2025-10-12 01:51:18
Curtis McHale in Productivity as a Fetish edition of their newsletter 3 Threads:
Many of the people touting their system actually have a team behind them getting most of the work done. Their only job is to show you the productivity system, not sit in the morass of expectations that most of us have around us from work and family and our own desires for life.
This arrived in my inbox at the same time I am watching Thailand: The Dark Side of Paradise. An interesting series of documentaries about issues in the country, most of which caused by mass tourism and modern internet culture. Zara McDermott does an impressive job of displaying the underbelly of Thailand, and talks at length with various versions of digital nomads living in the country.
In the very first episode she discusses drop-shipping, the first wave of online booms that allowed countless people to become roaming MacBook workers (seriously, it’s always a MacBook). She quite rightly goes on to touch on the very issue that Curtis talks about above. The people giving the advice are very unlikely to be doing so from a similar position to the people consuming their opinions.
The truth is, scarcely any people actually make money from drop-shipping, they might have in the past, but now they live on the income from selling a course to teach others. Peddling the false dream of making big bucks, when their lifestyle is funded by the course you just bought, not the tat they sell online.
Of course, there are exceptions in everything, but the people making the videos and content giving out productivity advice are unlikely to be the ones using it. They write books, give talks and make YouTube videos about you getting more out of your day — whilst having a team to do everything for them. I have read so many ‘self-help’ books written from positions of power. CEOs, entrepreneurs, and millionaires giving out advice the average person can’t use, nor relate to.
Advice given from the right level is much more worthwhile paying attention to.
2025-10-10 21:09:05
Les Orchard (@lmorchard) on Mastodon:
Folks pouring so much effort into a thing they seem to think is theirs and absolutely never will be. Doesn't matter how much noise or how many petitions or how many shitposts. You can't own a social network by just occupying it and emanating presence and making noise. You are ballast, packing peanuts, slight impulses on a metrics dashboard. They'll do it without you.
This post is interesting in terms of users thinking they 'own' a platform or offer value, but never will. Which is a weird thing to think as a platform user, but whats the alternative?
I've been a proponent of having a blog for what feels like forever, there’s value in the words you write. Not because writing whoever you see fit isn’t something worthwhile to some people, or that have a website make you a ‘real’ writer in some egocentric attack on those that want to tweet (or skeet or whatever). Simply because I don’t like people giving things away for free.
This way of thinking of course falls down when you think about people actually reading what you publish. There has been a shift away from reading websites, to reading smaller and smaller content. You can barely get anyone to visit a webpage any more unless you have an already established audience. If you ever need proof of this, just go to Reddit and look at the comments under any link posted, and a large percentage of people will have looked at the little of the post and very little else.
Sure, having a blog and a website is great but posting life update and thoughts to whatever platform you feel comfortable with (or all of them) is fine too. You may be feeding the machine, training the algorithm and giving away from content — but you’re probably doing that on your blog too.
2025-10-08 21:55:33
As you may have read already, I have moved my blog to Ghost. After using it extensively in 2020, I switched to something more simple and personal on micro.blog. Whilst this is fine, I have found myself in a place where I don’t really want to use any of the social features, and frustration with the hosting — so here we are, again.
It’s expensive. Not really my ideal solution, being more focused towards those that want to build an audience and make money, but I think it fits the bill perfectly for what I want. Namely, being able to write a post, not correct the numerous grammatical errors and just click post.
It also gives me at least some presence in the Fediverse, which was something I liked from micro.blog. So you can follow along at @[email protected] as all my posts will appear there, but don’t expect many short posts, or ‘skeets’ from me.
Unfortunately, this does mean that my micro.blog app will very soon move to not being maintained. There is an update in testing that improve image uploading and gives the user the ability to access all uploaded images, but after this release there will be no more.
It has been a great experience developing the app, and I would not rule out some more development in the future, but currently it isn’t something I want to devote my time to. I’d like to thank all the users who have supported me through the year or so it was being worked on. You fuelled the development in more ways than one, and I can’t thank you enough. However, if you’ve paid for an upgrade, and feel cheated out of something, then feel free to ask Apple for a refund and I will approve this for you.
Much Love ❤️
2025-10-07 14:26:15
Adam Newbold on Mastodon:
if you encounter outrage on traditional social media (X, Facebook, etc.), it's because it was amplified to boost engagement and drive revenue on that platform. If you encounter outage on Mastodon, it's because you follow someone who happens to be upset, or you follow someone who's sharing a post about someone else who’s upset.
Many people blame social media for a lot of the harm visible in the world now. IN fact Adams post is fulled by an email exchange on the subject. With good merit, too. There are whole books and thousands of research papers dedicated to the subject, all mostly coming to a similar conclusion. But there’s a problem with this outlook.
Social platforms, ones that allow people to communicate, share ideas and find common ground, can be a net benefit. Numerous studies support this (Bucci et al., 2019; Highton-Williamson et al., 2015; Naslund, Aschbrenner, et al., 2016b) So there must be something else at play here, and Adam hits this perfectly on the head. It isn’t just the social aspect, as we've been socialising for hundreds of thousands of years as a species. It’s the platform part causing the issues.
Often called the attention economy, platforms are maximising time on site and eyeballs on posts to show people adverts. It’s that simple. Nothing gets people to engage with others more than upsetting them and spiking emotions. Meta puts more disturbing content in your feed because it keeps you coming back for more.
