️Jack Baty Daily
Daily notes from Jack about everything

Monday, March 27, 2023

mu/Mu4e 1.10 was recently released and it has some nice updates. Of course it's broken in Doom Emacs. This happens every time. I've worked around the issues by disabling evil-collection. I do wonder if dealing with all this in Emacs is the best use of my time. I spend hours each week futzing with Emacs, and not all of it is just for fun.

I'm typing this in NeoVim because I don't have enough problems with my process right now.

From Freddie deBoer's newsletter:

you don’t need to have actual human conversations, anymore - you can just let ChatGPT talk for you, farming out the most basic and essential of human endeavors to a batch of code that has no consciousness, morals, or accountability. All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working from home driven by Adderall you got via Zoom from a pill-mill doctor, you order dinner through an app (so that you don’t have to talk to an actual person on the phone), masturbate to online porn, watch several dozen videos on YouTube, none of which you’ll remember even three days later, then take two Xanax to put yourself to sleep. That’s progress now, the steady accumulation of various tools to avoid other human beings, leaving people free to consume #content that is by design totally, existentially disposable, throw-away culture that asks nothing of us and which we don’t remember because neither creator nor audience wants to invest enough for remembering to make sense.

Freddie deBoer, You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now.

Jesus, that stings a little.

I stopped writing code or starting new projects mainly because it feels like too much work to get to anything useful. It hadn't occurred to me that asking something like ChatGPT to write code for me can get me to maybe 80% in just minutes. The more I think about this, the more I think it might be time to dive in.

Speaking of starting projects, I am about to recreate this daily.baty.net blog completely from scratch using Hugo. I'll build all my own templates, etc. That will either put me off Hugo forever, or I'll understand it better and become more comfortable with doing my own customization.