lesser daemon: brent bailey's personal weblog

25

Apr

Just Because It's Useful Doesn't Mean It's Good

Independent of yesterday's dive into a "useful" application of AI, discourse erupted on Bluesky over Hank Green saying he didn't think the "useless" critique holds water anymore. For the most part people are very angry at the perception of ceding any rhetorical ground to Big AI, which is a fair position to take. Green also put it in a fairly condescending "just asking questions" kind of way, which doesn't necessarily help his case. I don't love the phrasing but there is something to his point: people are finding utility in these tools whether we like it or not, and I

5 min read

24

Apr

Research Models and the Future of Search

In my self-appointed role as moral and practical judge of artificial intelligence and its uses I have rarely come across a product that I didn't end up finding boring or uninteresting after its novelty wore off. Most base or chatbot models are unreliable. Code models can be nice for tabbed autocomplete or boilerplate but I usually don't find them very helpful in the context of the large, complex, and often legacy codebases I work with professionally. I believe people who say they've found ways to make these useful in their workflows, but between the time it takes to establish a

4 min read

23

Apr

Most people are just people

A hard thing to wrap your head around is that most people aren’t particularly bad or good. I mean I think most people would like to be good but it really depends on how they’re feeling that day or what else they’ve got going on. Like, I try to give cash to beggars in the street but I’m not usually going to go out of my way if I don’t have cash that day or I’m in a hurry or they rub me the wrong way. I’d like to think this doesn’t

2 min read

21

Apr

Why This Isn't A Newsletter

Occasionally people will ask me why I have a blog instead of Substack (or a Buttondown, or whatever else is popular now). Ghost, the hosting service I use, is functionally designed to be an open-source version of Substack - I just disabled all the email functionality.

First, I don't actually like reading newsletters very much. Even though I have been making myself blog most days for the past few months I have very little desire to have someone else's writing in my inbox at a regular cadence. I like to be able to choose to visit a blog! I like

2 min read

18

Apr

Touching peace

I've always had a fantasy about becoming a monk. I'm not wedded to a particular kind of monk, I just figure a life of peace and solitude dedicated to pursuing a relationship with God or internalizing the Four Noble Truths might be the thing that fixes me.

This is an idle thought that I have not seriously pursued. I love my little treats and abandoning all material attachments sounds hard. I assume I will be stuck in the cycle of samsara for some time yet.

All the different schools of thought on this basically boil down to the bell curve

3 min read