks and have western civilization in the sites of our Jewish space lasers.

Is this a uniquely Jewish feeling? No. Of course not. Exhaustion at having to explain yourself or just feeling out of place are not experiences that belong to the Jews any more than the story of Noah and the flood does. But it is nice to not have to explain sometimes, to just feel normal. I think that's what still makes the "Krusty is a Jew" episode so special for me. Nothing is explained. Nothing is given context. Jews are just Jews, nothing we do is clarified or justified—and if you don't get it, well, we've got five more jokes coming, so buckle up and jot it down so you look it up later. And that might be the most Jewish part of it all.

For cradle Catholics like me, death is forever a part of how you see the world: how you pray, how you celebrate, how you tell stories and create art. But that doesn’t make your awareness of your inevitable death any easier. The thought of not being with my wife and my daughters, of never seeing my family again—these thoughts overtake me with an ambiguous frisson, something like the rush of ecstatic exhaustion I feel somewhere near the top of the hill.

I won’t run forever. But running feels like a practice inherited from some ancient tradition, something primal and odd. I run in the heat to run into the summer, to keep the heat going as the evening light begins to dim.

Ugh, I really need to stop reading powerful essays about running.

Eventually, one of them will make me pick up a new pair of shoes and get in a couple laps around the block.

I heard nothing but good things about Lina Khan when she was announced as the chair of the FTC, and I think she did a tremendous job during this interview with Jon Stewart.

Jon and Lina break down the various lawsuits that the FTC is currently engaged in, not just with big tech companies, but also pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies.

I found it interesting when Jon mentioned that he tried to have Lina on his podcast when he was with Apple TV+, but Apple told him no.

I get it, but also, why would you have hired Jon Stewart in the first place? You’ve seen his show, right? Of course he’s gonna call a spade a spade, one of the few reputable media personalities¹ who will not hesitate to bite the hand that feeds.

It’s also interesting that the FTC is often outgunned by the legal representation of the companies against which they pursue litigation, sometimes at a ratio of 10:1.

Listening to him name exactly what he liked about the wine turned up the hairs on the back of my neck. Suddenly, my own experience of the wine felt deeper and more satisfying. I wanted to know: How was he able to identify these flavors?

He told me the secret was to blindly smell things and try to label them. You see, the part of your brain that’s responsible for smells is naturally mute. It’s called the olfactory bulb, and it’s an ancient fist of neurons just behind your eyes. It has only indirect backroad connections to the parts of the brain that control language, like Broca’s area. So, even though you might have an easy time knowing whether or not you like a scent, it’s not easy to label that scent with a word. It’ll feel like groping through a dark closet for something you know is there, but can’t quite find.

I did not know this, and now I will be nerding out on ways to train my taste buds.

But this article isn’t just about developing your sense of taste. It’s also about defining your style.

In much the same way the author describes how he is, for the first time in his life, articulating what he likes as a writer, I am starting to do the same with several areas of my life.

Case in point: I have a huge collection of quotes that you can see on the main page of this site.

I just fed all of them through ChatGPT with this prompt:

I’ve attached a series of quotes which are meaningful to me. First off, tell me the consistent themes you recognize across all of the quotes. Then, tell me what this says about the things that inspire me.

Here is the result:

Across all the quotes, several consistent themes emerge:

1. Growth and Self-improvement: Many quotes focus on the importance of personal growth, overcoming challenges, and continuous improvement.
2. Perseverance and Resilience: There's a strong theme of enduring hardship, staying strong in the face of adversity, and the importance of perseverance.
3. Wisdom and Perspective: The quotes often reflect on acquiring wisdom, gaining perspective, and understanding life's deeper meanings and truths.
4. Happiness and Contentment: There's an emphasis on finding happiness, being content with what one has, and the pursuit of joy in life.
5. Community and Relationships: Several quotes highlight the value of community, the importance of relationships, and the strength that comes from vulnerability and connection with others.

These themes suggest that you are inspired by ideas related to personal growth, resilience in the face of adversity, the pursuit of wisdom and understanding, the importance of happiness and contentment, and the value of community and relationships. It paints a picture of someone who values both internal development and external connections, seeking both personal fulfillment and meaningful interactions with others.

:extremely Marge Simpson voice: “Well, duh.”

(For real though, pretty awesome that we have a tool that is exceptionally good at summarizing large amounts of data and picking out patterns throughout the dataset.)

This site contains 29257 unique* 88x31 buttons that I scraped from the GeoCities archives compiled by the incredible ARCHIVE TEAM before GeoCities' demise in late 2009.

I shouldn’t go through all ~30,000 images to find the ones I made for Tim’s World or That’s Unpossible, right?

…right?

Whenever I talk about a knowledge win via robots on the socials or with humans, someone snarks, “Well, how do you know it’s true? How do you know the robot isn’t hallucinating?” Before I explain my process, I want to point out that I don’t believe humans are snarking because they want to know the actual answer; I think they are scared. They are worried about AI taking over the world or folks losing their job, and while these are valid worries, it’s not the robot’s responsibility to tell the truth; it’s your job to understand what is and isn’t true.

You’re being changed by the things you see and read for your entire life, and hopefully, you’ve developed a filter through which this information passes. Sometimes, it passes through without incident, but other times, it’s stopped, and you wonder, “Is this true?”

Knowing when to question truth is fundamental to being a human. Unfortunately, we’ve spent the last forty years building networks of information that have made it pretty easy to generate and broadcast lies at scale. When you combine the internet with the fact that many humans just want their hopes and fears amplified, you can understand why the real problem isn’t robots doing it better; it’s the humans getting worse.

I’m working on an extended side quest and in the past few hours of pairing with ChatGPT, I’ve found myself constantly second guessing a large portion of the decisions and code that the AI produced.

This article pairs well with this one I read today about a possible social exploit that relies on frequently hallucinated package names.

Simon Willison writes:

Bar Lanyado noticed that LLMs frequently hallucinate the names of packages that don’t exist in their answers to coding questions, which can be exploited as a supply chain attack.

He gathered 2,500 questions across Python, Node.js, Go, .NET and Ruby and ran them through a number of different LLMs, taking notes of any hallucinated packages and if any of those hallucinations were repeated.

One repeat example was “pip install huggingface-cli” (the correct package is “huggingface[cli]”). Bar then published a harmless package under that name in January, and observebd 30,000 downloads of that package in the three months that followed.

I’ll be honest: during my side quest here, I’ve 100% blindly run npm install on packages without double checking official documentation.

These large language models truly are mirrors to our minds, showing all sides of our personalities from our most fit to our most lazy.