Substrate

Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks discusses how, as a technology, AI is used differently depending on predispositions:

The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled. The ActivTrak researchers found that the time people spent on focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9 percent. There’s even a name for this mental state: “AI brain fry.”

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A bigger announcement soon, but just to say that FIELD STATION, my new venture with Tom Watson, is now officially A Thing as we were incorporated at Companies House yesterday!

• Job 0: Test the collbaration water through TechFreedom** ✅
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What I like about this post is that it brings a bit of nuance to proceedings.

Not every audience group or individual user will care about the provenance of the content they’re consuming. It also depends on a case-by-case basis; sometimes AI-assistance changes everything versus other times, it barely registers.

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For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.

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When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.

– Ilya Prigogine

Every Sunday, my Little Robot Friend sends me a report which I call 'News Canary'. It assembles a weekly set of roughly ten "global change signal" stories from the last seven days, with at least one item from each continent It mixes hard developments (laws, policies, conflicts, technical releases) with soft signals (cultural shifts, viral posts) that may influence how systems evolve.

Just a quick note to say that, in addition to RSS, you can now receive an email digest of notes from this site on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

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The great thing about LLMs is that I can point them at blog posts like this one explaining how to jailbreak an old Kindle and turn it into a 'literary clock', then tell them to crack on. With a bit of guidance and troubleshooting they can do stuff that either I would never get round to, or I'd get frustrated by.

I realised that there were a couple of things missing in TaskDial that affect my productivity:

• Energy curve
• Weather

So I've added them! So in addition to being able to see your tasks and calendar on one clock face, you can also get some help in planning those tasks by being more aware of your energy levels and the weather at your location.