Sept 2025 Month Notes
The CoPilot buttons in Windows/Office/Teams remind me of the horns in Homer’s Car. They’re everywhere and they’re useless.
Just thinking about GenAI
I read with interest the I Am An AI Hater thing and don’t disagree. I’m in the valley of “occassional AI user but it makes me feel guilty every time”. The problem (for me) is that OpenAI et al. have built a machine of dreams. This is literally the Homework Solving Machine I saw in my Dandy comic in the 90s. It is so helpful at answering questions that you just can’t search on the web, and I use it (sparingly) to get very precise answers to language, programming, and problem-solving questions.
Obviously it offers big problems for teachers (vis a vis the bit where it actually is a homework solving machine) - I found this article “What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom” to be a humanity-affirming long read.
We do use GHCP (Business) at work for writing code, and this has amplified my production as an experienced dev. Friends and internet personalities alike have pointed out that this is hollowing out the space for junior engineers to get their first role and proper mentorship (and they’re right).
I am guiltily excited about the prospect of Claude Background Agents and similar, where these agents just run off and implement tickets, with a human review step, a la Linear (sorry for the linktin link).
Inference (the bit where LLMs answer questions) is getting a lot cheaper in energy, environmental, and financial costs. But the high and ongoing costs of training the LLMs are scary. Have AI datacenters really supplanted destructive Bitcoin mining operations? And while some DCs are spinning up fossil fuel plants (yuck) are others creating demand for new nuclear? (And am I now, in this stage of life, pro-nuclear?? Unexpected.)
My AI pledge (I need a little banner for this somewhere on the site) remains that this site is all my unaltered voice, and I will never use LLMs or other GenAI to copy-edit, write, or rewrite my prose up in here.
Also life
My kids had chickenpox three weeks apart, and now they’re fine.
Then they had some green snotty illness and briefly gave it to me.
Now the small one just had a tummy bug and I very much still have it. The big one hasn’t had it yet, which just feels like a lovely sword of Damocles hanging over the house.
Creative Energy Report
Now Glitch has shut down, the next imminent thing I need to do is migrate a load of glitch things to a mix of Github pages (or just this site) and some new node hosting solution. It probably means spending money and doing chores. So I don’t really feel like doing any of that.
Haven’t played any video games either. But I am enjoying the F1 and NFL highlights. Autumn is truly the season of sport. Now I’m off to go under a duvet, listen to geese flying over, and watch the Cardinals lose 🍂🏎️🏈