Not everyone shares your priorities.

There’s a nifty rhetorical jujutsu I have noticed among the set of tech-types who like to shout online about their pet causes. It goes something like this… Anyone who isn’t as outraged about their pet cause as they are is naïve and stupid. But if you suggest that maybe not everyone shares their priorities or that other people might have valid reasons for holding a different point of view, it’s you who is suggesting that people are too naïve or dumb to understand or care about the issue.

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I never really needed flying cars and tbh those ads for them in the back of Popular Mechanics always seemed pretty scammy, but I guess I had hoped that by this point we would have mastered the science of loading tissues into the box so a bunch don’t come out in a wad when you try to grab the first one.


Figuring out how to get people to pay you for the thing you make is hard.

🔗 Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business? - TPM – Talking Points Memo: This chart which I just made shows the exact dollar amounts TPM brought in over the previous eight years through programmatic or “third party” advertising. As I think is pretty clear, if this is your business, you’re dead. You don’t have a business. I’m not going to paste the chart in question into my post here, but I’ll describe it.

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Nearly fourteen years into my parenting career and I still have not worked out an effective counter-strategy to the parent who asks if my kid can hang out with theirs and then mentions only after I’ve said yes that they meant I’m hosting the kids.


Initial thoughts on Dune 2

Dune: Part 2 certainly is a loud movie. I guess I am glad that I saw it in theater but if I were to watch it again—and the jury is still decidedly out on that—it would be at home, where I think the experience might feel less like an assault. The morning after going to see the film, I am still trying to decide what I think about it. It is an overwhelming spectacle but I am still unconvinced that it is a good movie.

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Looking out the coffee shop window toward the intersection of Main St and Federal St

Black and white cat on a rug in front of a piano

🔗 Is GenAI’s Impact on Productivity Overblown?:

Leaders should consider where this technology actually helps and resist the urge to integrate it into every job and task throughout the organization. To do this, they need to understand two core problems of LLMs that are critical to their medium- and long-term business implications: 1) Its persistent ability to produce convincing falsities and 2) the likely long-term negative effects of using LLMs on employees and internal processes.

This article lines up quite closely with my experience thus far as a participant in an LLM pilot at work.

The “McKinsey said it, so it must be true” effect is very real, and I still continue to mostly encounter suggested LLM use cases that are entirely about what someone thinks these tools might do based on their imaginings from watching science fiction, rather than on what the tools are actually capable of doing.


Stop blaming the tool for your inability or unwillingness to manage it properly.

🔗 It’s Time To Give Up On Email - The Atlantic: Also in your inbox: All of the email you get that is, you know, actually related to your job, your interests, or your personal life. Forget reading or responding; even just finding those messages amid the junk can be a chore. Email has felt overwhelming for a long time now, with all of its spam and scams and discount codes.

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Science fiction and the myth of technological progress

I was thinking the other day about a few science fiction books that I finished recently. They were pretty good, although they all fall more toward the “hard SF” end of the spectrum than most of the stuff I tend to read. That got me thinking about the whole notion of Hard SF, which I generally find to be a made-up concept invented by a certain subset of nerds (mostly white dudes) to help themselves feel superior about the particular brand of fantasy they prefer.

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omg.social greenfield.social another weblog yet another weblog