What I’m doing now

I’ve been too precious with things I write. All of the things.

Via Simon Willison:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

I figure it’s better to do my warm ups here than where I write for work. I always wind up not blogging here when I get too caught up in asking questions like, “Is this on brand?” or “Is this as good as this other post?”

I just want to use this space and get comfortable with the discomfort of not overthinking the damn thing.

Locally Sourced AI Slop

I’ve seen local businesses in some of my feeds get called out for posting ads made with Predictive Plagiarism Algorithms, but wondered if the flack they were getting was limited or part of a bigger trend. Then I saw this piece from Luke Plunkett:

Firstly, it shows that you’d rather prompt something into a machine than hire a local graphic designer, artist and/or photographer, which tells your potential customers that you don’t give a shit about the community you’re a part of. Or that you’d rather offload the cognitive effort of coming up with a new poster to a glorified autocorrect, instead of just coming up with something cute, simple and personal yourself. Even the corniest blackboard trivia, or small A4 sign taped to a window made using MS Word on a yellowing printer in the back office, is preferable to an AI-generated ad, because at least you made it.

It’s a concise argument that cutting corners by using this tech to create your advertising suggests you’re willing to cut corners elsewhere. Not a good look if you want to convince people that they should come and pay you for your work.

Gasbag Blows Billions Blocking Off-Shore Wind Power

Via the Associated Press:

President Donald Trump, who often talks about his hatred of wind power, has said his goal is to not let any “windmills” be built. The Republican administration has been buying back offshore wind leases from energy companies as it seeks to discourage the expansion of wind energy in favor of fossil fuels.

I just have this image of President Quixote in a golf cart, holding out a nine iron like a lance as he careens into the water toward an off-shore windmill.

According to the AP’s numbers, almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds has been spent buying back leases to prevent new wind power development.

More from the AP article (emphasis mine):

But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said the lease buybacks are effectively bribing companies to step away from clean energy that can displace more expensive fossil fuel plants, which in turn will raise costs for consumers.

Clean energy could save Americans from further increases in their utility bills, which seems like it would be a good thing right now.

Make a focus vacuum

I’m posting this for my future self, to remember how peaceful and productive it is to block the inputs, and make a vacuum to expand my output.

–Derek Sivers, “Offline 23 Hours a Day“

Limiting distractions is a solved problem, and I need to remember that.

There’s 1Blocker, there’s Screen Time, there’s Bloom. There’s Do Not Disturb.

There’s putting distractions in the other room. There’s turning things off.

There’s throwing your phone into the river and burrowing into the soft mud of the shore.

But then there’s the sense of urgency that things are happening.

JOSH
I need information. I need to know what's happening in the world -- I have no idea what's happening in the world!

DONNA
I bought you the paper.

JOSH
I read it! Preparations are on the way for the fair -- I'm briefed. Organizers say it's going to be the best one yet.

–The West Wing, "20 Hours in America, Part II"

And blocking out information to make space to make things doesn’t have to be tuning out the world completely.

Because there’s a circle of influence where I can do something about what’s inside, but not what’s outside.

If there’s less outside to see, there’s more focus on what I can do something about.

AI won’t think like us

I don’t know all the words to the theme song for Three’s Company.

I do know a few of them, because I can remember an episode of Full House where the characters were having a hard time remembering what the lyrics were.

And sometimes only that segment of the song pops into my head.

I could just look up the lyrics, and that would be that, but it doesn’t really bother me enough. And would I remember it?

Because the memory of that episode is tied to sitting in the living room of my parents’ house, watching a furniture-sized television that had more wood panelling than screen. I was watching the show in prime time, because that’s how you had to watch the show. The show wasn’t my favorite (my preferred big family show was Step-by-Step). This was before Alanis Morisette strongly implied through song that Dave Coulier was suspect, so I still got a good laugh out of Woodchuck puppet jokes.

Anything generated by an LLM wouldn’t have that stream of consciousness. It would know the Three’s Company lyrics because it scraped them from a site. Or it would hallucinate that it knew the lyrics and make some things up.

It reminds me of this monologue from Good Will Hunting:

So if I asked you about art you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.

If I asked you about women you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.

You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.

If I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you…who could rescue you from the depths of hell.

And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel. To have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms “visiting hours” don’t apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.

I look at you, I don’t see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart. You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?