Josh Gammon:

The industries built to help facilitate third spaces in our communities keep getting bought out and shut down. When I think about my stint at Blockbuster during college, I like to joke that I was one of the last employees. It’s not not true. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and I was working at one of Tulsa’s last remaining stores until it closed sometime in 2011.

Josh and I have been friends since high school and I remember occasionally going to visit him at his Blockbuster before it closed. Even before they announced its closing, the store felt like a relative everyone expected to die soon but wasn’t comfortable discussing. His store finally closed in April 2011 on the same day as half of the 21 stores in the Tulsa metro area, including the one in Broken Arrow I always went to as a kid. I was sad, but I hadn’t rented anything from a Blockbuster it probably 4 or 5 years.

It’s easy to look back and say Blockbuster should have innovated, and in my MBA program that’s exactly what my textbooks and professors said. They thought Blockbuster should have merged with someone bigger. Or they should get rid of late fees, or offer DVDs by mail, or do monthly subscriptions, or kiosks, or streaming. But Blockbuster actually did every single one of these. The reality is that they did these badly and too-late. Blockbuster did not die of a failure of imagination or even a failure to implement new ideas. Blockbuster died because consumer tastes were changing faster than they could. Continue reading →

Jynn Nelson, writing for The “Inside Rust” Blog:

At the time of writing, there are 1,281 open PRs to rust-lang/rust. This represents a staggering amount of time invested by both authors and reviewers. We have long had the problem that there are more people who want to write code than people willing to review it. With the advent of LLMs, this problem only gets worse.

If you’re technically minded, the policy they agreed to adopt is an interesting read, but the overview has its own summary:

It’s fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create.

Jon Udell:

I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features.

Jon made me realize how easily I accepted the term “human in the loop” in the first place. Of course we’re in the loop, we made the damn loops! Just saying “human in the loop” implies there might one day be a loop without humans at all, which some people are trying to sell but not many people want.

I tend to agree with Jon that “agent in the loop” is a more appropriate disclosure, but if AI was ever capable of doing what big tech said it could, we might end up saying “agent(s) in the loop.” Not because we rightfully acknowledge and wish to disavow machine-centric language, but rather that we would want to acknowledge when an AI agent was keystone reviewer of a loop. As of right now, humans are still better than AI at a large variety of important review tasks, and until that changes “human in the loop” is the better name because human operators are the most valuable part. Continue reading →

I’ve been a fan of Hank Green, and his brother John, since their “Vlogbrothers” series in YouTube’s early days. As well-meaning and well-spoken nerds, they rapidly assembled a community of like-minded terminally online followers. One channel quickly turned into a network, laying the groundwork for educational franchises like SciShow and Crash Course. But with a big audience and community, they’ve also made good. In 2012, the brothers launched a foundation aligned with their goal to “decrease world suck”, and since then it has granted $17 million to more than 100 charities. Earlier this year, Complexly, the company the Green brothers started to produce educational content for their channels and partners like PBS, became a non-profit after both brothers donated their equity in the company.

Which is why the recent fallout over Hank admitting to using ChatGPT for research feels like such a seismic internet event. Hank Green isn’t a faceless media conglomerate chasing a payout, he’s a beloved creator at the center of the internet’s fiercest debate about automation, scale, and burnout. Hank first addressed the issues in a reply to a tweet, but the original tweet to which Hank replied to was deleted, and later posted a longer Reddit apology, admitting he had fallen into an unhealthy habit of relying heavily on generated notes to keep up with his brutal publishing schedule. He announced a pause on several of his personal projects, conceding that “the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs… is not healthy for me or good for the world.” Continue reading →

(This post was originally on codybrom.micro.blog before I migrated b10g.xyz to micro.blog)

In the middle decades of my life so far, sometimes I’d become so feckless that I’d yearn to bedrudge my innermost angst in some kind of ruled book for notes. Each time I performed this ritual, and I must confess it was many times, I’d say to myself, “Aha! This office supplies purchase will surely cure my writer’s block.” Dear reader, it did not.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped buying new journals and notebooks. Not because I didn’t want to, but simply because it became too depressing to look at how wasteful it had become. I expect the good people at Field Notes in particular enjoyed some lavish parties at my expense.

But weirdly, I’ve never held any contempt for any of the blogs I’ve started and abandoned. My Xanga, then the blogs feature of MySpace, various iterations of self-hosted “tumble”-logs, Tumblr (obvs), multiple Wordpress sites and even now, as I write this, I technically already have a blog. The problem with my newest one is I almost never write for it because that requires me to commit MarkDown files to a GitHub repo, something I can’t do comfortably from most places. But that was the issue I had with the others as well. They were always a very specific place that was harder to write to anytime, and often required needlessly more formality to post than not.

I thought it was easier to buy a new journal than to deal with the sense of failure I felt about the last one. I suppose this post is also mostly journaling, and not “blogging” though I think I forget what the distinction is (if there ever was one).

Maybe this platform subscription will finally cure my writer’s block.

For most of the twentieth century, you couldn’t buy a Coca-Cola in the Soviet Union. It was one of the most American things in existence, and like Levi’s and Michael Jackson, the Iron Curtain kept it out. Continue reading →

Today is Apple’s 50th birthday. Tim Cook shared a letter about “50 Years of Thinking Different.” There are animated homepages, Paul McCartney concerts at Apple Park, commemorative t-shirts, David Pogue just published Apple: The First 50 Years and there’s a lot of well-earned celebration for a company that really has put a dent in the universe.

But I’ve been thinking different about a lost side of Apple’s legacy. The side that hides yaks in software. Continue reading →