Brent - lesser daemon (Page 3)

05

May

Reading/Playing/Watching, 5/5/25

Stuff I'm Reading

I'd rather read the prompt - great blog post about LLMs in a university environment. Nicely sums up a lot of my thoughts about LLM-aided writing, which is that using an LLM defeats the point! "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly." Write bad essays! That's how you learn!

Bizarro World - a 2007 essay on the competitive retro gaming scene, in which the author discovers his wife is the best Gameboy Tetris player in the world. Really wild to revisit a time before Twitch when esports weren't really a thing and competitive gaming was relegated

3 min read

04

May

Surely the Second Coming is at hand

I decided to revisit Yeats last night. I guess this is what you do on a Saturday night when you're in your 30s. It's getting more relatable as the gyre widens.

The strange thing about being alive at this time in human history is that I feel like I've been waiting a decade for things to start getting bad for me personally. Things have been getting worse for a while now. I am very aware that as the meme going around puts it we are already about three lines deep into the Niemoller poem and it's not that long of

2 min read

02

May

Why Do Ads Make Websites So Slow?

Yesterday was a tough day for good websites. Multiple Giant Bomb employees left after their parent company, Fandom, decided to do a "strategic reset", which traditionally means "getting rid of anything good or human in a media brand and selling off its corpse". Shortly thereafter, Polygon was sold to Valnet, a content farming business best known for their ownership of Collider and Comic Book Research (as well as their terrible labor practices, scummy SEO, and general behavior ranging from the upsetting to the criminal).

I think it's fairly illuminating that it took me significantly longer than it should have to

4 min read

01

May

I don't really think we were supposed to work this much

I'm sick again today. I get sick a lot - always have as far as I can remember. I didn't exactly win the genetic lottery for immune systems and I am also not exactly a paragon of health.

I am lucky to have a job that gives me what is, for America, a pretty good deal in terms of paid time off. I accrue a sick day every month, I get 15 days of vacation time, and I get summer Fridays. A lot of people can only dream of being in this position. But then I look at, say, Austria,

1 min read

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