home | about

That Instagram post inspired me to write reflectively. I know that I joke at work that I am the computer or a brain in a jar -- so quick and refined is my technical mojo -- but that's only from mind. For heart stuff, I'm all about humanities, art and creativity.

I can sit and effortlessly pump out an essay or 20k-40k word book. Don't need a plan or outline at first. I always end up making one anyway because it adds excitement and lets me weave more from the space of "oh yes, and then after that I'll..." but the flow flows anyway.

In 2008 I visited my author friend Victor Verney who said his hands hurt too much (age isn't fun) and he couldn't type his draft for a military history book. I said let me get my laptop and you speak it to me while I type it. We did just that for months until the ~120k words draft was done. It wasn't efficient, and it wasn't work. It was joy: just a couple friends hanging out in what was left of summer Iowa weather sipping beer and celebrating history, knowledge and language. THE STUFF OF DREAMS! (Victor has since passed away.) A voice dictation tool or LLM (if it existed) could have done it all and a dictation tool was used a bit at the end for editor notes revisions, but whatever. We had a blast. No regrets.

One day a decade later I found an amazing 1990s BASIC programming book on archive.org by Ethan Winer. I thought it was brilliant but the diagrams and screenshots were low quality and it was locked behind Adobe Digital Editions book lending. So I reached out to the author and asked if I could rebuild the whole thing in free and open source applications with modern SVG graphics and FreeDOS screenshots, and any text revisions he wanted for a new edition. It was a massive book and I only had some nights and a bit of the weekend free every week, so it took a year, and how we loved it. Suddenly we found ourselves steeped into a friendship built on gratitude, nostalgia, core software development foundational principles and so much social commentary and humour. It was one of my all-time favourite experiences as a book lover. Ethan was kind enough to send me a signed copy of the physical book. I treasure it. An LLM could have chewed through it and fixed all errata within hours, but yuck! Two humans shared human joys and pride instead, followed by an enduring friendship.

Modern AI LLMs offer no humanities. It doesn't inspire my creativity, collaboration, friendship, nor any celebration of literacy and culture. Brought forth through the consumptive and exploitative mechanisms of capitalism, it steals, isolates, devours and erases people so that all that is valued are "the outputs" and "the gain$".

Journeys matter. As a person, I am a journey. When there are too many abstractions, automated processes, optimizations and hand offs, there's no journey and the why of life I gift myself becomes reduced and bland. So I continue to not reach for this technology very much. It's fun for dorky Overwatch pictures sometimes and science/data analytics can benefit from some of the tech. But on the whole, I'd rather reach for a pen, and a friend.