Colin Wright's Blog, page 5

Vigilances

My car—a beige 2007 Prius I bought several years ago, and which I intend to keep driving until it’s dead (over 150,000 miles and still ticking along)—doesn’t cause me trouble most of the time.

The other day, though, the little check engine light came on—the steady, amber-colored one, not the red, flashing one, thankfully—so I took it in to have the error code pulled and was told that I could be looking at some decent-sized repairs, that if not made, would basically lead to the engine explodin...

Personal Affordances

Working the way I work is sub-optimal by many standards.

Over the years, I’ve figured out all sorts of ways to do my work more efficiently, but sometimes pull back from those approaches because the “enhanced” methods diminish my experience in some way.

Recently, for instance, I tried using an AI-powered summarizer to get a sense of a news story rather than reading and summarizing it myself. I was able to technically do my work using those externally generated bullet-points, but at the end ...

Everlasting Present

When our lifestyle variables remain the same—or roughly the same—for long enough, it’s a simple matter (bordering on the inevitable—for some of us at least) to fall into what I like to call the “everlasting present.”

This is a moment in which we have a good sense of what to expect each day, our norms have worn grooves into our reflexes, and we’ve established habits, routines, and rituals that make good use of the shape our lives have taken.

It makes sense that we would do this.

One heur...

Optimism Scaffolding

I’m generally skeptical about claims of silver bullet solutions to complex problems.

Biological matters—our bodies aging, our brains not always functioning as optimally as we’d prefer—are foggy, multifaceted issues.

Social matters, likewise, are muddled at best, and anyone who claims to have a simple solution to poverty, to pollution, to powering the world is probably either not taking all the relevant variables and research and concerns into consideration, and/or is trying to sell us some...

Life Stages

I’ve spent maybe too much time over the past several years thinking about society’s assumed, “normal” stages of life.

This is partly (I suspect) because I’ve taken a somewhat unusual path (relative to what we might think of as the “default standard”) which means I’ve generally had to write my own manuals along the way; few of the things I’ve endeavored to do have led me down well-marked, pre-paved roads.

An adjacency to (but inaccessibility of) established ways of being and doing things ca...

Extended Mind Reorganization

A flurry of new organization-, optimization-, communication-, and consolidation-focused tools have been announced and released over the past few years.

Some are slightly upgraded versions of earlier options (a somewhat better calendar, a project organizer with a more complex or simple interface, an email inbox that has more tags, categories, and a novel approach to conversation threads), while others are truly innovative and unique to the point that contemporary use-cases are unclear.

Almo...

Relatively Ignorant Opinions

One of the better decisions I’ve made over the past decade or so is allowing myself to say “I don’t know” and “I don’t have an informed opinion about that” more often.

Giving oneself permission to admit ignorance isn’t easy for many of us, as society primes (some of) us to conceal our understanding-gaps with all the bluster we can muster.

Divulging our informational lacunae, though, can spark conversational chains that lead to greater understanding, while also demonstrating humility—which ...

Boxes and Tools

One way to assess the settings on our creative endeavors (professional, hobbyist, experimental, or any other commitment level) is to think in terms of boxes and tools.

In this context, our boxes are the containers in which we put the stuff we make and in which we create.

In some cases these boxes will be literal spaces in which we work, in which we put our work when it’s done, and in which we display or sell our work.

In others, the metaphorical boxes will be the publications, websites,...

Sharp Tools

It’s been a really wild year in the AI world, and I have some thoughts on this category of technologies and their potential, alongside some heuristics I use when learning and thinking about them.

What we’re talking about here is not artificial general intelligence (AGI): it’s unlikely to become conscious, do anything it wasn’t programmed to do, or go Terminator on us. It’s often convincingly lifelike, but so are a lot of things that aren’t “thinking” in the human sense of the term.There are a...

Depth and Accessibility

I struggle sometimes—especially when starting a new project—at intuitively sussing the proper balance between depth and accessibility for whatever it is I’m presenting.

These two attributes aren’t inherently in opposition: it’s possible to present complex concepts and topics in a concise, casually attainable fashion so that most of what you want to convey translates well to anyone who might even superficially engage with it.

Often, though, that engagement is limited by other factors, like ...