Unfinished, part deux
Two years ago, I published a post entitled Unfinished. It was a way for me to share some thoughts without having to work on them as much as I do on regular posts. As I wasn’t sure if these “lesser thoughts” were worth my efforts and my time, I compiled them in a different post format, inspired by a song:
This post is inspired by the excellent track entitled Lamb’s Garbage (Unfinished), from the classic album and one of my favourites, Mr Oizo’s Lambs Anger. The concept of the song, as its title suggests, is to regroup bits of songs that were never completed to be full tracks.
Well, here we are again. The text file where I jot down all my ideas, quick thoughts, and potential topics for blog articles is starting to get a bit too long for my liking, so I think it’s time for a little clean-up.
What you will see below is what was saved from the big flush, and what I don’t share on social media since I am no longer participating. Think of this as a list of intros, tweets, and blurbs of what was going on in my head recently. I believe some of these themes can be used later for a full post; in the meantime, feel free to use them for your own blog. And if you don’t have a blog, please, start a blog.
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I love spreadsheets. This is something I find a bit difficult to admit, but I do like working in spreadsheets. I even firmly believe that Google Sheets is their best product. I already like lists, but a spreadsheet is on another level. I like to make my spreadsheets look pretty, I like to plan how they will look, I like to build, I like to make them functional, legible, easy to read.
For me, it’s a very pleasing and interesting thing to do at work: there are so many possibilities. When I create a spreadsheet, I feel like an app developer. I feel like I’m a graphic designer.
I had a co-worker once whose job included the creation and design of very complex spreadsheets for other teams, using Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, and such. The resulting spreadsheets were glorious: fully featured and interactive dashboards, gathering data from different sources in real-time. Works of art.
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Are answers from A.I. chatbots recycled for other users asking the exact same thing, or are answers always generated from scratch? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more energy-efficient? If I ask “explain the difference between irony and happenstance”, will the A.I. chatbot just paste an existing, perfectly fine answer (one that received positive feedback in previous chats), or will it work to generate a brand new answer?
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Why do so many people keep saying “Samsung charger” or “iPhone charger” instead of USB-C, USB Type C, or just USB? I mean, despite these cables and connectors being ubiquitous in our lives, I see a lot of people completely ignoring what they are called. I wonder why.
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Don't brag so much about using A.I. It’s great that you used A.I. to do this thing you’re presenting. I can see how it has been useful and how much faster it helped you reach your goals. I understand that without A.I. you could never have pulled this off. I know it’s a way to show how you are part of the A.I. revolution, that you’re not left behind. No shame in that. I work with A.I. a lot too, I’m not judging you for that.
But please, don’t present your use of A.I. as a skill. It’s just a tool. Your skills are elsewhere. Having access to tokens is a weird flex. The tools you use and how you use them may interest a few of your peers, but what you create with these tools is what truly matters. Do you know what type of video cameras were used in your favourite film? Do you care?
By the way, the same piece of advice applies to air fryers.
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If we work so hard on automating our current tasks and projects with A.I. agents, how will we tell which ones are worth doing at all? Does everything need to be A.I.-enabled and optimised? Are we reproducing the same mistake that we made with social media, shoving it everywhere we could?
On that topic, I highly recommend this excellent article on The Verge. Efficiency is not the ultimate goal for most people: efficiency for what? For whom? Besides, friction is not always a problem: sometimes friction is how new ideas spark to life.
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If you are like me, an avid consumer of Techmeme, you will have noticed that A.I. companies get a huge part of the coverage these days. I don’t know if it’s an editorial choice of Techmeme or if it’s just a reflection of the public reception of said news, but my gosh it seems that Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude gets an incremental update every day, and they float on top of the site’s homepage seemingly forever. I wouldn’t mind a new site just for A.I. news, just like Mediagazer does what Techmeme does but for everything media-related. I’d call it Datacenter and it would make Techmeme a bit more interesting.
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I recently discovered that something I immensely dislike has a name: the Rae Dunn style for household items.
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Billionaires cannot stand the idea of a democracy where their individual vote is, technically, worth exactly as much as the vote from the person who takes care of their laundry. They hate that. So what do they do? They buy media or social media companies to try to influence thousands to vote like them.
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Side note on the ridiculous LinkedIn habit that consists of putting a link in the comments of a post, and writing in the post “Link in the comments”. Just put the link in the post, as you’re supposed to, so we can have a nice preview of the post, and we don’t have to look at the even more ridiculous comments of every LinkedIn post.
How messed up is that? I know it’s for better “reach” and to trick the algorithm, but you just look thirsty for likes. Isn’t that link the thing you wanted to share? Do you prefer a click or a like? What’s a like good for if nobody visits your link? Thankfully, I don’t have a LinkedIn account, and I can ignore this nonsense most of the time, but I do check on a few LinkedIn posts for work and this is making me both sad and angry.
On Instagram, the whole “Link in bio” was necessary because that was the only way to share links back then. But LinkedIn? No excuse. Yes, it sucks that their algorithm prefers posts that won’t send users out of their precious, shitty platform. I’m with you. But you don’t have to play their silly little game. You’re better than this.