Notes in 2024

  • I can’t fix my past but I can prevent it from controlling my future.

  • Do we all, eventually, become parodies of ourselves?

  • AI art is an insult to life. Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli

    Well said.

  • To all the future CEOs, it’s called Consequences. If you don’t want to get shot, don’t be a billionaire.

  • No one told me I was good enough.

  • It would seem, some people don’t even have a whole self to bring to work.

  • Look, if you’re gonna be such a whiny fuck, then maybe the Witcher 4 isn’t for you. But for me, it looks fun!

  • “People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”

  • I am both the animal, and the custodian assigned to take care of the animal. Will I?

  • LLM may be able to create a new level of horrible in the parasocial space. Think individualized greetings by your favourite celebrity.

  • Modern work fucking sucks

  • I guess I’ll add Geoffrey Hinton to the growing list of AIholes who don’t understand how human cognition works.

  • Matthew Lillard truly is phenomenal as the voice of Shaggy Rogers.

  • Backed into a corner, the white man will often start rambling about incoherent things until his perceived enemies withdrawn from sheer loss-of-will-to-live.

  • Psychological safety is the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking

  • In the best possible scenario, AI will demonstrate all the biases we codedinto it. And then people will want to return to their own-grown biases instead. This is not actually the best possible scenario.

  • Is the glass half-full, or is the water spread across two glasses?

  • If you’re only a good designer when you get to pretend that accessibility doesn’t matter, then guess what, you’re NOT a good designer. You’re a shitty one.

  • One of the burdens of life among fellow civilians is that when you enter the fugue state required for making art, you can’t really be a normal person. Go Away

  • The problem with inherited solutions is that there’s no one around anymore who understands what the solution is meant to solve, or how it even actually works anymore. Such fun. Much legacy.

  • Hazing is done by the worst kind of people.

  • Hot take: If your product or service backlog doesn’t include 50% “UX” tasks, your product is a piece of shit held together by silly string and boy-scouting.

  • Your daily reminder that Jordan Peterson is always, and have always, been an insufferable anus who doesn’t have any point to make about any subject matter.

  • The mistake you’re making, is thinking that you would be part of the resistance if Skynet ever came into existence. Based on your current behaviour, you would probably be discussing the PROs and CONs of which eye-colour to give the T-800.

  • It becomes hard to ignore the slot machines when you’re forced to live in the casino.

  • But it’s so delicious. That spigot goo — buoyed by pull-to-refreshes and pings and wily dots. Giving up attention, so seductive. How I Got My Attention Back

  • “AI artist” you say? That’s not how you spell “thief”.

  • “But, if you don’t have an army, what do you do if somebody invades you?” is an interesting premise, because really, the response ought to be, “Why would you invade us?”

  • Tech bros are ushering in the next digital dark age with infinitely generated garbage whilst thinking they’ve created a god.

  • Another daily reminder for you, that AI is garbage. A heaping dumpster fire of garbage. None of it is useful or even mediocre, it’s ALL garbage.

  • In the words of famous author Brian Sanderson, “Write it badly.” (I’ll fix it later)

  • I liked Nickelback in 2001, and I still like them.

  • “You don’t need words to think”. Duh, took you idiots long enough.

  • In both Rings of Power and Agatha All Along, I’ve really enjoyed that the character we thought might be, turned out to totally be. Didn’t do some twist for the sake of it. 10/10, loved it!

  • Parenting tends to be easy when you’re bad at it. Let that sink in.

  • I’ve decided I’m done being the bigger person. You wanna stoop to your level, let’s get fucking stopped!

  • I fucking love episode 6 of Agatha All Along! 🤣😍

  • Also, fucking ads on streaming services I already fucking pay for, get fucked. If this is how you’re going to treat your customers, then I’m going back to piracy.

  • I think it says a lot about you as a person as to which Marvel villain’s motivation you relate with the most: Thanos or Killmonger

  • Ultimately, I just want to be heard, seen, and understood.

  • What will become of our social species when we can engage in pseudo-dialogue with stochastic parrots instead of each other? How can I better hear and understand people?

