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.
\nNow if I would have already been fluent in Power Query, I could have built it in even less time. The advantage Copilot gave me was to tell me, step by step, how to build it. It allowed me to build what I needed without hours of Power Query training–and it was able to solve problems on the fly in plain language. So I built what needed to be built and learned what I needed to know about Power Query.
\nThis is nothing to sniff at. For an accounting department that is already fairly behind the times technologically, this will help us improve processes much more quickly. I’ve already built a few other tools like this with the help of AI that have saved our department a chunk of time.
\nListen, here’s the situation: my one marketable skill is accounting. If I’m going to make a decent living for my family, that’s the field I will work in until I retire in fifteen years or so. AI is no longer avoidable in companies of any size. Could I go out in a blaze of refusenik glory? Sure. Then what? I still have a mortgage and the need for health care. Alternatively, I could use Copilot to help my fellow accountants get out of some drudgerous work and maybe do something more worth their time. I don’t hold that out as a virtue; it is merely making the best of the situation.
\nI do not and will not use AI for any writing that means something to me. If I post something eye-rollingly tedious about animism, blame me not the robot. This is not machine work.
\nI just checked with the robot: drudgerous is not a proper English word. That’s how you know this is all me.
\nI have no advice for you. I am sitting here at the intersection of the demands of real life and my deeply Luddite worldview. I have drawn lines where it makes sense to me. There is, however, no purity to be found.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-22T10:39:01-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/05/22/me-and-the-robot.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/03/11/oliver-burkeman-on-the-reality.html", "content_html": "Oliver Burkeman on the reality distorting effects of the attention economy:
\n\n\nAs 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.”
\n
Four Thousand Weeks p. 96-97
\n", "date_published": "2022-03-11T09:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/03/11/oliver-burkeman-on-the-reality.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/02/18/dan-olsons-video-line-goes.html", "content_html": "Dan Olson’s video “Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs” is an excellent critique of crypto generally and NFTs in particular. It is well worth its two-hour runtime. The crypto economy, he argues, is just replacing a bad system with a worse one. NFTs represent another step toward the financialization of everything.
\nWhat I really appreciate about the video, though, is the context in which he places the crypto phenomenon. The true believers, he says, are those who saw the enormous clusterfuck of the Great Recession and turned against the financial system - not in order to liberate people from the power of finance but in order to take Wall Street’s power for themselves. To “be the boot.” History feels like it is narrowing and the crypto evangelists intend to grab what they can while they can.
\nHe concludes:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-02-18T08:59:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/02/18/dan-olsons-video-line-goes.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/02/16/looking-for-writing-app-recommendations.html", "title": "Looking for writing app recommendations", "content_html": "Our systems are breaking or broken, straining under neglect or sabotage, and our leaders seem, at best, complacent, willing to coast out the collapse. We need something better. But a system that turns everyone into petty digital landlords, that distills all interaction into transaction, that determines the value of something by how sellable it is and whether or not it can be gambled on as a fractional token sold by a micro-auction - that’s not it.
\n
I’m having a hard time finding something that meets all my needs. I’m looking for a writing app that:
\nFrom what I can tell, Ulysses, Obsidian, and ia Writer do not have web apps. Craft does not appear integrate with micro.blog. I’d really love to be able to do all my writing and note-taking in one synced application but on whatever device I’m using at the time. Of the ones I mentioned, I really like Ulysses but I can’t use it on my work computer.
\nI am grateful for any recommendations.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-16T12:25:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/02/16/looking-for-writing-app-recommendations.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/02/10/im-on-a-sixteen-day.html", "content_html": "I’m on a sixteen day streak with Day One. I’ve never been able to maintain a daily journaling habit but Day One is helping me do that. I had never heard of it before I saw several people on Micro.Blog talking about it, so thanks y’all.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-10T23:14:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/02/10/im-on-a-sixteen-day.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/02/09/this-is-an-excellent-video.html", "content_html": "This is an excellent video on how Amazon can afford to offer free shipping to Prime members. Basically, it hides the cost of shipping by raising prices across the internet. And that, folks, is monopoly power.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-09T12:25:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/02/09/this-is-an-excellent-video.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/02/01/from-the-revenge-of-analog.html", "content_html": "From The Revenge of Analog by David Sax, on the story of digital progress:
\n\n\nOur world would be successively rendered into bits and bytes, one program at a time, until we reached a state of digital utopia, or the Terminators came for us.
