When the bill for the latter lands with a heavy thud, moderation and common sense start to look like a pretty good idea.

I use plenty of AI. As best I can tell just believing my own eyes, everything is stagnant except the prices.

Which is fine… but the boosters shout “OMG EVERYTHING IS CHANGED YOU ARE BEHIND AND ALL PREVIOUS STUDIES ARE INVALID NOW” every Tuesday.

(Replacing overpriced garbageware with something I scraped together in 3 days is my jam. But the specifics matter a lot.)

On their own, browser tabs, notifications, and IM at work all make sense on their own and are not evil at all.

Taken together, there are now 8 people trying to talk to me all day every day, constant alerts unless you go out of your way to severely restrict what and who can message you, and you find yourself with 60 tabs across 3 windows doing 7 things at once but also doing nothing because... your brain was not built for this computer.

It was a choice to make technology that absolutely hammers you with information. It was not the right choice.

I want to build and use stuff that promotes focus. I only have a vague inkling of what this means, but it's quieter, less instantaneous. And it's going to be an uphill battle because everyone else is doing the opposite.

I dont care about simulating furniture placement specifically, but most use of AI in advertising that I see today would not be acceptable under that standard.

The tidy todo notebook or lab notebook is to offload working memory or keep records.

The chaos notebook is for disorder.

We were hobbyists making features and shorts on a shoestring budget with no expectations of “making it.” It was a blast. It’s also an all-consuming hobby that you can’t keep up forever.

The last short film we did before is still online https://vimeo.com/144277181

This is the lazy, pointless-TV-watching of writing. And I’d recommend it, but if I tried to explain why that would defeat the purpose of having no purpose.

They said they’d take your jobs, they forced families out of their homes, they gave you the worst electric bills you’ve ever seen, and if you pushed back on any of this they called you “Luddite” or “meat LLM.” And all this, it was said, seems fine.

That pendulum is gonna swing hard.

I have some extremely useful Discords and Signal group chats, but not everything ought to be an always on chatterbox.

I actually think this is about quality. Podcasts that take real effort (Hardcore History, Fall of Civilizations, Gastropod) are absolutely worth my time, but they're basically mini-audiobooks in their own right.

But I doubt the influence. I’ve been free for years, and I can always spot who’s spends a lot of time in TikTok/Twitter/Instagram—it’s like talking to someone from another planet. It mostly sounds weird and sad, more apt to annoy and alienate their friends than inform or influence them.

But unlike some of the others, I’m hearing anti-AI sentiment from a wide range of people who don’t even use social media.