Yes, I’m a relentless fanboy of whatever Paul Ford writes, but this is a truly wonderful post about what makes AI so addictive and impossible to look away from. He frames AI as a technology that truly has no shame because “it possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its carefree attitude toward plagiarism.” And so:

By aggregating the world’s knowledge, chomping it into bits with GPUs, and emitting it as multi-gigabyte software that somehow knows what to say next, we’ve made the funniest parody of humanity ever. These models have all of our qualities, bad and good. Helpful, smart, know-it-alls with tendencies to prejudice, spewing statistics and bragging like salesmen at the bar. They mirror the arrogant, repetitive ramblings of our betters, the horrific confidence that keeps driving us over the same cliffs. That arrogance will be sculpted down and smoothed over, but it will have been the most accurate representation of who we truly are to exist so far, a real mirror of our folly, and I will miss it when it goes.

I finally read this very long essay about Rewilding the Internet that’s been making the rounds. It’s about 30 mins of your time and in my opinion it’s time well spent.

It’s about what internet-builders can learn from the field of ecology, where the word “rewilding” has a very specific meaning. It’s essentially about systems thinking, which I know a lot of us care about deeply.

Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet. For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world. Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. Rewilding is a way to collectively see the counterintuitive truth; today’s internet isn’t too wild, even if it feels like that. It’s simply not wild enough.

In the end, I can’t help but think that though I love these ideas, it’s just… too late. I hope I’m wrong though.

In Crazy Charlie’s Window Michael Lopp says something that has stuck with me for a couple of weeks now (emphasis mine):

The reason, decades later, I frequently think of this unpaid weekend adventure sifting through a year of garbage, hardware, and knick-knacks is because it is when I discovered the compounding non-obvious value from doing exceptional work.

It’s a great story, well worth reading. Matthew Ström makes this point in a slightly different way in The polish paradox (again, emphasis mine):

The polish paradox is that the highest degrees of craft and quality are in the spaces we can’t see, the places we don’t necessarily look. Polish can’t be an afterthought. It must an integral part of the process, a commitment to excellence from the beginning. The unseen effort to perfect every hidden aspect elevates products from good to great.

Doing good work and getting the details right result in better outcomes, yes. But it’s about more than that. It’s not just about the job, it’s about us. The sense of accomplishment and purpose that comes from doing great work is an intrinsic reward that is life-giving far beyond the confines of our immediate job duties.

Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale have some hard truths about what happens when leaders take on too much of their team’s workloads in If you’re doing their job, who’s doing your job?

But now we have an overwhelmed team working for an overwhelmed boss. This is where cheap problems go to get expensive. You are chronically unavailable because you’re slammed. Your team can’t get your attention on a thing so they make their best guess. Their best guess turns out to be wrong. All the work needs to get redone. […]

As a manager at any level in an organization, a key part of your job is figuring out how to get the most important things done for the organization. Yes, the hard part of that job is sometimes the doing, and you can pitch in. But when your team is overwhelmed, when there is structurally too much to do, it’s your job is to figure out what’s most important. Where is that work happening?

Will Larson really got me thinking with his advice on the best ways to push your organization to improve. It’s essential work, but “organizations can only absorb so much improvement at a given time before they reject the person providing the feedback.” We have to balance the feedback about how to improve with guidance on how operate within the existing environment:

When I focused on how the environment could change to make my team more successful, I was usually technically correct, but usually didn’t help my team very much. Because work environments change slowly, it benefits your team more to give them feedback about how they can succeed in their current environment than to agree with them about how the current environment does a poor job of supporting them. Agreeing feels empathetic, but frames them as a bystander rather than active participant in their work.

I like Mike Hall’s tips for interviewers in his notes about behavioral interviews. The crux of the behavioral interview style is this:

I’d rather know what you’ve done than what you think, and I have adjusted my style a little to help candidates. I try to explain my process up front. “I’m going to ask you about times you did things because I really want to get down to how you work and what your experience is.”

It is, however, very important to realize that adjacent or related experiences are completely valid and should be encouraged:

If you want to build a diverse, vibrant team, or if you’re not one of those disasters of a manager who doesn’t understand that you need people at several levels of experience on a well-rounded team, then you need to think of a behavioral style not as a way to narrowly insist on stories that describe the exact thing you need done. Instead, you need to think in terms of the competencies the thing requires, and think of examples to ask for that reflect those competencies, not an exact task.

This is a good tip for candidates as well—don’t talk in generalities. Be specific about the ways in which you have solved a particular challenge in the past, what worked well, and what you have learned/would do differently next time.

I’ve followed danah boyd’s work for a long time so when she says something I listen. Danah has been researching teens and technology her entire career. In Struggling with a Moral Panic Once Again she weighs in on the “is social media causing the teen mental health crisis?” debate:

I wish there was a panacea to the mental health epidemic we are seeing. I wish I could believe that eliminating tech would make everything hunky dory. Sadly, I know that what young people are facing is ecological. As a researcher, I know that young people’s relationship with tech is so much more complicated than pundits wish to suggest. I also know that the hardest part of being a parent is helping a child develop a range of social, emotional, and cognitive capacities so that they can be independent. And I know that excluding them from public life or telling them that they should be blocked from what adults value because their brains aren’t formed yet is a type of coddling that is outright destructive.

That last point is pretty important I think. Maybe one reason all the arguments about teens and social media resonate with so many parents is that we are the ones with the deeply troubled relationships with it… Anyway, there’s some great advice for parents in the essay as well. Also see The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.