A Year of Mornings

Maybe you’re not overwhelmed. Or maybe you’re overwhelmed for a reason. – Matthew Dicks by

If you are spending five hours per day — nearly a third of all waking hours — staring at screens large and small, perhaps you’re overwhelmed because you’ve committed a significant portion of your life to the mindless consumption of video content instead of the things that might make you feel less overwhelmed:

I agree.

Temperature Zero for Culture

The mode gets shown more, so it gets picked more, so the model grows more confident the mode is what people want, and the tails starve. Within a few dozen rounds, a catalogue that began almost perfectly even collapses onto one dominant option. But why does it collapse toward the mode rather than fan out across all that individual data?

I read about this article in Pluralistic’s blog. It felt timely, as just yesterday we were having the same discussion about how everything feels the same. About how all houses look the same from the inside, about how all AirBnBs are the same, about how all cars look the same and so on.

A Swarm of Blood Robots by Craig Mod

LLMs are excellent at taking your messy spreadsheets, making them look great, and re-ordering them intuitively. I have some old financial spreadsheets that I’ve hacked together over the years, and Claude adeptly transformed them into something beautiful and sanely functional. It’s easy to cross-check to make sure all the important numbers are where they should be.

I loved reading this. I love pieces like this which talk about the things people have done using Claude/ChatGPT. These are inspiring to me. They give me new ideas for how I could use Claude.

This also made me write a note for the things I do with Claude.