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)

Because this is how we are conditioned to see value: we are only valuable if we do x,y and z – this is also how we value other people and our selves. It perpetuates an insidious suffering because very few people are truly loved or seen. We are not loved for who we are but the roles we play and the actions we make. Obedience is seen as a great virtue. Wanting to live in a way that we want is seen as selfish. When other people get to live in an unconventional way they want we ostracise them for it. If I didn’t get to do this, you can’t do it too. If I suffered, you should suffer too. Sometimes weird shit happens even if we do societally-valued things. For example, if we start caring about our health by eating better or exercising more, suddenly we start getting comments about how we are too health-conscious and should loosen up more.

If we spend a few moments thinking about this, it is shocking how little space we have to be our selves. Who exactly are our selves anyway? We may not know because we did not have the time, space or permission to unfold. We spend so much time and energy chasing the goals we think we want, without contemplating why we wanted them in the first place.

Another one I got a sore neck from reading because I found myself nodding vehemently the entire time.

Psychologist Paul Bloom's research on pleasure suggests that we derive our deepest satisfactions not from hedonic experiences but from making meaning; not from having but from being; not from displaying but from experiencing; not from accumulating but from connecting.

In response, new status hierarchies have emerged that privilege experiences that money alone cannot buy: deep relationships, creative fulfillment, community belonging, physical vitality, spiritual practice, and environmental stewardship. In some ways, these new status markers are even more rarified than the old ones, if only because they're harder to fake. Anyone with money can buy a Rolex, but you can't purchase the glow of someone who has fulfilled duty, found purpose. You can't buy your way into belonging to a community that values contribution over consumption.

This isn’t to say that material prosperity has been rejected entirely. But it is a more sophisticated, epistemic relationship with wealth – treating financial capital as just one form of abundance alongside social, intellectual, physical, and spiritual capital.

One of the best parts of going through unemployment was being forced to figure out who I wanted to be.

One way to approach this exercise is to identify what you do not want to be. The easiest entries on that list involved chasing status through my job title and material possessions.

After asking Henry Rollins if he is still punk at age 64:

I would have to say yes because it’s the ideology that has stayed with me: anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-homophobia, anti-discrimination, and you know, equality, fairness, decency, all of that. To me, that’s punk rock. And I don’t think that’s bad. If I had a kid, I'd say be honest, you know? Find a slow kid in school and become friends with them because people make fun of them. And when people start making fun of him, you know, stick up for him, man, you’ll be a hero, you’ll lead.

(via Naz)

It’s not the mistakes that matter. Apple has made them before. The Newton, MobileMe, the butterfly keyboard. What matters is the posture. A company once defined by joyful provocation—by thinking different—is now defined by its defensiveness. Its leadership acts not like inventors but like stewards of a status quo. They protect margins like relics. They fear dilution. They optimize at the expense of surprise.

I’ve been really into Joan Westenberg’s writing here lately. In her most recent post, she compares Apple’s current posture to that of Charles V, who had to face Martin Luther’s simple yet devastating observations of where the church was failing.

I can’t say I’m over Apple as a company, mostly because I still am not aware of a better option for the sort of work I do.

But you’d better believe I’m on the lookout for a better browser, a better phone experience, a better in-home audio setup, and a better wearable.

Too many bangers to pull out of this one. Well worth a full read. But here are a couple juicy pull quotes to whet your pallette:

Programming lures us into believing we can control the outside events. That is where the suffering begins. There is something deeper happening here. This is not just about software.

I believe sometimes building things is how we self-soothe. We write a new tool or a script because we are in a desperate need for a small victory. We write a new tool because we are overwhelmed. Refactor it, not because the code is messy, but your life is. We chase the perfect system because it gives us something to hold onto when everything else is spinning.

I’m trying to let things stay a little broken. Because I’ve realized I don’t want to fix everything. I just want to feel OK in a world that often isn’t. I can fix something, but not everything.

You learn how to program. You learn how to fix things. But the hardest thing you’ll ever learn is when to leave them broken.

And maybe that’s the most human skill of all.

One thing you’re not supposed to admit to: not enjoying basic activities of hygiene maintenance. I get that it’s suspect. I swear to you I do shower enough, but the whole process (the hair removal! the exfoliation, body and facial! the shampoo-rinse-shampoo-rinse-conditioner-rinsing!) is to me tedious at its core, and I know few enough of you all in real life to be able to admit it here.

So: I bought a Bluetooth speaker that claims enough waterproofness for my own plausible deniability to use it in the shower.

This then opens up an important soundtracking opportunity. What is the right music to propel one through the emotional deadness of a shower1?

Maya goes on to recommend froge.mp3 by piri & Tommy Villiers. Listening to it now, I can totally see myself shaving and washing with this album in the background.

It makes me wonder: what albums do y’all recommend for random every day tasks? Like, what are you bumping when you’re folding socks? Or pulling weeds?

We should stop worshipping numerical comfort. Twenty partial views don’t make a whole picture. They make noise. They make an echo. They create professionalized, sanitized, panel-approved blindness.

If you're lucky enough to know someone with twenty years of scar tissue in a domain, listen. Don't just ask what they know. Ask what they've unlearned. Ask what they stopped saying because nobody understood. That's where the signal lives.

“Worshipping numerical comfort” is a fantastic phrase that I’ll be pondering here for the next few days.

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 wish I could say I was past this part. That I’ve grown thicker skin by now. But the truth is, I still care. Not about applause. I care about people’s time. I care about making things that are worth showing up for. And that pressure? It can be paralyzing.

Still, something in me wants to try. Slowly. Gently. Maybe I’m not going back to who I was. Maybe I’m heading toward something new, something more honest.

This post was extremely timely because I literally talked with my therapist about this yesterday.

Time to get posting!