Jacob Aron

Thing is, if the tools are building anything truly worth a damn, people would be obsessively talking about what they've built.

This feels like cargo-cult productivity at best. The Pokemon Go of hustle culture.

Show, don't tell. If agents are so great, the results should speak for themselves.

No idea, it was 30 years ago!

The solution is to publish fewer books

Sure, but I'm not an astrophysics professor

Certainly the case for me!

I've been boosting my ego with a sycophant AI and it can't be healthy Google’s NotebookLM tool is billed as an AI-powered research assistant and can even turn your text history into a jovial fake podcast. But it could also tempt you into narcissism and nostalgia, says J...

Genuinely, the most utility I've ever got out of an AI is having it stroke my ego, which I obviously stopped doing pretty quick. I'm not against using AI, but after nearly 4 years I'm yet to find anything useful besides novelty + occasional search

www.newscientist.com/article/2452...

I can see how this would be highly addictive, but I think it also illustrates the gap between programmers who are finding AI useful, and the rest of us. I can't even think of a useful task I would get an AI to do for me overnight, given everything I've tried normally requires intense babysitting

Brilliant book

Researcher skeptical of ‘Havana syndrome’ tested secret weapon on himself The CIA investigated a Norwegian government experiment with a pulsed-energy machine in which a researcher built and tested a “Havana syndrome” device on himself.

Well, I don't know what to make of this... www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Also a thread running through identifying the actions of the Time Lords with the hand of the BBC, which I'd never thought of

One of the many great things about this book is it’s not focused on unearthing new (ever more obscure) facts; it’s much more interested in what the facts we already know tell us when laid out as a narrative.

I'm not blaming the readers, I'm blaming the Atlantic for not commissioning with the web in mind. Putting a fiction label at the top doesn't inform anyone who only sees it on socials and never clicks through

Regeneration wasn't invented until 3>4 despite already happening twice!

Good thread

Actually, this isn't even true. The biggest reach a story will have is as the background to a reaction video by a random influencer you've never heard of with 10 million followers

This is an example of a format that works perfectly well in a printed magazine, but is actively harmful to its aims when presented in the context-collapsed world of the internet. Editors, you have to commission with an awareness that the biggest reach a story will have is as a half-read headline

Just finished Exterminate/Regenerate by @johnhiggs.bsky.social and it's an absolute must-read if you are a Doctor Who fan, of course, but also more broadly a fascinating history of the changing TV landscape and the BBC

An utter tragedy. Science solved this problem, but a bunch of charlatans fucked everything up and brought it back

Come for the journalism, stay for the mad guerilla pothole repair set to opera

By way of contrast, I shot 1.41 terabytes of footage for 'Potholesville', a 12-minute film, which would require around 1,244,554 floppy disks.

My main camera would fill 1 floppy disk every 7.4 milliseconds.

the account which posted this appears to be an AI agent farming karma before it turns into an advertising bot

SalmonPinkSky

I can't match that, but I wrote my first software by copying lines of BASIC out of a book...

Yep!

Now this is an extremely bad use of AI - it will almost certainly make things up while summarising, with clear legal consequences for libeling people

The original post has been deleted, so this particular story may be nonsense www.reddit.com/r/analytics/... but really, your approach to AI should be like that meme about only using a printer with a loaded gun - assume it is wrong until proven otherwise

I'm so old that the first digital camera I ever used had a floppy disk for memory. You had to eject it and stick it in a PC

A key challenge, and a huge source of the disconnect between Silicon Valley and the other creative industries is that, for coders, AI eliminates the drudgery so they can focus on the creative/expressive part. In every other creative discipline, it has the exact opposite effect.

I don't think anyone is doing that, but certainly there are people playing the same game for multiple hours each day, for years