I track my reading on BookWyrm and always wished it looked a little more playful. So I built a cozy living room for my shelves, with Toronto's weather in the window, decorations for the season, a sleepy cat and the occasional visitor.
Most LinkedIn photos carry no information and the AI generated memes wore me out, so I built a browser extension that hides post images and videos. What is left is a boring feed where the real updates show up in seconds.
A talk at Trajectory Labs mapped the camps of AI safety. All of them assume AI isn't there yet. I'm not convinced, and I don't think a superintelligence is needed for things to go badly wrong.
Dave Winer asked for a web of Markdown, Andrew Shell built a browser for it, and my engine now publishes an llms.txt and a Markdown twin of every page.
AI-flavoured sameness makes me tune out before I have really read anything, so my personal posts now start as a draft written in German - a language my prompts never touch.
People are focused on who needs to watermark their AI content when the real problem is that we haven't learned how to validate claims on the internet. AI or not.
Treating an AI agent like a person stops you checking its work, and that would still be a problem even if these systems turn out to have an inner life - which I get at by way of our vacuum robot, a colleague's AI intern, and an engineer who says you should never test your agents.
The argument about whether AI photography counts is old and boring; the question worth having is where a photograph gets its meaning - and whether a machine that can make meaning too quietly writes the photographer out of the conversation. The same tool points two ways, and what settles which is whether you had something to say before you opened the box.
I ran a full comparison of nine different models - from remote giants to my local setup - and found that how finished your draft is matters way more than which model you pick, especially when privacy and speed are non-negotiable.
A small toolkit of habits for using AI honestly - tagging what it touched, owning what you ship, and setting the tool up to poke holes in your thinking instead of flattering it.