  • This is a test and will be deleted asap.

    This was a test. It won’t be deleted because I don’t allow deletion, haha. Way to go Past Carlos who made a deliberate decision to withhold that.

    To delete this I’d have to log into the the DB etc and I can’t be bothered to do that.

    Well played Past Carlos.

  • The attention economy will collapse in less than a year. We, humans, can’t cope with the amount of digital garbage that large language models (LLM) will/is generate/ing.

  • Perhaps my comfort zone isn’t the best benchmark.

  • Work at large companies has a tendency to blow up, run far behind schedule, then ultimately limp past the finish line in a maimed state. Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs

  • The problem with, “do your own research,” is that you, and I, are both bad at research.

  • When you adopt complex rituals wholesale, you create spurious associations that conceal cause and effect in a cloud of correlations. It makes it harder for you to tell whether whatever productivity improvement you might perceive was caused by something you did, whether it was something secondary to the ritual – the thrill of novelty, for example – or whether it had entirely external, even random, causes. The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems

  • I think you ultimately become whoever would have saved you that time no one did. roach-works, tumblr

  • Web Standards aren’t thriving because of any magical feature or capability. They’re thriving because of agreement and compromise. The Neverending Story

  • Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death. The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out

  • Linkin Park coming out with a new singer and a new album was not on my bingo card this year. I’m so happy right now though, welcome Emily!

  • History will remember the AI bros as the people who industrialised fraud. That’s all.

  • Maintenance tends to provide a particular problem as a result. If you find a defect in one application’s generated code and it is likely that the defect has propagated to all codebases that used that version of the generator. If you want to add new features or enhancements, then this needs to be added to every codebase, or we have to cope with legacy feature sets in specific applications. This propagation of errors and misalignment on features is an expensive burden once code generation is used at scale. Is AI a Silver Bullet?, Ian Cooper

  • Again, for the tech bros. AI is all garbage and theft, nothing more. You should be ashamed of yourselves. How dare you steal the most human parts about being human?

  • OpenAI is a criminal organisation pretending to be a tech company.

  • Is there a Turing test for people who are desperately trying to convince a chat bot that it’s human? Do we have a test for that yet?

  • That an average version of something is better than a perfect version of nothing. Rach Smith’s “It’s okay to lower the bar”

  • They make you yearn for the past so that you’re too distracted to imagine a future. Tax the rich.

  • Maybe you don’t exist in the future you’re worrying about.

  • No love, however brief, is wasted. –@louisethebaker

  • Goal without deadlines = Fantasy

    Goal + Deadline = Objective

    Goal + Deadline + Plan = Intention

    Goal + Deadline + Plan + Consistent Action = Success

    Personal meaningful goal + Deadline + Plan + Consistent action = Fulfilment

  • The previous note represents a exciting, like whoa that was easy, change to Notes whereby I can now post 10,001 characters instead of the original Reboot limit of 280. As you imagine, I’m genuinely very excited about this because it also gets me closer to moving over the old markdown—I suspect this is the biggest performance culprit for /blog at the moment.

  • But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. David Cain

  • Oooh, “load bearing cognitive distortion,” how fitting.

  • Ilya Sutskever—OpenAI’s chief scientist—is woefully and dangerously ignorant.

  • So I beheld the Thousand Fingered god and thus asked it, “create a rock too heavy for you to lift, and then lift it.”

  • Why yes, Marvel, I am available for hire

  • Another day, another “I’m not the brand ambassador for Lego” so it can be ELGOS for all I care.

  • Are you ready for people cosplaying as bots online so they can say whatever garbage they want to whilst removing accountability?

  • Make the revolution wheelchair accessible!

  • I hate that we live in the timeline where finding out what actors are in a movie is considered a spoiler.

  • Funding Loop is a piece of shit fucking tool.

  • “Go big or go home.” “Nah mate, false dichotomy. I’ll go medium and then home.”

  • Your Chief Justice Honour v.2.0.25, I would again like the training data to show that I was against this practical application of large language models.

  • Are game devlogs the new podcasts?

