Fair warning, I’m going to wade into the whole AI/ChatGPT discussion. It’s been discussed to death, but I’m going to jump in anyway. Feel free to click away if you’re already sick of the topic. I’m going to use “ChatGPT” as a stand-in for ML/AI-driven writing tools, even though it’s not the only one on the market and there’s certainly more to come. Anyway, it seems like ChatGPT is poised to automate away a lot of writing work, and we’re in for tools that are going to produce a whole lot of content of varying quality and accuracy whether we like that prospect or not.

Most people, I think, tend only to think about their actions and interactions as one-offs. That is, we think “what happens if I do this” and consider the impact from that perspective. But what if we considered the outcomes and impacts if everybody (or even a lot of people) do the same thing? We might act differently. And maybe we should think that way more often. Let’s talk about What If Everybody Did It (WIEDI)? (Don’t worry, there’s a tie-in to open source and community in here, too…)

I had a few snarky opening lines for this post, but decided that was a bit unfair. Let’s just say that people get very impassioned about tech events and getting talks accepted. If you’re on the conference committee, it can be… intense, sometimes, managing the needs of an event versus people’s deep interest in being one of the speakers. I thought it’d be helpful to give some insights into why talks are and aren’t accepted....

Today is, if I don’t miss my count, 100 days since I started the 100 day blogging challenge. I’ve updated the site every day since November 21st last year. It’s been a good exercise. Some days I don’t have a lot left in the tank after work, some days I feel like I could do two or three posts. Focusing here has been great for breaking the Twitter habit. Question is whether I plan to keep going or take a break....

About a month ago I bought a Beelink SER5 Pro Mini PC and have been using it as a desktop and test machine. I thought I’d give a quick review in case anybody else is looking at one of these for their own use. The SER5 was a bit shy of $400 with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H, 32GB of RAM, and a 500GB NVMe drive. Its footprint is about 4.5 inches (almost) square, and not quite 2 inches tall. That’s 126mm wide, 113mm long, 42mm tall if you prefer metric. It’s got 3 USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port, a 1GB Ethernet port, 2 HDMI ports, and a single USB-C port.

Chalk up one more orbit around the Sun for me. Another year older and maybe a little wiser. Certainly the stretch between the last birthday and this one has been full of life lessons. Not making much of a fuss about the birthday thing this year, just sort of quietly observing the occasion and spending time with the fam. A big slice of cake, some good food, perhaps just a sip or three of good Scotch, and a couple of presents to open....

At the risk of sounding like a Jerry Seinfeld bit, what is the deal with night mode? I was in a meeting today where somebody touted night mode in a tool as a Really Good Thing™ and I’m perplexed. I’m not perplexed about what night mode (or dark mode) is. I might be a bit dense, but not quite that dense. I’ve experimented with tons of themes, etc., over the years on Linux desktop environments....

I was sad to learn over the weekend that former president Jimmy Carter has entered hospice care. But I’m not surprised that President Carter is facing the end of his life the same way he’s behaved his entire life – with dignity and grace. Carter was the first person I voted for for president, with an asterisk. The asterisk being that I was in middle school and I voted for Carter in a mock election....

Nice post I discovered on the Orange site today, " I don’t like making the best things." Short summary, trying to make the “best” things gets in the way of doing things we enjoy. Specifically the author talks about blogging less often after they discovered they “only want to publish the best things, so I didn’t publish at all.” Not exactly a new concept, but one that we probably all need to hear or read on a regular basis....

Anybody else feel like the barrage of app and operating system updates is getting to be a bit much? Not only the pace of updates, which shows no signs of slowing, but also the continual expansion of devices that require updates. Keeping your computer updated was no big deal. Then gaming consoles, smartphones, tablets, e-readers, smart watches, smart TVs, routers… it’s easy to feel like you spend more time updating devices than using them....