We're still two weeks off from the shortest day of the year, but it can't start going the other way soon enough. Tonight I hit 6, and was like, I've got six hours before I'm going to go to bed. That's a long-ass time. So much time for activities!
So what am I doing with that time? I am starting to get back into coding, sort of. Getting an AI subscription has made it fun again because I don't have to deal with the drudgery of stuff that's boring. It also means a lot of waiting around for it to do stuff. Obviously I'm playing a lot of pinball, and my scores are starting to average a lot higher. I'm closing in on my thousandth game on Stern Insider, too, most of which are on our machine. I'm writing more, though not publishing everything, necessarily. Oh, I cranked out a basic lighting rig in Vectorworks right before my subscription ran out, with 50-ish instruments. I'll sit down with that again soon I'm sure. I have a song in mind.
I do feel anti-social to an extent, but I'm very much connecting this to the life of a remote worker. To be fair, we recently went to a show with a friend, we're going to a show this week, and Simon is involved in a theater class that by extension gets me out of the house. And we have lots of plans the rest of the month.
I'm so over early darkness though.
Simon is going through a phase where he says he's bored and wants me to do something with him. This makes sense, because I'm pretty sure that he's outgrowing some of the gaming stuff he was into, as that used to be a primary leisure-time activity for him. But I also find myself telling him that he needs to learn to be bored.
When you're bored, I think it makes you more curious. Being curious leads to new adventures, or at the very least, new interests. Curiosity keeps you learning, too. So in that sense, boredom is a very useful thing. It also gives you time to reflect, gain perspective and rest the mind.
Venturing into social commentary (because where else did you think I would go with this?), I really believe that folks are often incapable of boredom. And yes, it's because of those doom-scrolling devices, or more specifically, anti-social apps. You see it everywhere, even at a place as over-stimulating as a theme park. If there's even the slightest moment of boredom, out come the phones. If you don't see it, you're probably doing the same thing.
Try this: Next time you're waiting for something, or queueing, at the airport or the grocery store, keep your phone in your pocket. Look around, watch people. Observe. If you're really ambitious, try talking to people. If my eye contact-avoiding autistic ass can do it, so can you. I think whatever momentary human connection you have will be far more rewarding than pulling out your dumbphone.
The cure to boredom isn't electronic stuff, it's curiosity.
You know how the Internet can make something untrue fester into alleged fact? This is one of those things, and it drives me nuts.
Getting crystal clear ice is a neat bar trick that is typically achieved by freezing it in a directional manner. It's why ice on the surface of a lake is typically a lot clearer than what you'd find deeper. In your freezer, this can be achieved by putting the water in a deep container that's insulated around the sides, but not the top. If the upper half is separated by small holes, the top bits freeze clear, while the lower part is cloudy.
What almost every words-on-the-Internet say is that this is because it forces the "impurities" to the bottom. This is bullshit. If this were actually true, then the purest of distilled and filtered water would freeze clear in conventional ice cube trays. But it doesn't. Distilled water has effectively no mineral content. The reason has nothing to do with minerals or whatever people claim is in the water. It's because of gases. I imagine it's mostly nitrogen, oxygen and CO2 (i.e., air). It's the air that gets forced down in the directional freezing.
Seriously, every "article" or how-to says it's impurities, but unless you consider air an impurity, it just ain't true.
I had an interesting conversation with my therapist, relative to my recent involuntary departure from Facebook. After a week of FOMO, I was pretty over it. (Sidebar: She asked if it bothered me about the non-justice of AI enforcement, and you'd think it would grind on me, but I don't really care.) But I told her that I still had an urge to post and/or share whatever happened to be on my mind.
It was her observation that most of her clients likely do it for the usual reasons, as in the likes or comments, the dopamine, or whatever they think it's doing to move the needle on some issue. But I'm a weird outlier (as usual), in that I never did it for any specific audience. This blog is kind of in that category too, in that I don't know who is reading it or why, but I don't really care either. My reason is that writing something down, and making it public or semi-public, allows me to process it and move on. That makes sense given the noise, thought spirals and constant context switching that goes on in my head. For whatever reason, writing composition is something that I can do quickly and clearly, in a way that the thought soup can't do. Making it non-private also, in my way of thinking, forces me to be authentic and honest.
