Category — Uncategorized

Monday marks the 19th anniversary of the first Friday Blog Roundup back in 2006.

It was a few weeks after I started the blog, and I realized that I was reading stuff and wanted to talk about it with other people, so the Roundup was born. Every week, I would post things that I thought about after I closed the browser. If I bookmarked the piece, or I talked about it with someone else, or I thought about it at a random moment, it went on the list.

I like the idea that sharing is baked into the structure of the internet. It’s literally a tool for sharing information, perspective, advice; an infinite backyard fence in the form of a hyperlink. I am grateful for a world where there are still writers slogging past the words produced by AI to deliver their own unique thoughts to get under our skin and shift the way we see the world.

I’m going to ask you on Monday to share posts you still think about, so go look at your bookmarks and get ready to tell us the words that have stuck with you.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “July 4th Anniversaries” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “No children. Just us. And it was more than enough.” (The Next 15,000 Days)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Scientist on the Roof feels time poor, and I related to her missing minutes (hours?) 100%. She writes: “I am not sure if I am just so disorganized… or if I am experiencing some weird time-related quantum phenomena.. or if some things are just taking longer than they should.” I also feel like there are tasks each day that should happen, and yet… I don’t have time to do them.

The Next 15,000 Days writes about a thoughtless comment delivered by her uncle about a recent trip to the beach. She summaries the moment: “I sat in silence, struck by the sheer thoughtlessness of it all. How wrapped up people can be in their own joys, blind to the quiet sorrows seated right beside them. How carelessly words can fall, without the faintest thought of who might be catching them.” It’s a good reminder to think before you speak.

The roundup to the Roundup: 19 years of Roundups. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 11 – 18) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

It will come with zero surprise when I say that I worry about the future. (Unless, I guess, this is your first time reading my blog.) I worry about my future. I worry about the twins’ future. I worry about all 8 billion people on the planet, especially because I thought there were only 7 billion until I Googled that fact. I still remember when our minds were all blown because we hit 6 billion, and that wasn’t that long ago.

Anyway.

I am deeply curious about this upcoming book, Could Should Might Don’t, because it does not contain the word “will” in the title. As in, “AI will take our jobs.” A lot of my anxiety comes from believing the “will” repeated over and over again, about all possibilities. Maybe people think that it makes them sound more confident to put it in the definitive, but unless we are in control of the outcome (“I will walk out of the room if you don’t stop singing R.E.O. Speedwagon”), we should probably use “could” or “might.”

I’ve been trying to remember other times when the future felt so deeply uncertain and scary, including after 9-11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2016 election. While difficult times followed all of those events, things rarely turned out as predicted.

Clearly, AI is on my mind, so I clicked on a New York Times quiz (gift link) to see how well a person could identify AI-created video content.

I was terrible at this. The 3 I got correct, I got correct by guessing. And that guessing was based on how many AI or non-AI options came before it — as in, if there were just two AI-created videos in a row, surely this one must be non-AI… right?

I am curious to hear if you do better with this. I find the whole thing worrisome more than exciting.

I’ll start this by admitting that I haven’t actually tried ChatGPT (or any LLM beyond trying to engage Pi into talking about books with me a few months ago), but the end statement of this essay summed up exactly how I feel: I would rather see a person’s prompt than the LLM’s output.

I would rather see how people are using the tool. I’d rather see people’s Google searches and see how they word them or use operators than see the answer. I am so curious to learn how to optimize the questioning, but I’m not really excited to read what the LLM finds.

I will get around at some point to checking out ChatGPT or another LLM — I’m not against it as a tool. But I find people’s usage of it more interesting than the tool itself.

Do you use an LLM? What do you use it for?

Quentin slid wildly into his toddler stage. One night he was a sweet, cuddly baby, happy to curl up on my lap and have his back stroked for an hour.

The next night, he was trying to popcorn on my lap. Popcorning is when guinea pigs jump up and down, which is how they express joy. He popcorns every night when it’s time for bed because he gets a timothy hay treat, and he’ll popcorn on the floor when we’re playing, but lap time has always been calm time. Until now.

He comes out to greet me every morning when I come downstairs, and he gets Zoomies before bed. (Bedtime is just very very exciting.) I really love this guinea pig, though I miss my Beorn still very much.