Fein was rehired by one of his clients, who wasn’t pleased with ChatGPT’s work. But it isn’t enough to sustain him and his family, who have a little over six months of financial runway before they run out of money.
Now, Fein has decided to pursue a job that AI can’t do, and he has enrolled in courses to become an HVAC technician. Next year, he plans to train to become a plumber.
“A trade is more future-proof,” he said.
CGP Gray’s Humans Need Not Apply video is eight years old, but has never been more relevant. Leaning towards a profession more rooted in the physical world is a good instinct to have, for now.
📺 Ted Lasso, Season 3: better than the second, not quite as impactful as the first. Since the circumstances of the show’s debut were literally once-in-a-generation you can’t really fault it for that.
But isn’t it a bit sad that everyone but Ted has had a fulfilling arc?
Finished reading: The Formula by Albert-László Barabási 📚
The perfect self-help book for your nerd scientist friend who wants to succeed in academia; broadly applicable to other areas of human endeavor, such as competitive hot-dog eating, crocheting, and investment banking.
Finished reading: Empty Space by M. John Harrison 📚
The third and final installment of M. John Harrison’s Light series. As before, I was left wondering, between the baroque prose and the twisting parallel plots, what on Earth I had just read. But figuring it out is nine tenths of the fun!
Nearly 20 years have passed since I last attended a football (as in soccer ⚽️) match, but there we were at DC United versus Montreal last night. The fans were much more amped than I expected — a good mix of DC’s many colorful communities.
As for the score… well, can’t have everything.
Are these the two Americas everyone keeps telling me about?
An oral history of the final episode of the best show of the 2010s? Yes, please.
Spoiler alert, obviously.
At $5 per month for a cozy social network and a static blog hosting service, micro.blog was already quite the bargain. This summer, $4 will get you four full months — an absolute steal.
With $10/month you also get podcast hosting, bookmark archives, and a newsletter, if you are so inclined. So you have to ask what exactly $8 per month give you at that other service. The freedom to see fewer adds, I suppose.
Writes Kate Lindsay in The Atlantic:
Today’s teens are similarly wary of oversharing. They joke on TikTok about the terror of their peers finding their parents’ Facebooks. Stephen Balkam, the CEO of the nonprofit Family Online Safety Institute, says that even younger children might experience a “digital coming-of-age” and the discomfort that comes with it. “What we’ve seen is very mature 10-, 11-, 12-year-olds sitting down with their parents, going, ‘Mom, what were you thinking?’” he told me.
This is exactly the kind of scenario I had in mind when our now-almost–11-year-old was just born. It took a tiny bit of convincing, but neither I nor my spouse had posted any baby photos since then; who knows, the lack of dopamine hits may have contributed to neither of us having much of a presence on Facebook or Instagram.
And before I start patting myself on the back, there are of course negative consequences in that old friends and distant family members back in Serbia probably have no idea what any of our children look like, thereby lessening their psycho-social connections, etc. But that is something a visit or two to the old country will, hopefully, heal.
By the way, the article I just wrote about found its way to me via Artifact, which has become great for discovering interesting content — thank you, clickbait-hunters — but subpar for reading it, even on the iPad. Anxiously awaiting a Reader mode there.