Category: Thinking

Cory Doctorow on AI

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

Spicy autocomplete absolutely can’t replace journalists.

— Cory Doctorow on AI

There’s something very deep in our response to righteous anger. Spicy autocomplete. Righteous anger, followed by italic uncertainty. Dehumanizing the AI so that we’re ready for eradication. At the same time, AI is already replacing human content creators – journalists, bloggers, illustrators, troll farms, SEO experts, photographers, data labelers, etc.

Generative AI is not necessarily terrible. ChatGPT can be forced to link to the source of each of its statements and will become like a search engine. Websites can flag human-created content with a badge of honor. The chatbots could be used where human support was previously impossible, increasing the need for more specialized human support and sales.

The society managed to navigate harmful technological advances in the past. Open Source happened. I don’t quite see how we’ll push back against some of the negative uses of AI like deepfakes but we’ll have to figure it out.

My post from 2023 on content aggregation is still relevant.

Bad Grammar Can Be a Feature

~ Veselin ~ 29 Comments

Engines love to consume lengthy content and rank it higher on search. ChatGPT can generate tons of additional meaningful text for the idea. However, as a reader, I prefer to read content written by humans and for humans. I’d rather read meaningful ideas in ugly sentences with simple words and poor grammar than AI-assisted beautiful novellas with a summary and headlines.

In that context, bad grammar, slang, lower-case text, and such can be a form of anti-language that identifies the post as human-written and non-AI-augmented. It can be a feature, not a bug (now I have an excuse to turn off Grammarly lol).

A Sleep Trick for Computer Zombies

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I have slept more over the last year. My average has increased from under 6 to over 7 hours, and though that’s not Nirvana, it feels better.

My morning routine is fixed. Kids go to school, and the alarm clocks go off at 7. So increasing sleep time can only be achieved by going to bed early. But how so? The former self would play games, code, and watch TV shows or YouTube. Some of these can be very addictive and I would often go to bed after 2am, setting myself up for a difficult morning that would not work without caffeine. Coffee can disrupt sleep even further.

Then I found a saying somewhere, perhaps on Reddit, source unknown:

If it’s not worth doing first thing in the morning, it’s not worth doing last thing in the evening.

Would I start the morning with the next episode of Halo? Hell no. Why am I staying late for it, shut it down. Would I read that book in the morning? What about another game of chess? You only need to overcome each of these urges once, then it’s defused by default.

The quote stuck with me and I rarely stay after 12. Feels better.

When do you feel most productive?

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
When do you feel most productive?

Productivity is like a flower, it needs nurturing and dies if salted. For me, the fertilizer is knowing the meaning of work, how to do it, being on a good team, and feeling enthusiasm.

I feel most productive in the mornings, late afternoons, and early evenings, and least productive after lunch.

A risk to regret

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

I’ve noticed that the two most common sources of regret for my last 20-30 years of experience are:

  • Missed opportunities
  • Coulda/Woulda/Shoulda thinking when a disaster strikes and I didn’t see it coming

The risks taken that paid off – what would I regret? For example, when taking my first mortgage, it felt like a great risk. The payment was a significant portion of my salary at the time, the period was long, and the apartment we bought was not great but we couldn’t afford anything better. The interest rate was high, and the seller had some non-disclosed debt and some people wanted their money back. It ended up fine, we renovated the property over the years and resolved the issues. Turned it into a home.

When I take a risk that doesn’t pay off, I also seem to not regret it if it was a deliberate informed choice taken without influence. I stopped insuring my previous car for theft and accidents. It got stolen. The saved premiums for 3 or 4 years didn’t cover the loss of value. Did I have regrets? I didn’t. I made a choice based on the amount of time I lost each year to deal with things like paint damage and vandalism. Covering the cost myself would’ve been cheaper and quicker than going through the insurer and the police on every occurrence. The same happened with previous vehicles, none of which were stolen. It didn’t pay off last time but I felt zero regret because it felt like it was an expected, although unlikely result of my math.

Most of the time when I felt regret, I didn’t see the negative outcome coming at all even if there were obvious signs in retrospect. For example, I played basketball. A second later I was on the ground with a dislocated knee. I didn’t see it coming. Lots of coulda/woulda/shoulda followed. However, the outcome was predictable, and the risk was taken when I agreed to play with unfamiliar clumsy kids. I blogged about bias, assumptions, and intuition, a couple of times this year.