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Overheard on 7th

I was walking to the grocery store just now with AB in the carrier. A man bumped me accidentally rushing after a woman about his age, maybe both mid-70s. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her to him.

“Where are you going?!”

Silence.

“You want to go home?”

She nods.

Gently turning her the opposite direction, “But home is this way.”

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Hello again

Red dragonfly on a wooden rail in the sun

It’s been a while! My site has fallen majorly by the wayside which both feels appropriate (see first point below) and makes me a bit sad. There’s a lot I’ve already forgotten. I want to analyze a bit more why I haven’t been posting… but that’s something I need to think a bit more about first.

A few notes to catch up on major points, and then hopefully back to posting semi-regularly.

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Shower thought on trust

The more time passes, the more I think that establishing relationships, or repairing imperfect ones, is mostly about establishing mutual trust. Friends, work colleagues, family members, anyone really. Obviously a heck of a lot of other factors impact whether or not the relationship is enjoyable. But without trust, it’s really hard to maintain most of those other factors (respect, affection, communication, mindfulness, etc).

Been thinking about this a lot lately in the context of building and maintaining happy, healthy teams, but then realized that it applies in a lot of other areas as well.

Next question: how do you establish trust? It has something to do with demonstrating vulnerability, particularly if you’re in the more “powerful” position within a relationship… (Important to remember that power is the sum total of a bajillion possible factors; age, personality, org structure, gender, personal network, race, and much more.) But that’s not a fully-baked thought, there’s definitely more to it than that.

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“When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them”

[Rewilding is] a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command-and-control.

Worth reading: “We Need To Rewild The Internet”, an essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon published two days ago on Noema Magazine’s site. Came across it via the ever-excellent Today in Tabs.

An essay about improving the internet that kicks off with an Ursula K. Le Guin quote is always going to have me from the start.

Salient bolded lessons from ecologists that technologists should adopt:

  • shifting baselines are real
  • complexity is not the enemy, it’s the goal
  • diversity is resiliance

Also, they raise an extremely important but often-neglected point that standards development organizations (SDOs) are “increasingly under the control of a few companies; so what appear to be “voluntary” standards are often the business choices of the biggest firms.”

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Related reads:

See this Noema essay by Cory Doctorow.

Pls read “The Fediverse of Things”, a blog post by Terence Eden. Can’t remember who boosted this in to my Fedi timeline last week, but thank you whoever you are.

On the topic of infrastructure bottlenecks and maintenance: “The Cloud Under The Sea” by Josh Dzieza for The Verge. It’s about the undersea cables that form a large part of the internet’s infrastructure, told through the lens of a repair ship crew’s activities before and after the 9.1-scale earthquake that devastated Japan in 2011. Like they say in the rewilding article, redundancy !== diversity. Off the back of this article, I need to read “Rethinking Repair” by professor Steven Jackson.

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Mandatory interoperability, federated “social” accounts for infrastructure and public services, levying major search engines to publicly finance key internet infrastructure, user-enabled global privacy control for all… a girl can dream.

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“‘AI’ is pretty much just shorthand for mediocre”

Just read through “You sound like a bot” by Adi Robertson in the Verge. I hadn’t really put my finger on the right word for my feelings about AI until reading that article but that’s it: it feels very mediocre.

If you want to get a rough overview of how the average frontend engineer might feel about a JavaScript framework, ChatGPT is useful enough. If you’re willing to ignore the questionable origins of the training data in use, Midjourney can be useful for rapid image generation for an early storyboard.

But as of right now, the output always feels meh, “yeah ok”. Never really surprises you with a unique perspective, or an unexpected visual language. That vibe is only becoming stronger as AI developers continue to sand off the “rough” edges on their products.

Maybe that will change. As Robertson says, “Maybe the schism between artists and AI developers will resolve, and we’ll see more tools that amplify human idiosyncrasy instead of offering a lowest-common-denominator replacement for it.”

That’s not happening any time soon. One reason is that artists have been given about 1,000 reasons to distrust AI, and I think that it is only widespread artistic use and input that could actually lead to that sort of breakthrough.

Another reason: spewing mediocrity is a pretty strong sweet spot for AI. AI is useful as a summarizer so long as you take the response with a grain of salt and follow up on sources. Case in point: Elicit seems pretty cool! Listen to this ShopTalk Show episode with Maggie Appleton for more.

Anyways, maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where AI has that human “spark”, who knows. Maybe it’ll happen next month and I’ll eat my words. Until then, as most of the content we experience online becomes more grey and sludgy, the personal will become far more valuable.

In Anil Dash’s article “The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again” for Rolling Stone late last year, he says that “the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent”. He places a lot of emphasis on the breakdown of the content silos we’ve relied on for so many years, which definitely seems like the major catalyst for the shift. But AI’s growing mediocrity will be the force that drives it home and really makes the human web stick.

(Related side point: clearly I need to read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka.)

Edit 21 Feb 2024: Maybe I should eat my words sooner? OpenAI just came out with Sora. Which is impressive! But… IDK, it still feels meh somehow? Maybe it’s just because it’s still early days, we’ll see.