When I see a cool music performance or funny comedy sketch, my first instinct is to share it, so it's a bummer when I can't do that. Oddly enough, if we're going back 15 years, this is the social behavior that social media was supposed to facilitate. Before the algorithms, ads, brands and ephemeral nonsense that fills the screens now. I still believe in this as a concept, I just don't know if there's a business model for it. I think paying something annually for it is the model, but I don't know if it's something that people would actually buy it.
There is another reason to post, which a friend of mine described as scrapbooking. This is where I wish I could have retrieved the data (their export after the fact appears broken), because especially as a parent, it's fun to see what you and your kid were up to ten years back. Sure, it's also an easy way to share the same with friends and family, but to me it's the analog to photo albums, only better annotated and tagged with locations.
I've been coding around software that covers the former scenario a bit, though I imagine it could to the latter. While I'm very much thinking about this for my own amusement, along with a few close friends, I suppose it could be a wider used thing, if they'd pay for it. It's not a complicated thing to build, and it's kinda fun to build, so even if it's just for me it's worth it. Then I can get the thoughts out.
So here's a fun thing I've come to realize. Whatever gains I've been able to make by using AI to write code, I lose in the time it takes for it to write code. Stay with me...
When I was coding full-time and not managing, my output was not as voluminous as that of my peers. Now I know that it's because I have ADHD, but at the time, I figured that maybe I was lazy. I now better understand that the then-undiagnosed condition made it hard for me to concentrate on the work, especially if I wasn't able to get into the zone, which I also now understand to be what they call hyperfocus. See also: working in a cubicle office with countless distractions. While I like to think that I wrote quality stuff, it was definitely hard to write as much as others.
Fast forward to today, and I'm mostly writing code for fun on my own time. I've been getting a little deeper into it lately because the AI tools are like having a junior to mid-level developer pairing with you. If you give it the right directions and scope, something that definitely takes some time to learn, the outcomes are pretty OK. But there is a dark side to this as well, and it comes with the whirling icons or messages like "noodling." As text scrolls by and Claude does its thing, the desire to go do something else is overwhelming. The return time for usable code (assuming it compiles) can be at least 30 seconds, which is an eternity for someone with ADHD. I've estimated that in the course of five minutes, my inner dialogue may context shift at least a hundred times. Thirty seconds is a very big window.
I've been unknowingly developing coping skills for ADHD my entire life. When I got the diagnosis four years ago (also ASD), I learned about how neurodivergence forces people to find the shortcuts, the hacks, the compensation for having a brain that's wired differently. But this is the first time since then that I've found something totally new that I'm not used to. And it's crazy that I'm trying to compensate for a machine that's supposed to be helping me!
A lot of this is still right-sizing the work for the AI. When you ask it to take a big swing, it often gets stuff very wrong. But when you model entities up front, think about efficient ways to do stuff, and really design a solution, it's like giving the AI well-formed ideas and letting it figure out the glue. That's the boring part anyway, so knock yourself out, Claude. I do wonder how folks stay focused with the start-stop rhythm of using AI.
I know this is obvious, that everyone knows the aesthetic, but why were there no railings on anything in Star Wars? It's already weird that everything was built with cavernous pits that went on forever, but you know, maybe have something there to keep anyone from falling?
Imagine being a building inspector or OSHA person working for the Empire. You can literally phone it in, because it doesn't matter if there's a deck with a giant hole that goes, somewhere. Need a bridge through that shaft where the tractor beam controls are? No problem, I'm sure that narrow walkway will be fine.
Meanwhile, at the rebel base, there are more trip hazards than you can possibly imagine. How do the droids get around? Don't they have a union?
I don't think the average person looking down at their phone could survive in the Star Wars universe.