Notes

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

If you're into weird, human-created dystopias, check out this German documentary (with English subtitles) on the Kowloon Walled City.

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I've not been super bursting with excitement about the recent developments in AI be it chatbots or image generators – hot takes are not my thing. I'm also not posting this as a standalone piece, I don't think I know enough about the subject. But recent news on the Bing chatbot getting feisty, and this Daring Fireball piece have me less dismissive and more curious (and a bit more concerned as well).

People using ChatGPT to write school essays doesn't mean the bot is smart, it means the essays are easy to write for anyone who can grok the formula. The image generators, while quite fun, are likewise mostly producing results that are like cheap counterfeit goods – they look good in the lookbook, but on closer inspection, the seams are just plain bad. This AI stuff is not yet as smart as some think it is, which is another way of saying it's not as dumb anymore as some others think it is – they are not super good or clever, but maybe neither are we. Maybe we think we're more exceptional than we really are.

They are better and faster at producing mediocre work than we are, and these are the jobs it takes over first. This doesn't sound very tragic, but mediocre may be all anyone cares for and there will be less and less need for good quality and craftsmanship.

Om Malik touches on the subject in his Letter from Om newsletter and links to some good things to check out if you're so inclined.

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Cabel Sasser:

"Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard."

(via Daring Fireball)

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Dave Karpf compiled a list of Wired articles from 1993 to 2017 – three articles per year that capture the vibe in Silicon Valley from the dotcom boom all the way to the hangover.

"If you’re curious about the way the “digital revolution” was contemporaneously portrayed over the past quarter-century, think of this as the audio-guide that you could take through a self-curated museum tour."

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Car brain – the tendency to not apply our normal values when it comes to driving-related issues and bad behavior, giving it more leeway.

“Not only do people do what the world makes easy, but because it feels easy, people conclude that it’s right,” Walker said.

A new study sheds some more light on the doorway effect, that pesky phenomenon of walking from one room to another and completely forgetting why you came here in the first place. It seems our brains ability to compartmentalize comes with a minor downside:

The researchers suggest that it's not so much the doorways that cause a memory wipe, as moving from one location to a significantly different one – it's the abrupt change of scene that primes our minds to receive something new.

from Science Alert

No, that's not a typo. Aloneliness, unsurprisingly to me at least, is a thing — it's the negative emotions that come from not spending enough time alone.

As social beings, people depend on having other people around them to interact and connect with to avoid becoming lonely, another, much researched psychological phenomenon.

But some people, more than others, need regular spans of solitude to feel mentally balanced and re-energized, to avoid stress and, eventually, depression.

From the Psychology Today article:

The researchers recommended deliberately planning or scheduling time alone in order to avoid what they call a "negative degenerative cycle." They explained that when your need for solitude gets continually thwarted by the stress of competing demands on your time (or space), the result is an increase in feelings of aloneliness, which then increases stress and life dissatisfaction. This negative cycle can exacerbate internalizing symptoms (e.g. depression).

Know, that it's perfectly okay to want to be by yourself from time to time.
(via BoingBoing)

Great article by Kathy Sierra on how limited our cognitive resources are:

Spend hours at work on a tricky design problem? You’re more likely to stop at Burger King on the drive home. Hold back from saying what you really think during one of those long-ass, painful meetings? You’ll struggle with the code you write later that day. Since both willpower/self-control and cognitive tasks drain the same tank, deplete it over here, pay the price over there. One pool. One pool of scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources. If you spend the day exercising self-control (angry customers, clueless co-workers), by the time you get home your cog resource tank is flashing E.

Have you ever had the feeling that you didn’t really know  what you were doing, and it was just a matter of time before someone realized it and exposed you as a fraud? Turns out  it’s not just psychological, there’s also biology behind this nasty feeling that you’re a fraud about to be exposed, explains Olivia Fox Cabane.