Hi lovely readers. I'm heading back to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks and pausing Soft Coded. Had some thoughts before I fly away home:
I lingered on a Substack note yesterday. Best case, we've got eighty summers. Don't know why I've never thought of it that way, but it's effective! I can't wait to step away with that in mind. I'll be where the air smells like wet grass and no one asks you what you think about AGI. People have other things to do. They're fishing. They're refinishing deck furniture. They're making pitchers of brandy old fashioneds and asking if you want yours sweet or sour.
If you've worked in AI or any high-velocity field, you know the rhythm is relentless: releases, updates, benchmarks, discourse. There's always a new wave, and there's always a sense that if you stop paying attention for too long, you'll fall behind. But honestly, so what?
So what if you miss the next round of takes, or the new prompt injection trick, or the latest person claiming that human creativity has finally met its match? There is no AI crisis. I write about AI not because I think it's the most important thing happening in the world, but because it's been positioned that way, and I want to offer a slower counterpoint. I want people to understand it, yes, but without letting it crowd out the rest of life. Understanding should create room, not erase it. You should be able to read about the inner workings of a system and still go make dinner. You should be able to work on a chatbot and then go sit in the grass and eat a bratwurst off a paper plate. You should be able to look away.
That ability to look away becomes more precious when you remember: we don't get unlimited seasons. Those eighty summers, if we're lucky. And with that kind of math, you have to decide what's actually worth your attention versus what's just keeping you occupied.
I just highlighted something in Jathan Sadowski's work: "…our home lives exist, to various degrees, as non-capitalist enclaves…If capitalist imperatives like the profit motive starts dictating how we treat friends and families, then we see that as perverting the social relations we care about." There's something powerful in that — the idea that home, as you know it, is the place where the metrics don't apply. A space that doesn't need to be productive, or optimized, or summarized for stakeholders. Where no one is tracking your time, your output, or your potential.
These spaces become more important the more technology insists on edging into them. We all have versions of home that live outside the loop. Maybe it's a family cabin, or a Saturday farmer's market, or the hour before bedtime when you're doing nothing in particular. There are many ways to matter, and we don't need to have a public opinion on every industry development before we've had time to think.
So here I go toward the kind of silence that's earned. You know what I'm talking about. It's okay to be quiet. To just be a person with lake hair, reaching around to spray your calves with bug spray. There's nothing virtuous about being perpetually informed.
If the AI breaks while I'm gone, let me know. I'll pour one out under the summer sun.
Gonna think about "the ability to look away" and "we don't need to have a public opinion on every industry development before we've had time to think," for a while. Thanks for sharing all you do - go frolic! I'll meet ya out there!
Beautiful. Fellow midwesterner who will likely go on to work in tech in SF after I graduate. Really appreciated reading this and your point on understanding vs erasure.