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.
2010 - “Before printing this email, think environment”. 2023 - “Before using ChatGPT, just think.”
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.
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?
So, in a nutshell: Obsidian is a Markdown text editor on steroids with a fancy plugin ecosystem. Did I miss something?
If you can talk about it, explain it, even write about it, then I guess you can call yourself knowledgeable about it. Thought of the moment.
Daniel Jalkut on AI-based art and “prose”
Like everybody else, I was fascinated by AI art and prose. But I’m bored by it already. Why? Because it’s obviously not human. I like human things. Little quirks that make us laugh and cringe. That’s the beauty of life. AI is amazing, but it’s not human.
I don’t think that I’m bored yet, but I certainly feel the same about human-based creations. I’ll never be bored and always be fascinated by it.
I couldn't agree more with this take too. In fact, I prefer this take to ChatGPT's.[@numericcitizen](https://micro.blog/numericcitizen) It's a good formal summary of the pros and cons of social networks, written by a textual robot capable of being unintentionally harassing itself...
So this is how the replies appear on micro.blog, a brilliant platform designed by [@manton](https://micro.blog/manton), both uncluttered and optimized for blogging, which seeks through a constrained design to avoid as best as possible the flaws mentioned by ChatGPT.