- Venkatesh Rao: Cognitive Farmsteading. From the man who came up with premium mediocre (2017), the cozyweb (2019), and the Internet of beefs (2020) here is another tone-setting phrase. He spent the better part of this decade working on sloptraptions (guess who his co-author is there) so I lost interest, but this article is fully Rao in every sense, even if his preferences in AI use — discussed in the article — are far, far removed from my own.
- Cory Doctorow: Discernment. Doctorow’s preferences, on the other hand, match mine to a T, spell checking and all (would a regular spellchecker note the missing greater-than sign in my Hugo notation?) What I don’t yet have is my very own on-device chatbot — have you seen the RAM prices these days? — but that is coming, with or without the bubble bursting.
- Debbie Millman: If You’re Over 40, You’re Ready to Use A.I. The thesis is in the title, and it is downright stupid. Persons over a certain age — 65? 75? I don’t know for sure and there are individual differences but it is in that ballpark — have no chatbot immunity or capacity for discernment (see above) and from my experience account for 95% of slop being unintentionally shared around the Internet.
- Lila Shroff for The Atlantic: America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek. Headed towards or pushed?
In Silicon Valley, engineers assign their agents tasks to complete overnight, and then check the results even before their morning coffee. Some are staying up late: “The opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high,” the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said on The Joe Rogan Experience last month. “If you go to sleep, you won’t be with your 20 AI coding agents.”
This Andreessen guy sounds like a grade-A asshole.