November 2, 2025
I like this gal Anu Atluru that Sari is interviewing. This post tells me a lot already: “the hard skills are getting softer and the soft skills are getting harder.” Yeah, that’s about right. I was saying to Emily this morning that tradespeople (which include her by the way) are becoming less valued by society all the time.
The more I read, the more impressed I am with Anu. She says how our ability to detect “GPT-isms” actually gives her hope for humanity. I agree it’s good that we can pick them out, but it’s not good that they are becoming more prevalent. And she, like me, sees LLMs as a tool, not a teammate. She wants actual people who are “a beast” not “AI.” I think she and I are on the same page with a lot of things!
It’s figuring out how to use these tools without replacing your own agency or even the choice of who you trust to help you make decisions objectively, which AI can’t really do. Among the many ideas in that conversation, one really hit me hard at the end what Anu wishes AI could do but can’t, and that’s removing human suffering… because humanity creates its own suffering… In fact, AI may be able to help relieve it more than we think, especially when it comes to certain kinds of cognitive offloading when compared to others, which is a topic that didn’t come up.
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Success shouldn’t be about what takes off in views or likes but rather what you did to put your ideas together
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Emily was asking me why I wasn’t around all the years where people would scrutinize every little thing she did. I said that it seems people want to control other peoples shit when they can’t control their own I guess. I don’t do that. What I do is question why people do certain things that are clearly disadvantageous or even harmful to themselves.
Part of why you feel so heavily scrutinized, I replied, is a function of your being in public safety for so long, where that’s just how life is. But having a partner who was critical beyond any sort of reasonable boundaries didn’t help either.
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I don’t turn my brain off while watching Pokemon speedruns. I actually think through what the runner is doing, what items they pick up, their routing, etc. The process of doing a speedrun route is fascinating to me. And yes, Pokemon runners really do have long documents with all the different damage ranges and such RNG that can make or break a run. I’ve debated trying to run ZA, but it’s such a long game, even with the OP Heracross the game forces you to get that; it’s not fun to me. But this Fire Red Ch’ding run, it’s fun! Even if there’s a lot of switch training involved. And I do skip over the parts where it’s just kinda boring travel, etc.
When I watch Scott’s Thoughts it’s much the same thing. The process of refining his runs to get faster times is pretty interesting to me. I like JRose but he only does single runs, which naturally isn’t the best method to rank Pokemon. But it’s still entertaining. I used to watch more channels, but in my cutting back on content consumption, I only watch those two and recent world records. Especially the more obscure categories.
November 24, 2025
As I said to Emily this morning, without the influence [of a certain content creator, I would’ve deleted my entire website and archived everything and spent the rest of my life as a total ghost. But because of [them], I rethought a lot of things, learned about Anna [Corinne], Sublime, and digital gardening. I think I can get back on Sublime now. After all, it’s their conversations with people that got me my new writing strategy. And it was Anna mentioning Henrik Karlsson that gave me the new “complex search query” to find interesting people to focus on for my writing. So wherever [they] went off to, [they] changed my life for the better. I wish I could’ve done the same… maybe my advice worked after all, though.
Right away on sublime app, I found this: https://podcastmagic.app/podcast/45c53120-d73a-400b-8a46-4dad04c3f622
I’ll just copy the whole transcript segment here. It’s from Mark Manson’s SOLVED podcast.
“So the first myth is that there’s some level of wisdom or enlightenment or success that you stop comparing yourself to others. There is no evidence of that. In fact, I find it very amusing how much like pop spirituality and pop self-help, when you actually look at what they idealize, it’s basically just being a psychopath… They’re peddling this idea… Like it’s basically like I never care what anybody thinks. I only do what I want. I’m completely confident in myself at all times. And I’m a self-contained miracle of some sort… And it’s like there are no repercussions or trade-offs to any of my behaviors. It’s like… that actually what a psychopath believes and things don’t turn out well for them generally speaking.
“It’s funny too because I mean it this is something that you see you know if there is a form of enlightenment, I think what it is, is probably more of what like Sartre describes and being a nothingness, which is like, you’re aware of the comparison, you feel the comparison, but you don’t necessarily identify with comparison. You don’t, you don’t, you choose not to make it meaningful. I know like the Dalai Lama has said stuff around this before. Like, it’s funny because sometimes you’ll see the Dalai Lama get interviewed by a journalist and they’re like, are you ever sad? And he just like laughs at them. He’s like, yeah, of course I’m sad. Like all the time.
