Jim Willis

Month: December 2023

  • Read: A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

    I’m becoming more and more convinced that the people who are most well-positioned to leverage GenAI in its current form are those who are skilled at precise language. When you think about programming languages like Perl, Python or PHP, they’re really just language that is trying to communicate something without ambiguity to a computer. Prompting…

  • Re-listening

    The shift to hosting a personal Navidrome server has shifted my listening habits, fostering more repeated listening contrasted with Apple Music’s constant novelty aspect.

  • ChatGPT and “Humanities Types”

    In his latest issue of galaxy brain, Charlie Warzel dismisses the value of ChatGPT in part because he’s unable to see the value or potential. of ChatGPT, because the ability to control or drive value from the tool is outside the grasp of most humanities types. A good ChatGPT whisperer understands how to sequence commands…

  • Read: “We Are All Socialists in Our Private Lives”

    > If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes. *Source: Nathalie Robin Justice Gravel on X* We evolved *because*…

  • Read: Overconsumption Is Killing the Planet. What Can We Do?

    During the 1960s, for example, the average American person bought fewer than 25 garments every year. Fast forward 60 years, they’re purchasing nearly 70 pieces of clothing annually, or more than one new item per week. Source: Overconsumption Is Killing the Planet. What Can We Do? – Richa Syal

  • Read: Being a Humanist Technologist

    A *humanist technologist*, then, is someone who uses multidisciplinary skills to help organizations use or understand technology in order to improve personal and social conditions. Don’t get me wrong: I can code productively, and have built entire companies by doing so. But I’m not motivated by the code or the fundamental problems themselves. My motivation…

  • Read: What’s This for You Feed? Is It Algorithmic?

    When you subscribe to a Smart List, all the posts from the accounts on that list will show up at the top of your screen, as a feed. That’s the “firehose”, nothing removed. By default, Smart Lists you subscribe to also show up in your For You feed. In For You, we only show the…

  • Read: ChatGPT Turns One: How OpenAI’s AI Chatbot Changed Tech Forever – The Verge

    We don’t know yet if AI will ultimately change the world the way the internet, social media, and the smartphone did. Those things weren’t just technological leaps — they actually reorganized our lives in fundamental and irreversible ways. If the final form of AI is “my computer writes some of my emails for me,” AI…

  • Read: What A.I. Means for Buddhism

    He gives an example: “Pretend you’re driving and you’re late to a doctor’s appointment. You start whipping through traffic so that you can get there faster. Your sense of self is defined as ‘you contained within the car.’ When you need to get somewhere fast, it’s easy to behave selfishly, but driving is an inherently…

  • Matthew Effect

    Trying to track down the origin of a quote this morning, I learned about something called the Matthew Effect, inspired by this verse from the Bible: For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.…