Thankfully, not all social platforms are like this — but there are not many of them!
Update: The posts seems to have not been deleted, no idea why! So I guess I could be making the whole thing up 🤷♂️.
2025-10-01 21:21:55
Manuel Moreale writing about their inability to Score Books:
I suck at this. I genuinely don’t know how to rate things on a scale, which is why the vast majority of the books I rate are either 4 or 4.5.
I can’t score things. Not books, not films, not products. I don’t think most people can. Unless your job is to review things all day, every day, the idea of boiling an experience down to a number feels impossible. Too many variables get in the way. Your mood, your expectations, even the time of year can shift the whole thing. Unless you dedicate your life to it, you’re really just guessing.
Whenever I’ve tried, two things always happen.
The first is that I end up lumping almost everything in the middle. Because most things are fine. They’re not life-changing, they’re not dreadful, they’re just… decent. And so, everything lands somewhere between a 4 and a 7 out of 10. There’s a reason The Verge jokes about living in a world without 7’s.
Or the moment I stick my neck out, I regret it. If I love something and give it a high score, I’ll get told I’ve overrated it. If I don’t enjoy something and give it a low score, I’ll be told I’m missing the point. Doesn’t matter what it is, a film that I enjoyed, or a book that fell flat. Someone will appear to explain why I’m wrong, and also stupid.
Which makes me wonder why we’re so obsessed with scores in the first place. There are too many factors that will affect your perception of things. What mood you are in, the products you used beforehand, or even just your personal preference. One score doesn’t capture the nuance, nor tell you what it felt like in the time since the review. I’d much rather enjoy a well-rounded conclusion at the end of an pinion piece instead.
2025-09-24 10:32:49
Despite me being adoptive of LLM usage to aid my work from a fairly early stage, there’s a lot of frustration brewing. No, not the fact that Open AI made ChatGPT dumber and less able to produce quality results, the fact that I have to deal with sloppers in almost every part of life. Widespread usage of generative products, particularly ChatGPT, by many people I come in contact with is making my life more difficult and also in many situations means my skills are less appreciated.
I’d like to say there has been slow progress here. However, some time in the last few months there has been a tidal shift. All at once, the skills that I built over decades can, in some people’s eyes, be replicated in moments by a robot. Knowledge and learning are equal to a few words in a prompt box, and everyone who is anyone thinks it’s acceptable to share emoji filled nonsense as professional communication.
If I can be allowed to remove all the ethical issues surrounding LLM training and widespread use. Which are all completely valid. There are less pressing but more obvious issues in my creative life that boil down to two main areas.
I am a designer at heart. I produce products that achieve an end result. These might be nice-looking things, they may be experiences for users, and equally they are read by thousands of people every day. I’ve used the last 20 years or so to build my skills in many areas, and pride myself on being a good communicator (not that you might know it from my blog posts).
There is no ego here. Absolutely anyone can do what I do daily with a bit of effort, as I have absolutely zero natural talent. I like to think I am good at what I do, and enjoy continually learning and improving. Yet tasks I would typically do are being instead produced by a chatbot. Devaluing what I do, making my job even harder, and also decreasing the quality of communication as a whole.
Some of this I understand. Why spend a few hours on a draft of something, when AI can do it in moments? That's the lie we are told, and I would be totally onboard if that were the case. However, people don’t seem to understand that the things you send to others contain almost no meaning and are littered with errors.
Sorry, hallucinations. A word conjured up by companies selling these tools so it downplays the fact they make stuff up. As if the fact your tool is off its face on LSD means the lies it pumps out can be dismissed easier. Oh don’t worry about Gemini, they’re down a K-Hole. No point checking its work though, just send it out.
Emails are increasingly being written by AI. Memos being distributed with not a moments thought, and worst of all there’s an increasing understanding that it’s OK because everyone does it. I’m convinced that a large chunk of email traffic is Gemini talking to Co-Pilot, and neither of them has a clue what the hell is going on anyway. All in the name of productivity.
You see. No one is getting any extra work done. Companies are spending billions because they are convinced that this new technology will change the world. When none of that is true, it’s all smoke and mirrors, and hallucinations. Well, apart from the truth that the societal change is expected to be one not seen since the industrial revolution. Unquestionably it will, but that world will not lead us to work less. It will be one where the humans are dumber because they can’t be bothered to learn any more.
We will pretend every output produced is our own, and communicate only in emoji laden drivel that portrays hustle culture, but the only energy used was megawatts of electric and half a lake of water. But don’t worry because “🧵 Here are 10 things you should be going in your morning routine 👇”.
When things are questioned, the excuse that they didn’t check ChatGPT results appears to be perfectly acceptable. Emails from professionals, company press releases and even health care letters are unchecked and littered with issues. As if there’s no pride in anything, not least themselves, any more.
I am having to proactively ask others not to send me AI slop to make my life easier. If I am having to rewrite the shallow nonsense that every LLM produces anyway, I might as well just do it myself from scratch. Seriously, everyone is doing it, doctors, press releases, suppliers. All sending drivel that only an LLM on the receiving end can understand.
Couple this with the presumption that any end result I provide was produced by AI too. Heaven forbid I should use an em dash! I’m not exaggerating when I say this two-pronged attack is squeezing my the life out of me. The words “just get ChatGPT to do it” is the death knell that might signal my eventual snap. Throwing my hands up in the air and walking off into the sunset. Never to be heard of again. Unless you make a custom ChatGPT bot.
