There’s a lot of talk about how AI can get facts wrong. That’s fair, but in my experience it’s correct most of the time. Even when it’s slightly off, there’s usually some useful truth in the answer. Much more frustrating is voice assistants who can’t even begin to give an answer. Source: Manton Reece

You may be mind blown or not with ChatGPT and the like, but comparing these tools to Siri’s capabilities makes Siri look really bad. Not sure if comparing Alexa makes any difference. These assistant were leapfrogged.

Apple Entering the Journal App Landscape Soon? Hell Yeah, Count Me In!

As reported by the Wall Street Journal (since it’s paywalled, look at MacRumors report instead), Apple is supposedly working on its own journaling application. Code named « Jurassic », many interesting details are emerging from this report.

As an avid user of Dayone (read « Documenting My Numeric Life With Dayone »). , I find the prospect of having Apple entering the journaling apps landscape quite exciting. The idea of using journaling to help users with mental health issues is pretty clever. There is so much information available on our devices from which, I guess, we can infer some mental states. I’m guessing machine learning can be of some tremendous help here. Coupled with Apple’s stance on privacy, this provides a potentially very compelling story for a lot of people. Me included. Yet, some people could find this move to be crossing a line that is not acceptable for them. We will see.

The WSJ story is referring to very specific detailed aspects of the rumoured app. For example, journaling suggestions would be based on call history and iMessage conversations, and be ephemeral. After four week they would vanish from suggestions. I’m guessing this would help automate some aspects of daily journaling.

I asked this question to ChatGPT: « _Is the young generation into journal as much as older generations? _». Here is what it has to say:

_ There is no definitive answer to this question, as attitudes towards journaling can vary widely among individuals of all ages. However, some studies suggest that younger generations may be more likely to engage in forms of expressive writing such as blogging or social media updates, which could be seen as a form of journaling._

The debate might still be out if the youngsters generation is very into the writing journey, but having some part of the journaling automated would alleviate some rebarbative aspects of maintaining a journal.

Can you imagine having the journal app assembling photos, messages, phone calls, geo locations into pre populated journaling suggestions? Wow. I’m really looking forward into that one.

My wife recently told me how she was looking and considering tools like ChatGPT in her work. She considers ChatGPT like having an intern working with her. The intern will do the work she asks, but she knows she will have to give it a critical eye on the results just in case any errors creep in. If using interns in companies, why is ChatGPT not considered at the same level? Open for debate.

I like this intern analogy.

This morning, I had a heated (and respectful) debate about ChatGPT, what artificial intelligence is, what defines human intelligence, and why I believe we may be on a dangerous slope. We’re far from done with all of this. We need to define a new word to describe what is produced by ChatGPT-like bots. I think the problem stems from the fact that the “brute force” approach used by such tools makes it look intelligent for the mortal who doesn’t understand anything about computers. There is a clear distinction in my mind between what humans can produce and what ChatGPT can produce. The background behind the process is as much important to me as the actual results. Otherwise, we are doomed.

Manuel Moreale writes on his blog:

I dislike the concept of editing old content on personal sites. And the motivation is related to my love for simple, straight to the point, chronologically organised personal blogs. I believe a personal blog can and should be a representation of who you are at different points in time. We change, we grow and our thoughts and ideas grow and change with us. And it’s important to have testament of that. If I change my mind on something and I go back end edit my post from 4 years ago, there’s no way for you to see and be aware of that change. And that’s a shame. Source: Thoughts on an unpolished note – Manu

This post made me think about the process I’m currently going through with my move from WordPress to Ghost. I’m deleting old content. In fact, as of today, I deleted about 60% of my old posts. Why? Because I feel that many posts are too time-sensitive to make sense today. They have little value to me now (and probably for the rest of the planet). I decided to keep only worthy articles that can endure the passing of time and stay relevant. My blog here, the “blog.” part of blog.numericcitizen.me better fits this purpose of expressing all sort of more or less worthy thoughts. There, I don’t care too much. And this is where I’m with Manuel. It’s all about sharing “thoughts”. Nothing more, nothing less.

Spending Most of Your Life Running a Blog

Kottke.org turns 25. It’s quite a remarkable journey. I didn’t know about this website until recently. I’m not a frequent reader of it, although I spent quite some time today on it to better get the gist of it. Yet, I’m barely sure how to pronounce it. But I’m quite impressed to see someone’s life spent running a blog and getting paid for it.

I’ve been into computer tech since I was a teenager. I’m 55 now. I learned quite a lot from writing software, doing digital photography, followed Apple’s story with avid attention. My creativity is at its best with computers. I even found my career by simply being exposed to computers.

For some reason, I didn’t know much about website hosting back then, even less about blogs. I didn’t pay attention, I guess. It’s like being a writer who didn’t know we could write books. This sounds strange.

I wish I had a blog for this long. It’s not the first time that I have written this thought. But Kottke.org turning 25 reminds me that I wish I were this guy. Can you imagine having written 40 000 posts? I don’t know if we can still read them all (it appears we can). You won’t find all my posted content since I first wrote my first post. And I keep deleting stuff while moving from one place to another because I think it makes no sense to keep all that.

Bravo to Kottke.org.

For those who watched the Severance series on Apple TV+: sometimes I feel like those guys staring at their screen trying to manipulate numbers… don’t you have this feeling too, that our job is a string of numbers manipulation all day long?