Well the web filter must have finally switched the categorization of micro.blog to social networking because it’s blocked on my work laptop now. Boooo!
Posts in: technology
I made the same resolution a few weeks ago. I’m getting better at trusting that inner voice.
PSA: I will post nothing further about AGI/machine learning. I will read nothing further on the topic (and am purging my RSS feed accordingly). I have other and better things on my mind and heart.
One of my epiphanies when I left Big Tech social media in 2020 was how the timeline had come to dominate my mind. The (little) writing I was doing at the time was dictated by the topics discussed in my timeline. Freedom from the timeline meant freeing my mind, in some small way. Writing for engagement can feel, in the moment, like writing about the most burning issues of the day–and to some degree it is. At the same time, writing for engagement is self-limiting. “Hot takes” feel a bit less hot when you realize you’re only thinking about those things because the timeline told you to. The best way to gain perspective is by being irrelevant.
To repurpose a familiar line: be not conformed to technology, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.
My greatest professional achievement is never having created a LinkedIn account.
Me and the robot
Today in letting the machines talk to the machines: Copilot just helped me build a process that will convert a report from our new payroll system into a GL import file. It took me 90 minutes to build the tool and accompanying procedures. The process itself will require two minutes of work on the part of the end user–a huge time savings compared to doing this conversion manually. Now if I would have already been fluent in Power Query, I could have built it in even less time.
I have no idea if the internet is already over, but this is a glorious essay. Via @joshua
Douglas Rushkoff was invited to speak to a group of tech billionaires about the future of technology, only to find out that what they were really interested in was how to survive a collapse of their own making. He’s written a book about it. /via Cory Doctorow
Interesting page on permacomputing, a.k.a., “radically sustainable computing.” Plenty of links. This is way out of my league but some of you may find it valuable.
Oliver Burkeman on the reality distorting effects of the attention economy:
As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling - instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful - it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things - and all of these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well. If social media convinces you, for example, that violent crime is a far bigger problem in your city than it really is, you might find yourself walking the streets with unwarranted fear, staying home instead of venturing out, and avoiding interactions with strangers - and voting for a demagogue with a tough-on-crime platform. If all you ever see of your ideological opponents online is their very worst behavior, you’re liable to assume that even family members who differ from your politically must be similarly, irredeemably bad, making relationships with them hard to maintain. So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. In the words of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want.”
Four Thousand Weeks p. 96-97