This 👇🏻

The most prolific thinkers aren’t thinking with external brains. If you’re a photographer, take more pictures. If you’re a writer, produce more text. The tools will work themselves out. Source: RIP: The External 🧠

I don’t really like the idea of a “second brain”. My brain, the only one that I got, already requires all my energy. Why bother creating another “brain”?

Tweets on Twitter use to be 140 characters max. Later it was increased to 280 characters. Now, apparently, you can post a note with a maximum of 2500 characters. Now, looking at MacRumors or similar sites, it seems we get shorter and shorter articles, almost the size of a note on Twitter. Isn’t it … read more

Due to Canada’s forest fires and easterly winds, bad air quality is returning to my town for the next few days. With all the bad climate-related news coming up from everywhere on Earth, trying to understand what is happening is essential, so we can better adapt our lifestyle. I like to read … read more

In my mind, every new platforms should start from 0 user base. Meta, just to name that one, have a monopoly of social graph. This is anti-competitive. Should Bluesky sue Meta? Should the open source community sue Meta? Yes. And yes. Remember Microsoft and Internet Explorer back in the days? Remember … read more

Thought of the day: blog readers might not like negativity-tinted post or being told the truth they don’t want to read. I published my observations and opinion regarding our hyper-dependency on being connected all the time, so much that we don’t really connect in-person anymore. A few subscribers unsubscribed. 😒 Or maybe they just agree with my take and are looking for ways to regain more time in-person by unsubscribing from my blog? 😂

I guess there is always a positive side of an event. 🙏🏻

Hunters are not allowed to use drones to locate their prey. It is seen as an anti-competitive measure or an unfair practice. While “real” hunters who chase their future prey for fun aren’t allowed drone usage, what about those who hunt to eat meat because it is their way of living? Is it still … read more

Thought of the moment: to those who think that AI will cause human extinction, we must fight against it, is the wrong way to tackle the debate. It is borderline demagoguery.

Warning: it’s not about the Apple Vision Pro headset, which many people think will bring a touch of a dystopian future to our life. Something else more serious will. I read this week somewhere that, to get climate back into the normality zone🌪️ to ensure the sustainability of the human race … read more

Here’s a short “life at the office” story. Our VP of sales never stops bragging about how ChatGPT is cool and how it works for him for many use cases. I’m uncomfortable with his stance on ChatGPT & generative AI in general. I think about it each time he sends an email that was obviously created with ChatGPT.

Why is it a problem for me? Who am I to judge him and his “new way of working”? I think I have found the root cause.

First, it’s not the results of his work. It’s the work of something else. He takes something “as is” without adding any value, any personal opinion, or a personal twist. Second, the fundamental problem is that he works in IT but is not a tech guy. He is a salesperson. He’s the type of guy who surfs on buzzwords a lot. Using ChatGPT makes him circumvent his lack of confidence because of a lack of IT knowledge and culture. He probably feels better and more “into the game” like most of my other colleagues, who studied computer science before getting to work in IT.

How many more people lack my colleague do the same, for the same reason?

What an intense morning. I learned about the existence of iTelescope, thanks to this blog post from Christopher Curtis, a service where you can rent astronomical observation time from the comfort of your home. I read about the Eternal Recurrence, thanks to a post from Gr36. I would be ok with the … read more

Should I care if my content is used to train AI models? How is it different than someone who uses part of my content in a citation to write a linkpost, for example? Is it ok for a portion of my content to be used elsewhere as opposed to the full content? Should I be able to opt out of any AI … read more

I had a discussion about AI yesterday with my wife. She came back from a two-day conference in Toronto. One of the sessions was about the place of AI in society and how it is time to engage in promoting and organizing some AI regulations. The more I read and learn about AI capabilities as exposed in … read more

Being full of projects is being alive ™

Thought: read-later services should be called read-never because, for me, most of the time, I rarely come back to read my saved articles.

Thought: Read-later services or applications are a consequence of too much content availability and a lack of time for consuming that content.

I wanted to publish my long post about Inoreader this weekend so much, but it’s not ready yet. Tomorrow it’s probably the day. Being patient and knowing when something is not ready is a virtue of the writer.

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”.