Month: March 2023

I watched All Quiet on the Western Front this weekend. It picked up several awards and was adapted from a novel I’ve actually read so I had some anticipation built up.

The visual depictions were stark and didn’t shy away from gory, grimy violence as so many war movies do. It wasn’t a glorification of war. The protagonist is no Rambo rampaging across battlefields, nor is he an antihero—he is a teenager swept up by circumstances and events around him. The movie was well shot, alternating between closeups and wide-angle shots with good flow, and the musical score has a few numbers that really add to the ominous tone of particular moments. I watched with the original German audio and read subtitles. I cannot speak to the viewing experience of watching and listening to a dubbed version, but as a rule I find that distracting and so choose to read the dialogue instead.

It was a very good movie, but not a great one. The film failed to capture the final measure of the message conveyed by the novel. Fatalism abounds, yes, but the screenwriter opted for extra drama by altering the chronology into a race against time for survival as the armistice approached. The movie took events to within a few minutes of the end of the war. This was unnecessary and cheapened the narrative by making it shallower. This decision made the movie more like The Alamo or Titanic where you already know the ending but still spend most of the movie hoping that somehow it will end differently. This is the easier thing to do and I understand that it attracts a broader audience. That said, the most poignant moment of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front is the novel’s final image and the existential void that it manifests. Reading those paragraphs left me feeling hollow, a lessened version of the hollowness the protagonist felt (and not only for himself, but for his entire generation). Watching the movie didn’t do that. It stopped short, and that was a terrible shame.

ChatGPT has garnered a lot of attention since it was released for public use. Lots of people have begun experimenting with it to test its capabilities and see how it might augment their efforts. There have even been many posts and articles written about how to use ChatGPT that were written using ChatGPT. I have had multiple conversations with people considering buying content sites. My advice has been the same—don’t do it. The content game has changed forever and now is probably not the time for new entrants.

I have also tried a few prompts myself. It can give you meal ideas and recipes. It can help you create an exercise program. It can take prose that was written by one author and rewrite that prose in the (passable) style of another author. I’m sure it can do much more, but those are some of the things I’ve done with it thus far with my own limited creativity. It also makes some odd errors when asked for specific details. It will provide a link to a YouTube video but get the name of the creator incorrect. It will compile a list of academic studies on a particular subject, complete with authors and short summaries, but then you will find that those studies aren’t real. There may have been similar studies, but not the ones listed. ChatGPT does similar things when asked to provide biographical information, getting one’s alma mater incorrect or what have you.

I don’t know what to think about the program at this point. It, along with the neural network technology that underpins it, is sure to change many things. New business models will emerge. Old business models will falter. But the whole enterprise is something of a black box, and I’m not technical enough to parse the details of how the neural networks actually function. That gives me pause as to the larger implications but simultaneously won’t prevent me from trying to use the tool to improve my work.

This weekend saw the biannual time change for Daylight Saving Time. With that came the normal complaints asking why Daylight Saving Time is even a thing. I’m going to be a legal nerd this week and discuss a quirk in the way the law is written, a quirk that means there would actually need to be an act of Congress in order to make Daylight Saving Time permanent.

The applicable law is found at 15 U.S.C. § 260a. It contains a great deal of legalese, but in layman’s terms the main thrust is that from the second Sunday in March until the first Sunday in November time is adjusted forward for an hour. The way existing law is written, a state can exempt itself from Daylight Saving Time—Arizona and Hawaii currently do so—but it is not possible for a state to adopt permanent Daylight Saving Time due to an express preemption section in the statute. I’m not going to perform a deep dive into the legislative history of the provision to try to discern whether this one-way ratchet was intentional or not but I suspect it probably was since the goal of legislation around time throughout American history has been increasing uniformity.

This short post isn’t a position piece and my own work schedule means I have much more control over the amount of daylight to which I am exposed than most people (regardless of the time or season). It is instead merely an explainer on why things are the way they are.

I have faced a number of adjustments to my normal work routine this week. During the entirety of my work-from-home experience, I have been alone in that home. That comes with its own challenges, but being interrupted by other people in the same physical space is not among them. Sure, there have been times over various holidays and vacations when I’ve been with other people, but such times tended to be slack times. That isn’t the case right now, and on top of that my workday is extended with me working across time zones and continents.

I’m convinced the biggest cause of these current challenges is the physical layout of the space. My “office” is located in an open space between the living room and the kitchen. This is in contrast to my last few apartments that had offices in set-off areas. It has given me a new appreciation for those people who have trudged through the past few years with the kitchen table doing double duty. Having little ones crawling, walking, or running around would add an entire new degree of difficulty. I don’t know how those people have managed at all. The set-off offices also gave the benefit of a mental separation that made it easier to end the workday. This bears some resemblance to how putting on shoes instead of working in slippers aids my productivity. So much of the work-from-home experience is an internal psychological battle for energy and focus, and not needing to expend the energy required to fight that battle is yet another reason I’m convinced that work from home absolutists are incorrect (though I suspect we are currently seeing an overcorrection for most workers).

I transferred my podcast listening a few months ago to Spotify from another platform. My listening habits have changed a little since I left Raleigh but my regular programming has not. Unlike the podcast platform I had used before, Spotify makes recommendations. The basic concept is simple. Certain elements of your listening history are put into a black box algorithm, you are scored on various metrics, and then you are shown content that you are most likely to want to listen to. All of the streaming companies—music, audio, video—do something similar. Social media companies do too. Twitter and Facebook show you provocative content so that you react to it. YouTube’s recommendations push you farther and farther down a rabbit hole. I’m told TikTok goes even further in this regard with its short-form content (something so successful that YouTube has effectively copied it), but that is one of the many platforms I’ve never used myself. These algorithms are built for specific purposes, and those purposes don’t tend to align with how I would like to use these tools.

Before my walk yesterday, I had queued up a new podcast that was presented to me by the recommendation algorithm. I was in hopes that I might discover something new and a different perspective. My hopes were misplaced. I couldn’t get through the episode as the production quality was so poor, but that was secondary. What was primary was the fact that I was left wondering what I had done to get such a thing recommended to me in the first place. Chalk that up as a failed attempt at novelty, but it did get me thinking.

I’m well aware that it’s hubristic to think that any one person can overcome the collective power of all of the money and engineering talent that has been poured into these content recommendation algorithms. One option is to forego all of these platforms entirely, but doing so comes at some cost. I instead continue to hone a framework of guardrails, some of which include not being on certain platforms, disabling autoplay functions, and not having certain apps on my phone. Does anyone have any tricks they use, whether it be to get a better version of content discovery or simply cutting out the dross, on any of these platforms? I’m curious to read how other people navigate our current information/entertainment environment.