Neal Stephenson: Writing by hand is good for your brain — Here's how to do it
Stephenson discusses why he writes his books by hand — even The Baroque Cycle, which resulted in a 42-inch-high manuscript — and how to easily re-learn handwriting.
Hamilton Nolan: Enshittification relies on broken economic math
The accounting fallacy that makes enshittification look like growth
Should you use AI for a task? Here's a simple way to decide
The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.
At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.
The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work–if the task has to be done and no one cares how–then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.
I like the metaphor or a wagon or a forklift because they don’t do the job for you. They still require a lot of work on your part. That is my experience using AI. It’s a huge help, speeds the process and helps me do things I would not have done on my own. But it doesn’t do the job for me and it still requires a lot of work.
I don’t use AI to write posts here because what I do here is a “gym” task, not a “job” task.
The discussion around the Odyssey movie has led me to realize that I have not actually liked most of the Christopher Nolan movies I’ve seen. I liked “Inception” and “Interstellar” a lot, but the rest of them – including the Batman movies — seem like the work of a man who’s dealing with issues that are alien to me.
“You either die a hero or live long enough to be a villain”? No, that’s not true.
I am not trying to disrespect Nolan or his fans. Taste is subjective.
A friend who started following me on Facebook when Minnie was a puppy told me he did not realize, at first, that Minnie is a dog. He thought Minnie is my wife. He saw me post about how Minnie puked and it was disgusting and he thought it was disrespectful to say such things about one’s spouse.
The dog is recovering from her health crisis a month ago
Minnie has made a great recovery. She’s eating regularly and gained back a bit of weight. She seems happy and alert.
When she got sick, I cut her back from our usual 3-1/4-mile morning walk to about 1-1/4 plus another third of a mile at bedtime. She seemed to be feeling pretty good this morning so I increased her to more than 1-1/5 miles and she did great — even had energy left over for zoomies. I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to 3-1/4 miles — but I don’t know that we won’t.
Our time together is limited. She’s a 13-year-old medium-sized dog with kidney failure. But we’re enjoying the time with her while it lasts.
I received an email at work this morning, following up on a recent article. The email starts, “Hey, half-bald motherfucker.” I love hearing from fans.
by @dave
“Now, it wasn’t AI that killed all that. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter were the main culprits, especially once they started treating corporations like users and users like product, sacrificing quality for quantity. AI just danced on our grave.” : ehandbook.com