“You know, but he’s like, sadness is still beautiful in its own way. And I’m still like, just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s true. It doesn’t mean it’s meaningful. It doesn’t mean it’s permanent. Like I think, you know, what the Dalai Lama exemplifies is that, yeah, he’s very human, but the thing that’s unique about him is his constant awareness of how transitory his humanness is… That’s the real wisdom,.. Like he feels sad, but he understands… oh, this isn’t going to last… Don’t buy into it too much.”
I cut some of the stumbles out with ellipses, but the general gist of this is very important. We’re letting pop spirituality and self-help turn us into psychopaths! And we need to find meaning in our sadness, something I have in great abundance. Definitely something I need to write about… but right now, I have potent quotables to revive.
But first, I have to take note of a podcast our boy Henrik Karlsson was on recently: http://podcastmagic.app/podcast/625bb998-fab7-4ec6-9a0d-56d2d0197364
“…now that I’ve gotten to like a larger scale, I have like a professional army of people telling me when I’m stupid.”
I can definitely tell you he’s not stupid. His ideas about what a blog post should be revolutionized my entire writing process! Henrik goes on to talk about starting to feel “a certain joy in being wrong.” He asks, “how can I be wrong faster?” And “recode the shame of being wrong. Turn that into a dopamine loop.” There’s a lot to unpack there. My problem is, I don’t think I’m wrong nearly enough.
“Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.” – Olga Tokarczuk, from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Here’s another quote I need to explore again in the future: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt.
We had a good time at Buffalo Wild Wings and I had enough to save for lunch. [Meeting Maddie was particularly awesome.] First good experience I’ve had going out to eat in a very long time. I was saying to Emily that going forward I’m going to focus on writing brand new stuff. I’m tired of just rewriting all my old stuff. [Yet, I’m STILL working on my archives in July 2026…although I HAVE written a lot of new stuff, fortunately.] That’s part of why I don’t log into the sublime app for so long; I didn’t want more to write about. But now, what else is there to do?
One thing I want to do is really bring music more into my writing, as I like to think of song lyrics for my titles. I was saying to Emily that I really don’t write about music nearly as much as you’d think. My priorities have long been very screwed up. I don’t like music journalism generally, so my way of going about it is kind of odd. More reflective, gut feeling sort of writing.
November 28, 2025
I was doing a lot of thinking about why I find certain women so attractive. It isn’t one thing, and while yes there are certain things I like – heart shaped faces, cute face framing hairstyles, and big expressive eyes – these are not any sort of requirement. I just want to find a girl who has already found her final form and slays. That’s really it. There is no hidden agenda for me. I’m too old for silliness: I just want a companion I can adore and make happy. But no, people (especially the gorgeous female ones) want to be immature and let themselves be dominated by stupid bullies and clueless idiots…and it’s very frustrating.
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I like what this guy said about AI in schools, and I have to agree with him. We have to assume that AI is always being used outside the classroom, but teach kids how to be able to live without it. It’s sort of like the calculator… although this is a far more disruptive technology of course. What I do like is that homework, basically, now becomes a useless endeavor; I’ve always thought homework was stupid. If you’re in class all day, you should learn all you need to do there!
“A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights:
1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All “detectors” of AI imo don’t really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI.
2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later.
3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don’t want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it’s doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped “prompt”), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators.
4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher’s discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc.
TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.”
https://sublime.app/card/www-x-com-karpathy-status-1993010584175141038-6221c53376ce4a81
I am amazed this quality of post is still on X… must be a fluky occurrence. Anyway, banning the use of AI at all is simply counter-productive. Hell, I use it constantly! Just not as much as most people. It’s not evil at all, but how it’s pervaded everything is; as usual, it’s not the tech, it’s the lazy and scheming people ruining it for everyone else.
