lesser daemon: brent bailey's personal weblog

29

Apr

Useful To Who?

I've been thinking about the usefulness of AI since I wrote about it last week. The latest salvo in this battle is a recently-released study showing that AI is neither replacing jobs nor drastically affecting wages. Plenty of grains of salt to be taken here: the data is from Denmark, self-reported, and from 2023-2024 so predating some of the recent leaps and bounds made in the technology.

Still, I think there's a growing realization that, while this tech might have the potential to be world-changing, it's not actually there yet. Most of the cases where it's getting the most use

2 min read

27

Apr

Letter of Recommendation: Getting Punched In The Face

I got punched in the face tonight. This is not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last. When I was a kid my older brother and I got in fistfights constantly - I still remember the first time I beat him, when I was around 8. There's no better feeling. When I was in high school I got in a few real fistfights because I grew up in West Virginia and that's something you do there. When I was in college I did drunk fight club because I'm an idiot and so were my friends.

2 min read

26

Apr

The Boring Stuff Is Worth It

I've spent the last few weeks setting up a Plex server on a Synology NAS drive and I have finally gotten it working reasonably well. I haven't set up the arr suite or whatever yet because I can really only tolerate spending so much of my free time debugging docker containers but I'll get there. This was a long and mostly tedious process, but now I have a self-hosted media library I can access anywhere through Plex.

I struggle a lot with making myself do stuff like this. If I'm not working on a project obsessively (which I've been trying

2 min read

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