Brad Barrish

The boy and I have been listening to the audiobook of The Hobbit while we’re in the car together. I made an awful error getting the Andy Serkis version and it’s virtually unlistenable. The audio volume of the voice over is all over the place, the voices are exceptionally over-acted and irritating, we literally had to skip the singing parts. It’s so distracting and unenjoyable. Come to find that we need to listen to the Rob Inglis recording, which sounds like it will be much more pleasant.

The boy and I have been listening to the audiobook of The Hobbit while we’re in the car together. I made an awful error getting the Andy Serkis version and it’s virtually unlistenable. The audio volume of the voice over is all over the place, the voices are exceptionally over-acted and irritating, we literally had to skip the singing parts. It’s so distracting and unenjoyable. Come to find that we need to listen to the Robert Inglis recording, which sounds like it will be much more pleasant.

If you’ve installed OpenClaw and played with it, you know this Nat Friedman bit is probably true.

Friedman uses OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that runs on his computer, acting like a personal assistant. One day, his OpenClaw decided that he wasn’t drinking enough water, so Friedman instructed the agent to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he stays hydrated. According to Friedman, eventually the bot directed him to go to the kitchen and drink a bottle of water. It informed him that it was monitoring him via a connected camera in his home. “I’m going to watch to make sure you do it,” the bot supposedly said. Friedman did as he was told, and, moments later, the bot sent him a frame of him drinking the bottle of water and said good job. “I felt like I did do a good job,” Friedman said.

From Charlie Warzel’s Atlantic article, Too Much Is Happening Too Fast.

Micro.blog Publisher is live in the Obsidian Community

Earlier this month, I mentioned that I started posting directly from Obsidian. I’ve been posting more frequently, or at least it feels that way! I think part of the reason is that I’m no longer looking at Micro.blog. Consumption eats creation.

My Micro.blog Publisher plugin is now live in the new Obsidian Community, which feels pretty cool. It’s a tiny thing, but it shipped and I use it every day. For someone that has so many incomplete projects and ideas everywhere, it feels like an accomplishment.

A great interview with Maria Popova

David Perell interviewed Maria Popova on his How I Write podcast. I’ve been reading Maria’s blog, The Marginalian (f.k.a. Brain Pickings) for many years and it’s one of the greatest the web has to offer. I might have to re-listen and watch on YouTube. It was a great interview.

One of my favorite parts of the conversation was when AI came up, though I was maybe a little disappointed (not surprised) that she had never so much as played with it.

AI will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. AI will never write the great American poem, the great French poem, because it hasn’t suffered. I mean, AI has not the capacity to suffer. Because even if you try to make it suffer, meaning write a command that is to execute failure, it’ll already be succeeding at executing failure. It will never know what it’s like to collide with its own impossibility. So AI can only ever succeed.

She goes on to dismiss the idea of the tortured genius.

I don’t subscribe to the tortured genius myth. I don’t think it’s necessary to suffer in order to create. But I do think that out of what we have suffered and do suffer comes that restlessness to find meaning, to find beauty, to find wonder, to give voice and shape to what we feel that can be so lonely.

There are so many great moments in this interview.