ChiMan

This gets to the heart of why we have copyrights. They’re not to make writers rich. They’re to make us all rich with the content they produce.

The modern abuse of copyrights by the likes of Disney does not negate this otherwise wonderful institution.

Half the value of a todo app lies in the act of writing tasks down in the first place, and the other half lies in reading, revisiting, and revising them. In this, a .txt file works as well as anything, and is much cheaper. For me, a proud skinflint, the low cost has of a .txt file a side effect: I’m tickled to use it, reinforcing the memory that any todo app is meant to create.

Seems like a market has emerged for a LinkedIn-like service that does everything LinkedIn does, minus the public posts. Resumes and direct messages only.

The point is not to delegate. It’s to augment.

AI performs best in non-deterministic environments where highly extensive if slightly imperfect (or even hallucinatory) knowledge works just fine. When mapped onto today’s jobs, the fit feels less natural for high-level engineering than for “looser” tasks that would do well to be armed with wider knowledge. In other words, it seems like AI—or AI-armed humans—are more squarely aimed at executives.

Seems possible that one possible unintended consequence of AI could be a rebirth of the Web as something closer to what we knew. Because why use search at all for general inquiry when AI can satisfy much of that?

More critically, it’s not hard to imagine that, with AI-boosted boosted coding, a thousand bespoke search engines and other platforms being just around the corner, radically changing the economics of platform lock-in. When you can build your own version of Google Search with the help of AI and do the same with social media or any other centralizing Internet force, then platforms cease to be platforms at all. With AI, the challenges of self-hosting could become quite manageable as well. And while we’re at it, some version of the same, individual-centered computing economics on your own devices seems possible.

In these senses, it’s quite possible that Jobs’s vision of computing as extensions of individuals rather than individuals being extensions of computing is again at hand, with the magic of self-curated order from a chaotic Net not far behind.

The speed alone is sufficient for a local-first approach. The latency of any cloud software I’ve ever used is like constant sand in the gears of thinking. Although taking supplements that slow my thinking—essentially natural downers—do improve my experience with such software, the improved experience comes at the expense of IQ. Basically, you need to be a little slow and dumb for the software to work as intended.

This is nuts. Computers are supposed to enhance and enable thinking, not make you stupid. In this sense, cloud software is possibly the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the paying, computer-using public.

For the love of God, please bring back my late 1990s and early 2000s brain-boosting computer experience.

The problem with that solution is that it would work too well, making it unattractive to lawmakers who need the issue to maintain their careers.

Major free-rider problem, this is—one, however, that property rights could protect against: You own your data. If the OpenAIs of the world want to ingest your data, they pay you for it.

Uses in AC and clothing seem like obvious use cases.

The more fundamental question is: If mass layoffs are so necessary, then who’s responsible for the unnecessary mass hiring? In any mass layoff, fire that person first. Get to the root of the problem.

With AI, I'd say white collar work should become less like factory work. Generative AI is non-deterministic, the opposite of factory work.

In four years, they’ll revisit the complexity. Facts may become simpler then.

Best drug suite for productivity: Copious running and moderate weights and calisthenics; moderate coffee, including occasional midday coffee with L-theanine; a protein-rich diet with minimal sugar and carbs generally; in bed by 9:30. If your job doesn’t allow enough time for these minimal investments in your productivity, then get a different job. Don’t waste your life working for fools, or competing with them.

In other words, the parents protect the kid from real life. No thanks.

The way to see this is that we’re all individual contributors, from the janitor to the CEO. Because if you’re not an individual, then what are you? And if you’re not contributing, then what are you doing there? When you manage a project or team, you’re just individually contributing in a different (though usually overlapping) way.

Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t. So the way you contribute is, in general, by applying the hard-won lessons gleaned from your time on the brain-speed freeway while letting others, whose brains naturally run faster, either because of youth or disposition, do the fast-brain work.

Personally, I don’t generally enjoy managing in part because brain speed, which I value, seems to slow further because of the nature of manager or executive work. When I’ve gotten a taste of management and spent time on calls with other managers and executives, I was shocked to discover how slowly (and often haphazardly) they thought through problems that were quite understandable in an instant or two spent alone. They were all very smart people, and yet the managing—or, more likely, the group settings of meetings and calls—seemed to trap their mind, eventually habitually, in a socially constructed box from which they couldn’t escape.

The moral of the story: Don’t quit your job unless you have an employment contract for another one or if you have a reliable, growing side hustle that generates enough income to live on. Real life bites hard, and $80k is peanuts.

I think we can expect sophisticated criminals to start using AI to rewrite their correspondence.

Any information asymmetry will produce incentives to exploit Brandolini’s law. If you pay attention, you will begin to notice frequent examples.

Sitting for 20 minutes is about all I can bear. A little voice in my head says to get up and move after that. I don’t mix in standing; I just make an excuse to go to the printer. I’ll stop feeling guilty because of it.

Not sure a better stimulus for work has ever been discovered or invented. If times are tough, maybe it’s because there wasn’t enough free coffee.

Read the court cases, where Team Trump had dozens of opportunities to present their evidence and were thrown out of court—dozens of times.

The same can be said of spreadsheets. No, they’re not for “calculating.” They’re for mapping your problem so you understand it. The calculations just come along for the ride.

Finland is part of NATO. The US and Canada should collaborate with it too. Sharing knowledge is a perfect way for European NATO allies to carry more of the collective defense burden.

Funny how they don’t mention the time your employer doesn’t get from you while you commute.

I returned to the office mid-Covid in part because, when remote, I was working too hard at home. At the office, I was able to waste time during the day shooting the breeze with the few other folks there, and closing my laptop for my drive home reduced the chance of it being open at 10 pm.

Whenever I hear executives go off about return to office, I know they’re probably lazy and don’t understand what makes their companies tick: self-driven work.

It’s a law of managerial capitalism that serious success at any firm will first create a culture of executives and managers who compete for company teats and later a company of vultures, pecking at the carcass of the mother the executives and managers drained of life. So if you want interesting work in a healthy environment, you might look for struggling firms that want to improve their fortunes.

Sounds like sports are good for kids, and contact sports are good for boys. Who knew?

Call your mom.

Tokyo is jam-packed with ads and loads of neon. When I lived there, I loved the visual effect. It brought the city to life and visually reaffirmed the economic bedrock of any modern city: Commerce.

Sounds like yet another manifestation of the fake rationality that was so popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We already have a calendar that is universally understood and works perfectly well for any day-tracking problem we throw at it.