Weeknotes

📺 Fresh off of our weeklong stay in chilly Albuquerque, I was very happy to have been able to spend Monday doing absolutely nothing. It was a bank holiday here in the States, and my wife was traveling on business, so there was no one around to keep me from watching a lot of TV.

I started evaluating my subscriptions and the big one on the block is Adobe Creative Cloud. I love it, but it is very pricy. There seem to be decent alternatives to all the apps and features I use, but I need to take them all out for a test drive. It’ll take me some time.

⌨️ I broke down and replaced my cheap MacAlly keyboard with the (slightly more expensive) Keychron Q3 Max keyboard with Gateron Jupiter Brown switches. It is so much better!

🧠 I signed up for the Murmel free trial.^[2] After only a few days, I’ve already had the experience of finding something that I might otherwise have missed: the “What vegetable are you?” personality test.^[3] I’m not convinced this is something I’ll be willing to pay for, but we’ll see. In case you’re wondering, I am broccoli.

🦃 I created a new avatar to celebrate the Thanksgiving Day season on the socials.^[4]

Watching

🇬🇧 Finished watching season 2 of The Diplomat, which is so wildly implausible it’s silly, but it’s fun to watch. Will definitely hang out for season 3.

✡️ I binge-watched season 1 of Nobody Wants This and what can I say? I’m a sucker for romantic comedy. And I was ROFL for episode 4!

Started watching the final half-season of Yellowstone. Now that they’ve killed off (REDACTED) they can get on with putting this show out to pasture for good. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been great, but we’re just about done here.

Listening

“Early Hours (DJ Mix)” by OddKidOut (Apple Music)

Reading

🧠 In a recent issue of his e-mail newletter, Corey Quinn wrote that Amazon “Q is a perfect representation of Amazon’s severe case of GenAI Shiny Object Syndrome, which comes at the expense of distracting Amazon from the care and feeding of its other products.” This is happening all over. Everyone I talk to, both in tech and in other industries, are falling all over themselves with FOMO frenzy trying to figure out how to apply GenAI to, well, everything. It’s crazy.

👕 Side note: Corey’s 2024 fund raiser for 826 National is an “AI faux gras” t-shirt. I ordered one, which I plan to wear at re:Invent in a couple weeks.

☁️ There could be a silver lining to RFK's crazy. There are lots of drugs and treatments available in other countries that are bogged down in FDA bureaucracy. It’d be nice if some of those could be made available here.^[5]

💀 “The Death of Critical Thinking Will Kill Us Long Before AI.” by Joan Westenberg

🍷 Drops of God, Vol. 29 by Tadashi Agi

🧠 “OpenAI scientist Noam Brown stuns TED AI Conference: ’20 seconds of thinking worth 100,000x more data’” by Michael Nuñez (Venture Beat)

A Little Rant

🔮 I get nervous when people say things like “We must prepare students for AI Future” because it reminds me of similar calls to action like “everyone should learn to code” and “STEM for all!” Maybe we need more engineers and mathematicians and computer scientists, but we DO NOT need every kid to become an engineer or mathematician or computer scientist. Now more than ever we also need poets and painters and historians and journalists. Yes, we all need to be conversant and skilled enough in using computers and in cybersecurity to survive in the modern world, just as we need basic numeracy and literacy.

Peace, y’all.