Jo

Precede but supersede. Urgh I hate English sometimes

Parenting a teen:
Teen: "I'm sorry I love you"
Teen: pause
Teen: "I'm sorry COMMA I love you"

If you haven't read Utopia 5 yet, I highly recommend it as a deeply thought-provoking exploration of some ideas around privacy and AI. Several years old now, but the ideas are as relevant as ever, if not moreso

View from a teenage girl:
Most boys are arseholes. It's fine, you can just ignore arseholes. The ones you need to worry about are the creeps.

YouTube video by LeadDev Ask vs. Guess Cultures – Katherine Wu | The Lead Developer UK 2017

One framing I keep on going back to is this "ask vs guess culture" back from 2017 Lead Dev talk www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxTX...

It's not exactly about language, it's about the cultural way that language is used.

Nice! I haven't yet got my brain to work in a way that allows gen-AI to do writing for me

5. Post-cancellation: the subscription service equivalent of texting your ex

4. Threaten them with a significant degradation in their lifestyle or happiness if they leave

3. Throw in some freebies! They're bound to stay now!

2. If we ask them if they're sure, they'll change their mind

1. If we hide the cancel subscription button, they won't leave

The 5 stages of grief, as experienced by a subscription service you're trying to leave:

As a Brit/European, there's something that makes my skin crawl in the simpering, sycophantic tone of most AIs. It's US cultural imperialism but worse for being more subtle.

Please for the love of god someone create an AI that can tut under its breath in a way you can't hear but know is present.

Once I saw someone replace "feature parity" with "feature parody" and it was so apt that I wasn't sure if it was an accidental mistake or a purposeful one.

One true original thought Innovation is your moat in a world of AI... but is that even possible?

I did a blog post www.jocrossick.com/blog/one-tru...

Most rules don't really exist. People don't follow them because they choose to, they follow them because they don't realise that not-folllowing them is an option. Following rules is generally good, but do so because you choose to, not because they're there.

I'm coining reverse imposter syndrome: when you blame yourself for the fact that others can't keep up with you.

The smart girls all know what I'm talking about.

Yeah I'm really interesting to see it and will be attending with a few of my team.

If you're mourning the loss of DEI initiatives, then stop. I've put a huge amount of effort into this space in tech over the past decade and from what I saw they had limited impact. Dismantling DEI programmes is a call to arms - time to get radical, and do stuff that works. Act without permission.

As a Barcelona resident I've observed that there's a rule for everything, about 1/4 of those rules are seen as sacrosanct while all the others are treated as optional. I don't know if that applies to the rest of the country or to this case in particular, but it wouldn't surprise me either way.

I have literally no idea who you are or why I follow you, or even if I do.

Having kids is wonderful, doesn't mean it's not hell sometimes, and most of the time when they're small tbh. There's a very worthwhile discussion to be had in how our society makes the toughest job in the world even harder.

(Granted I am a little nervous about how I'm going to find 4 hours of Wagner)

Nobody says "oh I thought you liked modern art so I'm really surprised to hear you're going to the Siena renaissance art exhibition" or "I thought you liked Indian food, so I'm amazed you're enjoying those tacos".

People at work were beyond surprised that I was going to the opera because they know I like techno. Why is music the only field where enjoyment of one genre presumes exclusion of others?

(And long may I remain Gru in this relationship)

But if your company is forcing you to adopt AI, it's potentially a good sign that they're actually looking to go that route of humans-assisted-by-AI, which is better than the other alternatives. And I for one welcome my new army of AI minions :-)

Anyway, more to the point - Humans assisted by AI is the best outcome we can hope for in most cases. AI replacing humans is going to happen, but to what extent is unclear right now. Humans assisting AI is another possible outcome, and there are variations on that

There's a mental/emotional hurdle that people need to go through, and employers are forcing them through it.

I don't care what the company's motives are; resisting this change as an employee is not going to save you from AI taking your job. Learning about AI might save it, though.

There is a learning curve here, and while a minority are philosophically opposed, most are just being human about it - resisting change, and being too tired/busy/overwhelmed to explore new ideas/approaches, and making excuses.