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This is a great quote:
Doris Lessing on reading:
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
https://sublime.app/card/doris-lessing-on-reading-there-is-only-one-way-t
I’m glad I came back to actually using the Sublime app. The staff picks lately have been phenomenal! This part of the quote is particularly interesting to me: “Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.” I feel like many things I write are just not the things a lot of people who read them are ready for just yet. I’m ahead of my time I suppose in some ways, or other people are just not ready to accept certain aspects of reality.
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“The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us and sometimes even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.”
– Pope Leo XIV, https://sublime.app/card/the-logic-of-algorithms-tends-to-repeat-what-wor
Yes, the Pope said this. I’m impressed. And really, the algorithms are by their very nature propagators of the status quo. They don’t know any difference. Machine learning has its limits. At least for now. So much creativity is being buried under generative outputs, some of which are actually pretty strong considering it’s basically a room full of a million monkeys on typewriters inside of your device. But generative AI can only imitate… it’s how you use it that allows YOU as the human being to iterate and expand upon what’s existing. It’s why I actually find AI hallucinations useful… you see where the gaps in its “thinking” occur and where the model is either not properly trained or what concepts it can’t somehow grok just yet.
And yes, I intentionally used the word ‘grok’ to bring to mind Elon Musk’s xAI project. I refuse to use it, but apparently, it’s quite impressive. I have considered messing with Perplexity more, as it’s the one AI product even anti-AI people seem okay with using. I’m certainly not anti-AI, but I did need to step back and gain perspective on how it was actually making me cognitively lazy. But many of us already were cognitively lazy long before ChatGPT went viral; as usual, disruptive technologies bring out both the best and worst of humanity, but we focus mainly on the worst. For all its faults, LLMs have actually helped my writing overall more than hurt, even if the end result was often lacking, the process of discovering WHY it was lacking is quite insightful.
[To be completely honest, I only use AI for search and messing about just to see what it iterates. I don’t use it at ALL for creative or even creative-adjacent tasks anymore, just to give me some potential digital gardening material, and just to track the progress of the viability of the technology in certain areas that impact creative fields. It’s not nearly as close as we think to actually being anywhere CLOSE to human level. Just FYI. It’s all smoke and mirrors.]
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The Sublime app is a treasure trove for Potent Quotables, for sure. I keep saying to Emily that a collected works will be coming in the next year or so. I think it will be longer than that. [Yes, it’s planned for 2027.] Writing essays doesn’t really excite me anymore. I need to focus on much broader things… but not plan it out too much, either. Basically, I’m just gonna play it as it lays.
… I never cease to be amazed just how truly stupid I can be. What I mean by that is I’m astounded by my own ignorance of things that I probably shouldn’t be ignorant about.
There is no point forcing myself to create content for a nonexistent audience. [So, I basically just started writing the content I’d want to read. We’ll see how this goes, as it’s still not getting much traction, but it’s getting at least SOMETHING!]
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Anne Reburn had a really sweet cover of Tay’s Opalite.
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Cinzia (Lady of the Library) had a very good video about self education:
She said a lot of great stuff, but one thing really stood out. The best parts of education happen in times of reflection and in pauses. Clearly I burned out just like she did. It does actually make you physically ill… [So, I was still trying to heal from my own lifelong burnout.]
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Oh, Jess of the Shire talked about a new Tolkien book. Yes, I am serious.
It’s called the Bovadium Fragments. He was literally trolling Oxford. It’s hilarious. Basically, archaeologists are digging up ancient ruins that were once Oxford after civilization fell because of cars. I am dead serious. He absolutely hated cars. I never made the Morris automobile connection, who basically took over the university town. Yes he did have a car later, but he did correctly identify a lot of the problems. Like Jess said, we have to drive everywhere. The suburbs are a stupid invention. But Emily and I can’t help but drive either. We didn’t ask to live in this world. But we should work towards something better and I agree.
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I need to get away from tech more often… I’m not sure exactly how I will do that, as handwriting is actually physically painful for me, but the idea should be that I’m not letting tech just eat away my day… But as I said earlier, I’m extremely burnt out. [Playing games like Master Duel] is part of my recovery process. And I do need to just brain dump more often, let words just spit themselves out onto the page and make sense of it later. Or perhaps, that trying to make sense of all that is the problem I’m having. Perhaps it doesn’t have to make sense at all, long as you enjoy the process.
