The Butt Ugly Weblog

People sometimes ask me how do you keep up with news in this fast-paced world, since I seem to be "in the know" most of the time. All this new AI stuff happening every hour of every day, there's no way to read it all!

Yeah.

They're right. It's not possible to read it all. What I practice is just following my nose and reading whatever smells interesting to me. (Note: I read. I don't in general listen to many podcasts, because they're linear and hard to just skim and browse. I prefer to use my time to think, and I find that reading allows me to think. I just pause, lift my eyes, process the thoughts the text gave me, daydream a little, then continue simply by lowering my eyes back on the book. None of that pause-rewind -cycle that podcasts make you do.)

So, as you see, I just basically cheat and skim a lot. You see - if something is important, it will surface in so many places that it probably passes by my eyes at some point. And I trust my instincts on whether it's worth my time or not.

And – this is important – I don't need to know everything. I don't need to even read full articles. I don't need AI summaries. I just skim, read a sentence here and there and piece together an idea. And if that idea is interesting, then I read more. I wrote earlier about bead curtain shaped people. That's how you get one.

It's a version of "passive research" - that's when you turn on the TV and learn about whatever happens to be on. (In the old days you could learn about giraffes; these days you learn a lot about the social behaviour of young adults in zero clothing. It's interesting too, in its own way.) If I recall correctly, Esa Saarinen (a famous Finnish philospher) does a version of this method too where he just opens a book randomly and just reads a few paragraphs and then closes the book. Just enough to get an idea.

One thing I've found AI to be very useful at is hardening your web containers you've had online for 25 years. So this is a test to see if I can still edit after all the extra protection layers I've put into place...

Englannin kieleen on tipahtanut sana "meat proxy", jolla tarkoitetaan ihmistä, joka ei ajattele itsenäisesti, vaan kopioi tekoälyn vastauksen sellaisenaan keskusteluun. Näitä on viime aikoina alkanut näkyä aika paljon - osa myöntää suoraan kysyneensä chatgpt:ltä. Ehkä siksi, että he haluavat ulkoistaa myös vastuun – että älkää suuttuko minulle, suuttukaa tietokoneelle.

Haluan nyt ehdottaa tälle sanalle suomennosta "väliliha", vähän samaan tapaan kuin "kokousliha" tarkoittaa tyyppiä, jota kutsutaan kokouksiin koko ajan, mutta joka ei oikeastaan välttämättä kontribuoi niissä kovin paljoa.

Kuten joku sanoi hienosti: Ensimmäiset tyypit, jotka tekoäly korvaa työelämässä tyystin, ovat juuri näitä välilihoja. Heillä ei kun ole sellaisia ajatuksia, joita pomo ei saisi suoraan tekoälyltä itsekin.