January 20, 2025
Hey there. At long last, I’m back with a link roundup. There’s a smmall change this week and it’s likely going to carry forward. I’m dropping the AI summaries.
I remain unfashionably somewhere in between “AI is your new master and has changed everything about your job” and “AI will kill you, singlehandedly destroy the environment, disrespect your dog, and bring Kid Rock back to the forefront of popular music.” There is a middle ground. I believe.
Still. I just don’t think the landscape needs totally meaningless uses of AI. And most of the uses already feel pretty unnecessary, honestly. I’ve used ChatGPT to help me understand some code while contributing documentation to an open source project, and it was wonderfully valuable. I’ve used it to help me think through holes in a lesson plan. And it helped. But the one thing everyone seems to think AI is going to replace–writing–is the area it both feels least necessary and most limited.
I don’t want to add energy to that. At least for the time being. So I’m losing the generated summaries. I don’t think anyone will mind.
I can’t explain how nostalgic this post made me for the pre-2.0 Internet. For a brief summary, Schuster tells a story of him and his friends in junior high discovering the possibilities for command-line shenanigans. It’s short, funny, and you should read it on your own.
It reminded me of a similar story from my high school, though. One day, a class clown-type student discovered that the rudimentary high school email system that literally no one used could send emails to every student without CC’ing any teachers or administrators. He used his power to organize equally hilarious and weird displays at our football games.
In my old age, I can only remember one of them, but it was so funny I think it will always stick with me. In one of his strange emails, he cryptically explained that at a certain moment, in a certain quarter, everyone was to act as though an army of spiders was advancing from the opposite end of the field. Incredibly, we all did, and the confusion it momentarily caused is still funny to me today.
For… reasons (check the date) I have been anticipating a need to continue my now years-long project of decreasing the role of social media in my life. Honestly, I’ve done an embarrassing amount of reading about reverting to an RSS-based model for web consumption, and a lot of the suggestions in this article are things I am actively doing or have tried in the past.
Still, I implore you: take a look at this great post and see if an RSS feed might make sense to you. The old Internet had a lot good things going for it. The new one has a lot of bad.