Mitch's Blog

jwz: ChatGPT is a dangerous “bullshit fountain.”

RIP Harry Whittington, 95. He was shot in the face in a 2006 hunting accident by Dick Cheney, and then Whittington later apologized to Cheney and his family and yes you read that right about who apologized to who. (The Texas Tribune / Sneha Day)

“Shift Happens” is a book about keyboards, “starting with typewriters and ending with modern computers and phones… How did we get from then to now? What were the steps along the way? And how on earth does QWERTY still look the same now as it did 150 years ago?” (Kickstarter)

An animated sitcom based loosely on “Seinfeld,” powered entirely by AI, ran continuously for six weeks on Twitch. But that service recently banned the show when the bots made transphobic jokes. (Kotaku / Levi Winslow)

Joe Rogan, who gets paid $200 million to share whatever stupid thing comes into his head, shares the anti-Semitic myth that Jews are greedy. (Mark Frauenfelder / Boing Boing)

Please, My Wife, She’s Very Online. Jia Tolentino does not like the word “wife.” (The New Yorker)

The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump (Wired). “Active users have fallen by more than 1 million since the exodus from Elon Musk’s Twitter, suggesting the decentralized platform is not a direct replacement.”

My $0.02: No, it’s not a direct replacement. Mastodon is similar to Twitter, but different, and the differences will become more pronounced over time.

The article notes that traffic went from 380,000 users late last year to 1.4 million by late January. That’s insanely rapid growth!

Two steps forward, one step back still gets you a step ahead of where you were before.

[Many publishers] no longer have audiences in real sense; what they have instead is traffic — a huge stream of drive-by readers, delivered by search engines, that they can monetize primarily by getting them to make attributable purchases.

Casey Newton writes on Platformer about the emerging wave of AI and how it will disrupt search and publishing.

Many publishers already operate like spam operations and the time may be running out for them to be able to convert human journalists’ output into Google search results and then sales, Newton says.

Some of this is probably fine, or at least inevitable. If you run a men’s health site, there are only so many ways to tell your readers to eat right and get regular exercise.

…

… with digital publishers’ businesses already hugely dependent on search traffic, and traffic toward news sites declining precipitously, the incentives are for almost any publisher to transform into an AI-powered, SEO-driven content farm as quickly as they can.

For an example of my ignorance today: I only have a vague idea who “Drake” is. I gather he’s a rapper? And super-famous? Other than that, I can’t tell you a single thing about him.

It’s not just Drake. I routinely don’t recognize the names of popular actors, other musicians, movies, and even many TV shows.

This intrigues me, because in the 70s and 80s I was pretty plugged in.

For the years this has been going on, I’ve just assumed it’s because I’m middle-aged, don’t have kids, and pop culture is not for me anymore.

However, this SNL skit suggests the phenomenon goes much deeper. The skit suggests that famous people and movies just aren’t actually famous anymore.

I recognize the guy with the mustache, though. He’s Pedro Pascal, star of “Last of Us” and (the exact same role, only with a helmet) “The Mandalorian.”

The last question in the skit is spot on. Just like Pedro, I would have been totally stumped.

This makes sense if we consider that people are more likely to put off starting or completing tasks that they feel aversion towards. If just thinking about the task makes you anxious or threatens your sense of self-worth, you will be more likely to put it off.

Research has found that regions of the brain linked to threat detection and emotion regulation are different in people who chronically procrastinate compared to those who don’t procrastinate frequently.

When we avoid the unpleasant task, we also avoid the negative emotions associated with it. This is rewarding and conditions us to use procrastination to repair our mood. If we engage in more enjoyable tasks instead, we get another mood boost.

…

But:

In the long run, procrastination isn’t an effective way of managing emotions. The mood repair you experience is temporary. Afterwards, people tend to engage in self-critical ruminations that not only increase their negative mood, but also reinforce their tendency to procrastinate.”

— Fuschia Sirois, Professor in Social & Health Psychology, Durham University, writing on The Conversation:

And procrastination is linked with health problems.

I recently had this insight about myself and why I procrastinate: I put tasks off that stress me out. I found the insight itself to be life-changing—just knowing why procrastination happens went a long way to correcting the problem, though I still have a long way to go.

I am grateful for the insight—and I wish I’d had it fifty years ago. Sigh.