Food for thought

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. Continue reading →

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.

I couldn't agree more with this take too. In fact, I prefer this take to ChatGPT's.

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 journal entry or browse some old photos and memories. – Launch Day One and log how you’ve spent your time so far for the day. Continue reading →

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?

Dear developers, be honest with us. In my usual morning rabbit hole digging, I stumbled on Flow, a Pomodoro app for the Mac. According to the website, Flow is free.

I click on the “Available on the App Store” link. Once in the App Store, I look at the app details.

Then, things start to look different. There is an “In-app purchases” tag. Scrolling down to the details, I get to see this.

Now, I go up and read the app description. 😠 The developer fooled me. I feel cheated when basic and core features are under the “Pro” plan (like a timer custom duration). It’s a stupid one-feature app, and the developer manages to put the core feature under the pro plan!! I skip the app and move on because I don’t feel the developer is honest in his approach. Yeah, I know it’s called “marketing”.

Attorney General Ashley Moody:

“We must ensure that consumers have the information needed to make informed decisions about their data privacy and security. The existing lack of transparency in app stores can create a significant risk for American citizens, and could cause their personal information to be exploited by foreign entities of concern. That is why I am calling on Apple and Google to bring more transparency to their app stores—so consumers know what products are owned or developed by nations that may pose a national security risk.”

I think this is a great idea. In challenging times, I want to know if an app is created or owned by someone who brings money into bad actor pockets. I do have internal debate about this issue from time to time, having such labeling in the App Store would certainly help in my buying or subscription decisions.

This evening, using an Apple Shortcut called Clips, I imported the « Apple in 2022 The Six Colors report card » by Six Colors into Craft. It’s a 25 000 article that I started reading on my iPad, within Craft. Then, fifteen minutes into my reading, I asked Craft assistant to summarize the Mac section. It came out with this summary: « In 2022, Apple released the M2 MacBook Air, Mac Studio, and Studio Display. Continue reading →

I recently took a taxi ride to leave the airport as Uber taxis were unavailable and plagued with longer than usual delays. We were directed to the traditional taxi lines. I couldn’t use an app on my iPhone to call a taxi instead. Boy, it was a trip in the past. The taxi driver had no Google or Waze open to know where to go, only his memory and his knowledge of the city. Continue reading →

Google’s official announcement of incoming layoffs:

I have some difficult news to share. We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices. Source: A difficult decision to set us up for the future

And comment from Gruber:

There are numerous reasons the tech industry wound up at this layoffpalooza, but I think the main reason is that the biggest companies got caught up in a game where they tried to hire everyone, whether they needed them or not, to keep talent away from competitors and keep talent away from small upstarts (or from founding their own small upstarts). These big companies were just hiring to hire, and now the jig is up. Source: Daring Fireball

Here’s my view on this. Google is not alone. Microsoft and Meta announced major layoffs too. I’ve been working in IT for over thirty years, and I have never been in such a situation where we have so much difficulty finding or hiring new people. Big companies are competing for great talent not only with each other but also draining talent from smaller companies. It’s very difficult to compete in this context.

I think what is happening is not as catastrophic as it sounds. We will see a redistribution of the workforce in the industry. A lot of talent is being freed in the process from the big ones and is now available for the smaller companies where management is more sound, and financial posture is in good shape.

Today I spent some time in Matter to read a few articles. I went to the Staff Picks section, noticed those tweets between articles and remembered Matter's decision to leave the social portion in their early days. They preferred to go the Twitter route instead. That was before the Elon Musk fiasco. As you might expect, it was a deception for me, and I preferred Matter to build its own thing instead. Continue reading →

Interesting (and sadly valid point) from Om Malik:

Regardless of age, the big elephant in the room is that we are certified addicts to attention.

It doesn’t matter whether it is Twitter, Instagram, or Mastodon. Everyone is playing to an audience. The social Internet is a performance theater praying at the altar of attention. Journalists need attention to be relevant, and experts need to signal their expertise. And others want to be influencers. For now, Twitter, Instagram, and their ilk give the biggest bang for the blast. It is why those vocal and active about Mastodon are still posting away on Musk’s Twitter.

If we didn’t care for attention, we wouldn’t be doing anything at all. We wouldn’t broadcast.

We care. I certainly care that you care about my content, my words, and my thoughts.

Instead, we would socialize privately in communication with friends and peers.

Even in this social scenario, we are broadcasting and expecting that people are listening. This is how we are programmed. This is why social networks, and the web in general, are so addictive.

Source: Why internet silos win – On my Om

This video from birchtree@mastodon.social resonated greatly with me today. Here’s why. First, someone is finally calling out something about software subscriptions that I always wanted to call out myself. Every developer seems entitled to charge a subscription for whatever reason. Matt brilliantly illustrates that some subscriptions are ok, some are borderline ok, but others are not. For applications like Notion or Craft, developers must pay costs for hosting the backend. For example, Craft’s backend seems to be on the AWS cloud. Continue reading →

Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Vi Bilägare. The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.Source: Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds | Vi Bilägare

I’m not surprised by these results. My wife always told me she wouldn’t buy a car with a touchscreen-only dashboard. Not only that is the fact that it is far less secure to use a touch screen simply because we need to look at the screen for a long period of time, diverting our attention to what is happening in front of us.

My gut feeling is that, eventually, we will return to a hybrid model when screens have to cohabit with physical dials and buttons. I’m paying close attention to what Apple will do in that space. The next generation of CarPlay that we got to see last June at the WWDC conference points in the wrong direction. But who am I to judge, you might ask!