Cam Pegg

✈️ DL169 BCN-JFK—Wow, what an amazing vacation! Hanging out with friends in Ibiza was a ton of fun, and then we had a great time exploring Barcelona. Back to reality now, I guess.

@artlung I’ve always though it was a bit of an odd construct too, but after hearing more of the story and more about Gaudí, it makes much more sense. It really is an incredible structure.

I’m not a church guy, nor am I a particular fan of the work of Antoni Gaudí, but I visited the Sagrada Família today and was completely blown away… it is an awe-inspiring building and the architect’s vision for what a church could (should?) be is brilliant. Regardless of your religious beliefs—or lack thereof—I would absolutely recommend visiting it at least once in your life.

✈️ VY3503 IBZ-BCN—Ibiza was not at all like I thought it would be, in the best possible way… such an amazing place!

✈️ VY3510 BCN-IBZ—We’re going to Ibiza! (👈🏻 So yeah… I do feel bad about that. I’m sorry.)

✈️ DL128 JFK-BCN—Finally going somewhere that’s not Atlanta. And doing it for fun, not work.

✈️ DL434 ATL-LGA—Finally, a flight home that is leaving on time!

✈️ DL569 LGA-ATL—Off to Atlanta. Again.

Here’s another piece that fits quite nicely with a lot of the themes running through my recent reading; this time, it’s Joan Westenberg’s AI maximalists and the danger of social Darwinism.

Futurists, tech moguls, and AI acolytes preach the gospel of AI supremacy with evangelical zeal; dissenters are dismissed as Luddites, clinging desperately to an obsolete past as the tides of progress threaten to sweep them away.

“Embrace AI or be left behind” may turn out to be an accurate assessment of our technological reality. I’m not here to deny that.

But it’s also a condescending and heartless demand rooted in long-debunked notions of social Darwinism. It threatens to subjugate humanity to the whims of an amoral algorithm, as it waves away the immense perils and dislocations that await us in an AI-dominated future.

Related thought: the more I think about it, the more I come to think that the biggest problem I have with much of the rhetoric around tech is the conflation of “innovation” with “disruption”—the entrenched belief that for an idea to be considered innovative, it necessarily needs to break something. That’s just silly.

Mandating RTO in the hope that people will quit goes way beyond Lumbergh-style out-of-touch management cluelessness… I’m not a psychiatrist, but surely that’s got to be borderline sociopathic behavior?

I preferred when we made fun of autocomplete. Foisting the burden of the entire global economy on it seems like a mistake.

This talk by tante from re:publica 2024, Empty Innovation is a perfect accompaniment to my recent reading.

Rotten Tomatoes needs to get rid of the audience score.

There is truly nothing valuable about it. The Acolyte sits comfortably with a 91% certified fresh rating, but 30% with the audience score, with *over 5000* ratings. Every single one is a whiny “real Star Wars fan” who is purportedly an expert on writing, acting, direction, and supposedly Disney and Lucasfilm’s corporate structure.

We all know the worst part of the Internet is the comments section. So why did Rotten Tomatoes add one?

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

This is not an acceptable use of the word. “Technology” and “hi tech” are not synonymous, and a technology that isn’t “hi,” isn’t necessarily ‘“low” in any meaningful sense.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, A Rant About “Technology”

Go read the whole thing. It doesn’t take long and it’s brilliant.

So I decided not to wait, and spent an hour or so this morning migrating all of my credentials from 1Password to Apple Keychain. With the exception of one passkey (which, TBH, I only set up to see how they worked), it was surprisingly easy.

One less subscription (and one less crap Electron app!). 🎉

Well, this kinda sucks. I’ve used Bartender for probably 10 years now, but have uninstalled it and switched to Ice.

I hope this report is correct, because 1Password has been flakey AF for me lately.

Paul Kafasis does a much better job of articulating what it’s like to see a Cybertruck in real life than me:

It was even more terrible than I had imagined it would be. The vehicle is awful on countless levels, and the price tag starts at eighty thousand dollars, and if you bought one I just don’t know what to say to you. I guess maybe “Why?!”, but if you actually replied, my brain would tune out because there can be no good answer.

(As an aside, the lady standing next to me and I shared one of those eye roll moments Kafasis mentions in his post when it rolled past, so can attest to that being a common reaction.)

I’ve just started reading The Innovation Delusion by Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell and oh-my-god-I-love-this-book-so-much-already. A few of my highlights from Chapter 1:

There is actual innovation, the profitable combination of new or existing knowledge, resources, and/or technologies. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that innovation is the motive force of economic change, capitalism, and indeed history itself. But genuine innovation is quite distinct from innovation-speak, a breathless dialect of word salad that trumpets the importance of innovation while turning that term into an overused buzzword.

[…]

The ideology of change for its own sake is a recipe for disaster in the wrong hands. Fortune magazine named Enron the most innovative company in America from 1996 to 2001, before the energy giant’s shady accounting practices came to light. Elsewhere, lawmakers have applied the “start-up mentality” to education with dreadful results, unleashing a flood of for-profit schools (such as the fraudulent Trump University) and the erosion of funding for public education. The warping of truth and democracy at the hands of conspiracy theorists and foreign governments has become one of the most significant political developments of our time. Yet no one delivers sunny TED Talks on the disruptive innovation of Alex Jones and the Russian intelligence agencies.

[…]

Our point here is that many people assume that innovation itself is a good, when in fact it can never be more than a means to an end.

[…]

But much of what passes for innovation is actually innovation-speak. In recent years, economists have noted that the rate of innovation has decreased since about 1970. To put it another way, there’s no evidence that actual innovation or technological change has increased during the period when everyone started talking about innovation. At its most extreme, innovation-speak actively devalues the work of most humans, especially those who do the dirty work that keeps our technological civilization running. And, as we will see, it fails to capture the essence of human life with technology—where maintenance and reliability are far more valuable than innovation and disruption.

I can think of about a dozen people I talk to on the regular who should read this book (but won’t because it would involve critically examining some of their closely held beliefs, and that would be TOO HARD).

Never set out to innovate, because more horror is done with that goal in mind than any other.
—Charles Eames

This is possibly the rightest right thing that anybody has ever been right about.