The best tutors were the ones that gave you a task and then let you grind and self-learn; seeking help too early was gently ignored or chastized. An over-involved or -critical tutor always created a kind of learned helplessness instead. I would do a small step, then look for reassurance from the tutor, then move another small step, and on and on. A mistake was a confidence setback, instead of a learning opportunity.

I do wonder how the reliance on LLM coding (and other types of) assistants will create this same helpless behavior. I already feel it in myself on occasion, especially while it’s in the loop on troubleshooting. I think it’s important to learn how to break the loop and zoom out to see the broader problem set, or else we are doomed to hand off all control and understanding.

Perhaps training some of the most powerful computing elements off the whims of a bunch of users on reddit wasn’t the best idea

I’d say we’re already some amount of the way into the phase of the internet where “sameness” is everywhere. When AI gets its grubby little fingers into content generation (consuption wasn’t enough), it impacts everything. One thing that gives me hope is that in and among the sameness, the weirdness stands out and is celebrated even more.

Boy do I love weird, especially when it’s paired with “talented”. Those two things are a magical combo and hard to fake with AI.

And thus, I now share my favorite bit of weird from the recent internet, Angine de Poitrine

When Gibson talked about the future not being evenly distributed, was it uh…this?

Dear Audacity: Given the true variety of available pre-filled genres in the metadata listing, perhaps we could consider adding “Podcast” so I don’t need to type it each time?

I know humanoid robots are all the rage, but as I sit here on the 3rd day of a broken dishwasher, I find it’s appliances that I’m really partial to.

I recall writing a diary entry about a young crush on the family i386 desktop, naming it something innocuous, and saving it to a 3.5" floppy disk and hiding that in my desk.

…and that’s the oldest sounding sentence I have ever written

Dad, what were video games like when you were little?

This ain’t a lake, it’s a dammed river!

I have visceral memories of coming home from school and my head feeling overflowing with new things that I learned. I also remember thinking it paled in comparison to some of the things people a generation above me needed to hold in their head (ie. Math methods I was allowed to offload to a calculator). Will my kids generation feel the same if they’re allowed to offload to AI models? Or just different, higher level ideas filling their young minds to the brim?