I dread workdays when I arrive tired. Today is one of those days. There's a sensation of wanting to call in sick, there's a Mexican joke where an office worker calls in sick claiming to have a sexual illness, and since his boss is too embarrassed to ask he doesn't give a hard time. After a couple of times of doing this, the boss finally asks what is the specific matter. "Es que soy un huevón" (literally: my balls are too big) which figuratively means "I'm lazy".
However, as we see patterns play out in different branches of our daily life, I also felt the same when I went to yoga this morning. My body was sore and my energy levels low, but as I advanced in the practice I warmed up and in the end I enjoyed it. I hope the same happens to me with work.
It's easier now with AI. I'm taking care of the docs, and I produced a series of reference articles a couple of months ago which each took me three days between research and writing. Yesterday, however, I used Claude's research feature and it produced a good article, then I showed it an example documentation article and it produced a very good article which required minimal edits.
I see how this is leveraging our skills but I'm also a bit concerned that the generation that grew up with this will not know how to innovate, or have the taste necessary to elevate AI's output from average to excellent. Many of the things it produces are average (which is more or less expected given it's trained on everything) and a human being's responsibility is steering it towards excellence. In many ways it's similar to a really talented and quick intern: it's quick and compliant but it often misses the details necessary for excellent work (and will deviate from it if not prompted correctly, because it's attracted to normalcy). We observe this pattern when it produces overly verbose bullshitty text, like most writing is (including my own). Adapting Pascal's celebrated phrase: "If I had more time, I'd make my logs shorter".
The other day I was thinking: what a period to be alive, I grew up at the start of the computer revolution and my father had a Mac Plus at home, I was an internet early adopter ('94), then social media (let's group here blogs and instant messaging besides the usual suspects), then the mobile revolution, and most definitely we're experiencing an AI one at this very moment.
I just came back home from work and smoked weed. The day was not unpleasant, unlike my early prediction, I was able to get things out of the way by collaborating with my co-workers, and that made the day pleasant. A note to myself that emotion is transitory and this will heavily influence your predictions of the future and memories from the past.
I've been wanting to share my explorations into the body, yet I take little action in it. Today on a high whim I decided to do it as an off-the-cuff experiment, as if it were a pilot of something I'd properly share in the future, a quick overview of something that would take me about 15 minutes to explain fully, and perhaps you could silence and follow along. I see I did a terrible job at positioning properly the lens and my house is a mess. It's only when I have guests at my house that I clean up.
You see, my plan was not for you to be my guest tonight: I recorded myself first to see if I was comfortable doing it (at moments), and if I liked what I saw, I would improve and share it. But, I know that if don't do it now tomorrow I'll say meh and it will go back into incubation.
Claude isn't being helpful in finding me a quote about Goethe, but I remember him admonishing Eckermann not to be consumed by "the great work of art", and to produce something artful everyday. It will get better in time. I must start somewhere: let that be the worst way possible so that it can only improve from here.
Mark from tomorrow: please don't delete this.