\n
\n\nThe Revenge of Analog presents a different narrative, however. It shows that the progress of technological innovation isn’t a story of a slow match from good to better to best; it’s a series of trials that helps us understand who we are and how we operate.
\n
This brings to mind an analogy to evolution by natural selection. It’s often misunderstood that evolution represents a sort of upward progress to perfection. The reality is that it is progress toward reproductive fitness, integrating whatever allows a species to propagate. An evolved species is not ideal in every way. Rather, in some ways it may be worse off than its earlier iterations. (See Breath by James Nestor for examples of how our evolutionary adaptations have actually devolved our breathing functions.)
\nTechnology evolves, but its latest iteration may not be ideal in every way - may be worse in some important ways. This is where human judgement about the purposes of life and technology must engage, refusing to allow ourselves and our world to become slaves to our technology.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-01T09:33:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/02/01/from-the-revenge-of-analog.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/01/25/the-irs-will-require-you.html", "content_html": "The IRS will require you to use ID.me to access your taxes online. Last year, ID.me was locking people out of their unemployment benefits due to facial recognition failures. I had to set up an ID.me account to opt out of the child tax credit advance payments and it was indeed a cumbersome, annoying process. What really bothered me, though, was giving so much critical information to a third party contractor.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-25T15:27:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/01/25/the-irs-will-require-you.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2021/12/28/fascinating-piece-by-nicholas-carr.html", "content_html": "Fascinating piece by Nicholas Carr on GPT-3, an AI tool for generating text. It has been fed mountains of human-written text and, in turn, has generated some startling text of its own. Carr:
\nIt is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by its interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a way, communing with the dead.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-28T17:07:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2021/12/28/fascinating-piece-by-nicholas-carr.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2021/12/28/when-it-comes-to-crypto.html", "content_html": "When it comes to crypto assets, I lean skeptical but I hold that opinion loosely - since I won’t be investing in them I don’t have sufficient motivation to spend time learning more. I’m a CPA so I have some professional interest in it as a financial instrument. On the other hand, I have basically zero understanding of the technology. In any case, Stephen Diehl has written some good, skeptical commentary. I find this argument particularly compelling:
\nIf there is any innovation in crypto assets it’s not in software engineering, but in financial engineering. We’ve created a new financial product like an option contract on a startup potentially building something real, but in case they don’t you can always exercise it early by simply dumping the stock on the public to cash out completely untethered to the company’s success. You don’t need to file a S-1 or have a coherent prospectus about attracting customers or business or revenue. Hell, the company doesn’t even have to have a business model at all, and in fact the best performing crypto assets are the ones that literally don’t do anything at all. They just need to tell a good story.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-28T11:47:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2021/12/28/when-it-comes-to-crypto.html", "tags": ["Technology"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2021/12/17/ive-been-reading-a-bit.html", "content_html": "I’ve been reading a bit about surveillance capitalism (Privacy is Power and a couple hundred pages thus far of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) so I’ve been trying to disentangle myself from some of the worst offenders. My Facebook account was permanently deleted a few days ago. I’ve switched email from Gmail to ProtonMail. I’ve moved all my files from Google drive to Dropbox. Here’s where my question comes in: Dropbox is fine but I would like something privacy-focused with the ability to edit documents on my iPhone (as with the Google apps). Is anyone aware of something like that?
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-17T21:02:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2021/12/17/ive-been-reading-a-bit.html", "tags": ["Technology"] } ] }