mwillis

I don’t accept this framing. If tools allow us to pursue ever more deeply into the mystery of being, and get to both questions and answers we never thought we’d see, that’s a good thing. I think the genuinely curious should have no problem redoubling their “freed up time” into further exploration. The library Borges describes is infinite. I won’t mind getting to read a few books I wouldn’t have otherwise.

maybe it’s more like “abstracted” away, in the same way higher-level languages “solved” needing to code via machine instruction sets. Higher level languages allowed humans to think more like themselves. AI puts another abstraction in front of the outcome, making it even more generally open to human thinking and less defined by the need to give machines exactly what they expect.

Today, human-language outlines / briefs / prompts are “compiled” to code which is itself then adapted to hardware. We are stretching less and less across the divide, doing less and less work on the terms of the machine. Now the farthest we’ll stretch is often formatted markdown - the most basic application of machine-parseable structure to very organic human thinking. Because we’re given the chance to be less precise, coherence suffers.

Organizing information could be considered its own form of (self-inflicted) torment.

This 3 minute song creates a fleeting portrait of a man, not necessarily Bieber, who we cannot know. The song captures the mindset of a character who, one might infer, cynically knows what he’s trying to do. It’s possible he has no interest in a heartfelt, meaningful apology. In fact, this character - who lives only within the song and the liminal world it creates - may be operating exactly to his own moral preference. We don’t know enough to say more. It’s like asking if a singer of “happy birthday” truly wishes their subject to be happy.

In short, you Kant analyze pop music with confidence.

This is cool. The various, odd “error” shots are (subjectively) more interesting than the ones that went to plan.

I’d guess because Canadians often rely on American tech infrastructure by default, and current events are shining a light on the vulnerability inherent in that arrangement. It’s a line that speaks to a potential Canadian user base who doesn’t make a distinction among what’s tangled up in their web use.

We’re in a transitional time. A lot of things will feel off until we figure out what “right” feels like. Critiques like this are correct, but correct only for as long as the circumstances stay as they are. Which they won’t.

A six-week road trip sounds amazing. A six-week road trip with lots of interstate driving does not.

maybe it’s just some quirk of how my fingers work, but when typing with two hands, I constantly get the letter “n” where I want a space. Itngetsnquitenfrustrating and it’s really annoying to go back and correct, because none of the intermediate words got autocorrected either. It seems like a) such an easy thing to prevent, and b) such an easy thing to detect and fix after the fact.

Second most egregious issue is how every space becomes a period when typing in the Safari url/search bar. I’m using it for search 90% of the time, and directly entering URLs 10%, but Apple must think those proportions are flipped.

Free the space!

Finally - could we have a simple gesture that toggles words between lowercase, first letter capital, and all caps? Highlight a word and swipe up or something? So much needless input to make a word capitalized.

Why, in this given scenario, does the individual’s mandate to their company automatically trump the mandate given to them by an ethical society, or even their own moral code? Why is this position held up as infallible? The situation could easily be re-framed as “my corporate mandate is to grow revenue, but the larger mandate I have is to my own ethical truth.” Why are corporate desires allowed to get the “shrug, that’s just what I’m supposed to do” treatment?

If the answer is you lose your job and your means to provide for your family if you don’t put corporate desires first, then we’ve constructed the society we want already and no one should be complaining.

I truly believe psychology is at the root of this. People start families when the optimism they feel about the future outweighs the pessimism. Even if this evaluation is done subconsciously.

At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.

wildly cool, nice job!

reading is tougher though