"I'm sorry, you're out of time, we have to move on. Senator, what's your response? You have three minutes."

Watching a political debate these days feels useless. Candidates get two minutes to make their case, and their opponents get even less time to reply. I'm reminded of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, where he argues that what passes for debate on TV is nothing more than an audition or a performance review. It is only an opportunity to come up with catchy sound bites or to appear likable.

On the other hand, if you want long-form, one-sided podcasts where politicians can babble uninterrupted for hours without being challenged, you can tune into Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, or whichever pseudo-comedian is trending.

Our choices seem locked between traditional media, where you barely have time to clear your throat, and one-sided online echo chambers.

So why not a third option? Two candidates sitting down in a long-form podcast format. Debate the issues, prove your point, and take turns. No commercial breaks required. If it takes three hours, it takes three hours.

This format isn't new, in fact, it plagues social media right now. The problem is that it's mostly driven by influencers, or people of no consequence, chasing viral moments. They are either doing gender wars, or arguing whether it was a Nazi salute or not. When you switch to traditional media, the talking heads on CNN, Fox, or Piers Morgan's show are just that. Talking heads.

Of course, this might never happen because candidates have almost zero incentive to subject themselves to it. If they're unprepared or rely on weak arguments that don't hold up past a 15-second clip, a three-hour deep dive could destroy their campaign.

Still, it would be nice to see Michiganders give this a shot in the coming month.

We’ve given in to using LLMs for writing at work. From emails and Slack comments to full-on documentation, everything is AI-generated. However, I’ve realized it only ever saves me time when I’m being lazy. That is, it’s great at converting meetings into transcripts, summarizing those transcripts into action items, and keeping information accessible.

But it’s pretty bad because the result is ridden with invisible errors. But what counts as an error if you trust the LLM and never meticulously read the output? And how much time are you really saving if you end up spending that time proofreading?

I went back to a meeting transcript after a developer struggled to turn my AI-generated summary into a coherent ticket. Looking through the source transcript, I noticed that at one point it recorded the word "embroidery." I mean, we work for a large telecom company, the chances of me using that word are slim to none. Nevertheless, the AI summarized the conversation and included "embroidery" as an action item.

In the words of Claude himself:

It's not just X, it's Y.

I chuckled, but it made me think about all the BI slop we generate daily in the name of using AI technology. It feels helpful. Creating massive documents makes us look productive. Generating a pull request with changes across hundreds of files seems impressive. Asking AI to validate an idea feels instructive. Unless you take the time to scrutinize the results.

I can only imagine what the world will look like when we feed all this slop back into the machine.

Last week I opened Edge to test my Internet connection, because that's the only thing I use it for, and noticed something new. Right beneath the address bar was a new bar with a button offering to let the browser launch automatically whenever I start my computer. That was strange. Yes, I open the browser the moment the computer starts, but why would they want to do that for me?

And just now, I opened Chrome, and saw the exact same message but for Chrome:

It looks innocent enough. We all start browsing the web right away when we turn on our computers, so what's the big deal here? Well, the big deal is that everyone wants to be the front page. Defaults matter. While we all want to believe we have agency, the numbers don't lie. Most of us never change the default settings. Just last year, Google paid Apple close to $20 billion just to remain the default search engine on Apple products.

While we're all distracted by the AI race, the one race that actually matters is who remains the front page of the Internet. Microsoft is trying to claim that spot by loading its browser at Windows startup. Now Google is trying to win that space back by doing the same with its own browser.

On my Mac, Anthropic has been very aggressive about trying to load Claude automatically. I suspect every company will be pursuing this aggressively in the near future. The quality of your product is secondary to the exposure it gets. Not even benchmarks matter if you can't be on the user's front page.

Google still holds the front page of the Internet, and that makes up for its AI model not being at the top of the benchmarks.

Note there are no options to dismiss. Only "Set later"

But don't let them take this space from you. They are all fighting for your attention. I urge you to simply consider pressing the little X button they tuck into the corner. It's your computer, use it the way that suits you best.

This was so casually uttered by LG executives in their sales pitch to advertising companies.

We own the glass.

What they mean is, they own your tv. They own everything on it. You may have paid for the box, but they own the glass. They can run anything they want on it, and you have agreed, in the terms and conditions, that you will inform anyone entering your household that the TV may record them without warning.

TVs come equipped with microphones, wifi radio, and tracking software. That’s enough to monitor everything that’s happening around it.

If you haven't watched the research video essay published by Gamer Nexus, I highly recommend it. I've said it many times before, TVs are cheap because you aren't simply watching them, they are watching you and listening, and reporting back to the mothership. This info is then used to sell you more stuff.

What scares me in all this is that the solution I often tell people may no longer be true. I often tell people, just disconnect your TV from the network and you are all set. Now imagine just for a second. What if they add a cellular radio to the device? One with an esim. Then that is it. You can no longer disconnect your device from the internet. They now own the glass in your house, and have a permanent connection that you cannot disable.

They own the glass. We are merely vessels to their business.

I was debugging an issue and I found a link to my blog!

Interviewing a senior software engineer

Biggest challenge so far in any coding project?

My biggest challenge isn't code per se. It is explaining to someone else what I am trying to do with the code. It is surprisingly hard to convert the thoughts in my head (or the code) into something coherent someone else can understand.

I still believe that. I don't even remember when we had this discussion, but I'm glad Walter has kept it up. And a great reminder of my priorities.

If you weren't coding, what would you be doing?

I'd be a writer. (not a good one, but one nonetheless)

Yep.

The aliens arrived, and their first instinct was to check our networks. They accessed one of our most important websites. A government website. Unfortunately, they were met with a reCAPTCHA.

Are you a robot?

They are not robots. But after fifteen minutes of squinting and trying to select all the fire hydrants and traffic lights, they gave up. Defeated by a checkbox, they returned to the stars.

A couple weeks ago, the CEO of Snap was all over the news in the US because he and his wife made a large donation. The weird part about it was that every news outlet that covered it had an acrobatic title where they didn't specifically say how much they donated, yet insisted on that $550 Million amount.

When you read the article a bit deeper, you can do the math. They donated one hundredth of that amount. So I wondered, why did they inflate the amount in the first place? It looked like a PR stunt.

This past couple weeks, I worked on a video to explain what really happened and how we should take this news.

Enjoy

I think I finally figured it out. That is, the reason why AI written articles suck:

Both the author and I are reading the article for the first time.

When an article is insightful I don't even mind the emdashes or that the stark truth is not X, but Y. A good take can transcend even llmism. But then you have questions, and somehow the author doesn't even know what you are talking about, it's simply because they are discovering the insight at the same time you are.

They were busy, they didn't have time to write. As a consequence, they only dedicated enough time to skim the result before publishing. They don't know what's in it. You can't ask them what they were thinking when they came up with the insight because, well, they didn't think.

The great article sucks because there is nobody behind it.

It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.

I am a father of twin boys. There is a question I often think about. It often appears as a midlife crisis where I am not sure when I became a man responsible for a family.

It looked so easy for my father. It was as if he was born into it. He was a leader, a strong man, one that an entire community could rely on. When does that kick in for me? When do I become this leader? Or have I already become?

That's what I was thinking when I wrote this short story about my father 10 years ago. I couldn't find a way to describe him, without mentioning clocks. It was fitting since he loved them so much.

I hope you enjoy this "Ode to my Father". Happy Father's day to you all.

PS: please excuse the AI generated images, I'm still trying to find the best way to present it. The text was entirely written by me in 2016-2017.