Category: Newsletter (Page 11 of 20)

Back in January I wrote a post entitled “Double-Barrel Information Intake” about an experiment I was about to conduct in which I would simultaneously read and listen to a book. After about two months of going through the exercise, I can now report the results. I will not be adopting this approach to my nonfiction reading moving forward. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be using audio versions of nonfiction books at all in the future as I haven’t gotten the results I wanted to obtain. That isn’t to say that I won’t listen to a work of fiction ever again. It’s just that right now I don’t have a commute and making my commute better was the function of those books.

My conclusion about listening to nonfiction books was echoed by some findings that I took in (somewhat ironically) through Cal Newport’s podcast describing how there is magic in the time spent between words and sentences that allows for the absorption of material and forming synaptic connections in the brain. When I tried to click through the link in the episode description to the study he referenced, the site wouldn’t open in my browser, but here is a link anyway: LINK. There may be broader evolutionary implications of those findings given the shift away from prolonged and focused reading in favor of ever-shorter bursts of dopamine in short-form video applications but this post isn’t a polemic; it’s just me reporting my own experience and being honest about something that I tried and will not continue.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading four different books, each at a more-or-less consistent time and for a different purpose. The early returns on this experiment are positive. Maybe I’ll write another post about this approach in a few months.

My birthday was this week. It was a subdued affair and a solo dinner out. I did at least I get myself an ice cream cone for dessert, vanilla lest anyone have doubts. I’ve never been a fan of big birthday parties anyway. As with many other milestones I took a little time to reflect on another circumnavigation of the sun, this time sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean. It’s now 10 years since I graduated from college and 5 during which the rate of change in my life has accelerated. I’ve had five more-or-less permanent addresses during that time. The only place I’ve woken up more than once on my birthday during that span is where I am now in what has become my in-between home. And every indication is that the trend will continue over the next twelve months. Where I am isn’t at all where 22 year old me thought I’d be when I left Wofford for a stint in Boston. That disconnect doesn’t look like it’s going to change in the year to come either and I’m glad that that is the case. I tried a version of the dreams 22 year old me dreamed and as it turned out my vision missed the mark. It may have been directionally good but many of the particulars were off. I doubt I’ve got all of the details sorted in my current vision of my future either, but I’m more directionally accurate than I was 5 or 10 years ago. At least I hope so.

I was having a conversation this week about ChatGPT, AI in general, and what the technology might mean for the future. I’ve continued to experiment with the ChatGPT interface and have found several resources that have helped me write prompts that get more out of the tool. In the short term, I’m now convinced that the people who learn how to interact with these new AI tools will see massive productivity increases and rapidly outcompete others, at least in the domains in which the AI tools function.

During the conversation, a thought came to be in the form of a connection to another idea I heard on a podcast a few weeks prior. I haven’t spent hours and hours turning over this thought, but that is one of the purposes of the act of writing. The thought is this—these AI technologies are going to do to the digital world what the discovery of the neutron did to the physical world. The discovery of the neutron opened up the possibility of nearly unlimited energy by tapping into potential of which we had known nothing previously. It also led to nuclear weapons. These versions of AI systems are surely already being weaponized (after all, the real breakthrough of ChatGPT was to make the outputs more human-like; there are already more advanced AI systems that have been created), but the effects will only compound as future iterations are created and released. Sure, nearly every new technology comes with positives and negatives and metaphors have their limits, but this one does have a Pandora’s box sort of feeling to it. Or maybe more of a 1984 feeling to it. And if that inkling is correct, then it is already too late to reclose this particular Pandora’s box. It probably isn’t too late to course correct, but my knowledge of how these systems work is too limited to allow even a half-educated guess as to how that might occur.

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.

While I was in Miami, my brother and sister-in-law introduced me to a new television show. I’ve since been using it as part of my nightly wind-down. I’m uncertain that my ability to use this show to relax is a wholly positive reflection on me, but that doesn’t change the truth. It is a show whose protagonist is a private detective in London, one with a checkered family history and half a leg missing from an IED blast in Afghanistan. The cases, the subject matter, everything is more pathological (and maybe disturbing) than an American program would be. American programming relies more on displayed violence and gore, British programming on psychology and subtlety. C.B. Strike is definitely not one for the children and is probably not one for many adults either. It is certainly much darker than Sherlock ever was and at least as dark as The Fall.

I’ve had too many posts about television in this newsletter thus far this year. This gives me notice that I need to inject some novel activity into my life again. Being able to make that observation is a side benefit to publishing on a regular cadence. My archive serves as a quasi-journal of what I was doing or thinking about during a particular week. That wasn’t the purpose of starting the newsletter. The purpose wasn’t creating the pressure of meeting a regular publishing deadline either. Both, though, have been pleasant side effects.

I have spent more time in South Florida over the past year than I expected I would spend there in my entire life. Part of this has been the result of business decisions to learn more about and become involved with digital assets, a nascent industry largely bereft of lawyers and so a blue ocean to target as a growth area.

An even larger part of this has been my brother’s decision to work and live in Miami. It is not a decision I will make myself—I hardly visit the beach even when I stay nearby and I prefer not to be in a place with enough heat and humidity to feel like a low-grade sauna. After each of my visits, I have written in this chronicle that I have no desire to deal with Miami’s traffic or its climate. That hasn’t changed. What was different this time is that I spent a longer period of time down there, including some time during a normal work week for my brother and sister-in-law. My workday was the same, short bursts of work interspersed between meetings in whatever time zone was necessary. Their workdays were also the same, much more of a 9 to 5 schedule than I have had since I worked for the government. It felt weird being in Miami surrounded by people living a more-or-less normal life. And other than me choosing restaurants for dinner where they wouldn’t normally eat, that’s what we did. It was a nice jolt for me, just different enough to be worthwhile. I just wish that I had completed my CLE requirements earlier so that I wasn’t forced to catch up on them during the afternoons. Oh well.