The best UI, the ultimate interface, is the one that you don’t see.

DHH wrote “In defence of the office”: I salute Apple, for example, for sticking to their in-person culture now that the pandemic is long gone. They’re making that choice knowing that some, talented portion of their workforce will leave as a consequence, yet have the confidence that others will … read more

Hot AI Summer (or, my practical uses for AI generators)

This is the sort of empowering interaction I love to experience with these new technologies: I’m not being replaced, I’m getting help, much in the way spellcheck and grammar checks in word processors have been doing for decades.

Interesting parallel here with spell checkers and generative AI. At what point the help we’re getting becomes troubling or questionable? The same goes in real life. Suppose there is something that needs your attention in your house, and a fix is required. Either you know from the get-go what to do and fix it yourself, either you go o YouTube and find a visual guide on how to fix it, or you call someone to your house to fix it for you. What’s wrong with the latter approach?

If there is something that generative AI brings to the table is the inevitable discussion in society of what is the human touch and when is asking for help crosses the lines and what those lines are.

Wait what? Even millennials don’t like algorithms 

I don’t fight the future — we need all the help — but as someone who has made the transition from no technology to some technology to always technology — no matter what I do, there is a tiny bit of me that is still holding on to the analog world.

Om Malik is probably my age. And I feel the same all the time. I know what it was like before the Internet. I prefer chronological over algorithmic timelines. I enjoy human curation. I certainly remember and value the “human touch”.

So that sales pitch of “it’s just a coffee per month” really doesn’t hold water when you think that most people will subscribe to multiple services. Source: It Only Costs a Coffee per Month - Kev Quirk

This is why I maintain a spreadsheet of my monthly (and yearly) spending. And frankly, even with my recent subscriptions cleanup, you wouldn’t want to know my monthly spending on apps and services. Experimenting is not a free ride. Far from it.

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.

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 … read more

Percentage of the moment: 4%
https://9to5mac.com/2023/04/04/4-percent-of-teens-use-vr-apple-headset-challenges/

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 … read more

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.

[@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.

It’s the week-end in a few hours, consider those suggestions by Shawn Blanc: A few alternative things you can do when you’re bored (instead of scrolling social media) Here are a few alternatives to what I call the “Just Checks”. – Scroll through your Day One timeline and read a previous … read more

Writing Shouldn’t Be Hard

We now live in a world of multimodal communications, and how we communicate is changing. The omnipresence of devices in our lives — smartphones to computers, means most of our conversations and communications happen through text. We have replaced so much of our face-to-face interaction with the written word. Teams, Slack and Discords, are part of our daily lives now. As the volume of text in our lives increases, we need tools that help facilitate and perhaps improve how we write and how fast we write.

Am I alone in having the feeling that people no longer read?