Too much is said about how AI - ChatGPT & likes - is already challenging our being. Our personhood. But AI can learn from and build over only its training data.
What makes us human is we invent our own training data. As long as we keep the bulbs in our heads flashing, we have nothing to fear.
The weekly report from Digital Wellbeing on my phone informs me that the daily average screen time was 20 minutes less than last week’s. And I am pleased to see that trend has been downwards for the last few weeks. I uninstalled YouTube from my phone a few weeks back, which is one of the key reasons for lowered usage.
YouTube sucks away time without you noticing. The best way I know to control this beast is to not be available to you. The web app is a pain enough to not be distracting. So just get rid of the app from the phone and get your time back.
It’s just February, not peak summer yet by any means. But the afternoons are already hot enough that it has started to feel like the season of Mangos isn’t far enough. Today was another warm afternoon, and we couldn’t resist the Pune special Mango Mastani from Sujata Mastani.
I sometimes hate how I read stuff online – hopping from link to link. Reading, but not letting it absorb within. To not pause and think. That’s not the way I like to do it. If what I read doesn’t make me agree, disagree or learn something new, it’s futile.
Though it sounds cheesy, I love the word play in this advertisement of Federal Bank. “Rishta Aap Se Hai, Sirf App Se Nahi”.
It’s in Hindi and I won’t even try to translate - the fun will be lost.
Seth Godin reminded me today that “no one cares about the noise in our head (or the actions we take) nearly as much as we do”. That noise kept me wary of changing a few things with my setup till today. I pulled the plug and have changed how and where I write. Thanks, Seth!
How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much.
I can’t remember the last time I had read all the new items from Stoop and Reeder. No unread items - they both read. It felt nice - we must get some badge for that.
I had no idea a Mercedes-Benz makes a special sound before a crash which helps “make the noise from the crash impact not nearly as harmful” to our ears. Now I Know.
That’s a smart feature. And here I was getting pleased having a few buttons aligned to the centre through CSS.
If you’re a developer or a tester, and you want to abbreviate the word “accessibility” in a bug report, then as my New York friends keep saying to me, “knock yourself out”. But when we’re talking about accessibility in a public environment like Mastodon, where we can connect with people who know little about it, using A11Y as a hashtag creates a clique that has the potential to lessen the reach of the subject matter.
