A few days ago, I was pressure washing my deck. Very interesting, I know, but wait before you leave, I understood something cool thanks to this mundane activity…

Pressure washing, essentially, consists in violently bouncing a water jet against dirt, transferring it momentum and pushing it away. You don’t want to be in the trajectory, because it's no fun being hit by a fast-moving mix of cold water and dirt. Usually, that's not going to happen to the person doing the washing, because the jet is directed away from them, and even when it bounces off the object being cleaned, it's still moving away.

So it's always a surprise when you get to a corner and end up covered in disgusting stuff from head to toe. The reason this is happening is because a corner has very interesting properties.

Feedback is a funny thing. I'm not talking about the social feedback you give to another person after an interaction (or am I?). I'm talking about the physical principle of feedback where you take the output from a process and feed parts of it back into the input of the same process.

Generative AI, no matter how marvelous it eventually gets, presents some well understood challenges, and another that nobody seems to be talking about. But first, let's recap…

A little more than a year ago, I decided to step away from social networks. It's time now to look back at that year, and count all the ways this was a positive or negative change. Spoiler: it was ALL GOOD.

Yesterday I uninstalled the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn apps from all my devices and I closed the tabs I had pinned on my computer. I didn't delete my accounts, but I'm drastically changing how I'll use those services going forward. I'm doing this for a number of reasons that I'll explain in this post. It's not because I'm better than thou, but because I hope I can convince you to do the same.

Two Neanderthals need a bow and some arrows. Grrmt can build a bow in 5 hours and arrows in 4 hours. Aaaargl can build a bow in 2 hours and arrows in 3 hours. Thus, in order to build what they need, Grrmt will take 5+ 4 = 9 hours, and Aaaargl will take 2 + 3 = 5  hours. 14 hours total will be spent by the both of them.

Now what happens if our primitive friends talk to each other, specialize in what they do best, and trade? Something extraordinary. Aaaargl should have no interest doing that, as he's faster than Grrmt in everything, right? Right?

I just read Brian Dunning's post about the Fukushima explosion and was about to comment there but they are blocking comments from behind proxies, which is incredibly stupid on their part. So there, new post.