Tootfinder

As we continue down this path of escalating nihilistic meme violence, it can feel like the worst things have become viral. We are drowning in the memetic effluent of a capitalist media that profits by maximizing engagement. But I wonder if anyone remembers "Pay it Forward?"
A movie came out in 2000 about a kid who started a viral kindness campaign. The idea was that you do something nice for someone else with the expectation that they do the same in the future. I never really saw the movie, but I do remember the time. There were a few weeks, maybe a few months, where people started doing it. People would just be randomly nice, and everything actually just started feeling better.
Over time, the world caught up. Capitalism consumed the whole thing, and life went back to normal. 9/11 happened the next year, and the US started down the path of becoming the most twisted and evil version of itself. But there was a short time that doing nice stuff was a viral meme, a thing that people just started doing.
Gun violence doesn't have to be the only viral meme we have. We can make good things happen too.

Curious that whenever someone shows me “the cool #AI flow” they built that’s supposed to be impressive, the conversation goes the same way:
Stage 1: “But you don’t understand. You don’t like AI because you haven’t used it right. Let me show you how much you can do it with.”
Stage 2: “Here are the steps in the flow and the instructions I feed to this agent / custom GPT / Claude project. I tell it to do X, reference document Y, and aim for Z.”
Stage 3: “Now, let me show you the results it gives.”
*Writes task, presses to run the prompt.*
Stage 4: “Umm sorry it’s taking a while. It’s fast but not instant. And by the way, the prompt isn’t perfect, you can definitely make it better. I just threw this together real quick the other day. It makes some mistakes, but it’s really good.”
Stage 5: “Uuuuuuh actually don’t look at the output.” *scrolls or stops screen share or pulls device away.*
“You know it’s already doing so well, if I do more prompt engineering it will get really good but I need to give it better instructions. And it ran just fine last night, I don’t know what’s up with it. And this is a cheap model, if we use another model it will be better.”
Stage 6: “You know, you really shouldn’t judge this so much. The technology will improve, it will get there sooner than you know and then you’ll regret not trying it sooner.”
So curious that this keeps happening 🤷‍♀️
#LLMs #work #tech #AIBubble

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

Joking aside, this advice is generally pretty good. Reducing social media usage *definitely* improves my mental health. The less time I use my phone, the better my focus is. Dopamine purges *really* help increasing creativity. Most of the things he's saying are pretty spot on, but I literally can't finish some tasks without help. My brain is just wired in a way that makes listening to a podcast while doing chores basically necessary. I just can't go to a normal gym. I go to a climbing gym because it make exercise actually interesting.
There are a lot of hacks ADHD folks have to use to do "normal" stuff. Neurotypical folks just can't seem to comprehend that.

I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.