  • “Comments are turned off” on the new awful Toys“R“Us ad tells me all I need to know. Also it’s awful.

  • Hot take: Naming isn’t hard, you’re just bad at it.

  • I think one of my fundamental problems with AI Image Generators is that it doesn’t democratise design, it homogenises it.

  • I too mourn the loss of Ironiman, 2013-2013—fucking GenImages!

  • Another day, another fucking email about updated Terms and Conditions that I’m never going to read.

  • “Unsolicited advice is criticism, always.” I need to accept this until I embody it.

  • The best 2 minutes and 14 seconds you’ll have today, you’re welcome: How to mime ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’

  • Here’s my theory, it’s actually Ryan Reynolds playing Lady Deadpool.

  • I’m about ten minutes into The Acolyte, it’s great, finally some fucking story that’s not about the Skywalkers.

  • Another day, another time of Elon Musk being the idiot oligarch that he is.

  • Well, I for one, did not have “fuckable popcorn buckets” on my bingo card this year.

  • Here I am, watching people speedrun garbage using Co-pilot.

  • Are you ready for a tech-company to start using your dead mother’s disembodied voice to sell you life insurance via unsolicited phone calls, courtesy of AI bullshit?

  • I have not watched either tech-company-presentations because I’m so tired of the AI bullshit peddling. Yes AI will be useful but not like these incel boys would like you to think.

  • Me (cosplaying as an online fitness guy): Of course, you need the bodyweight equivalent of a whale of protein per day and 100 gallons of water and you’ll see dramatic changes to your body!

  • I’d choose the bear too.

  • I do like Taylor Swift’s lyrics sometimes though, beautiful turns of phrases.

  • “Me, I’m not a Swiftie,” he says as the 18th song on her new album begins to play, “Or am I?”

  • I no longer opened books, I read out-of-date Confluence pages to learn about acronyms for bespoke enterprise systems that I didn’t care about. Ludicity

  • [I’m] just reclaiming the intellectual life that the corporate world demanded I sacrifice. Ludicity

  • Elon Musk, or as he shall forever be known from now on: Pony Stank.

  • When the machines took over, it wasn’t in the deaths we noticed it, it was in the loss of new art. The machines just repeating our most mediocre works, over and over.

  • Infinite freedom of creativity is a cage.

  • The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. Igor Stravinsky

  • Watching in horror as White Men make LLM-powered chat engines “trained” on “diverse people” so they don’t have to listen to opinions that challenges their Supremacists thinking.

  • The cybertruck was always and continues to be a joke. But also unfortunately a terrible joke.

  • Minimalism is the new consumer religion.

  • This is your yearly reminder that billionaires and millionaires should not exist.

  • There should be a moratorium on all artificial intelligence work. Its current form cannot be trusted by those who are building it.

  • “Oh, I can’t wait to get up and make everything I do into a product,” said no-one, ever.

  • In summary, Tailwind is shit because it only solves problems that it itself has created. And quite frankly I don’t need those problems.

  • There are few things I hate as much as tacit knowledge and bullshit. And those who wield the former to spout the latter.

  • I can’t wait for people to start analysing and finding meaning in the nonsense fabrications produced by AI and LLMs. It’s going to suck so much.

  • https://www.instagram.com/p/CzcnOTSvTXf/

  • Following their own standards for ChatGPT, by 2071, The Republic of England will hold a referendum to withdraw from the International Safety Regulations for Artificial Intelligence (ISRAI). They’ll call it Chexit.

  • “I am anxious.”

    You are not your emotion. You are you, and the emotion is a data source.

    Instead, try: “I am feeling anxious.”

    This creates critical space between you and the emotion. Your emotion is a cloud. You, are the sky.

  • We optimize our life for certainty. What if instead, we approached everything and everyone from a place of curiosity? Ness Labs

  • What can I do, with the resources I have, my capabilities, and the market I can study and reach, that will build a business?

  • Threads seems a bit like speed-running a dumpster fire.

  • Death waits for no man.

  • The guy selling you bullshit isn’t going to stop until he’s managed to update his factories for the new brand of bullshit.