On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“In ages past they stole the commons so you had to work for them to live. Then you had to work for a wage, so they stole your wages and labor. Now they steal your thoughts and ideas to lease them back to you on subscription. They are thieves of not only wealth and power, but of our creativity, our histories, and our potential.” —@kalshann
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“I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people’s.
If someone doesn’t bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they’re trading your time for theirs and that’s rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That’s rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn’t work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they’re saying that it isn’t worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That’s rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they’re saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That’s rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They’re machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people’s time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That’s not because person 1’s time is more valuable, it’s because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It’s not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner’s time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.”—@David Chisnall
Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated
When Rebecca Green arrived for her first appointment with a urologist, she was asked whether she consented to having the appointment transcribed by artificial intelligence (AI).
She said yes without hesitation.
“I don’t want to be in her bad books or be that annoying patient who takes up more of her time,” she said.
But that decision would cause her a lot of stress, with the AI scribe making up the serious but false claim that Ms Green was taking illegal drugs.
The useful comparison is not office good, home bad, or the reverse. Different jobs contain different mixtures of focused work, mentoring, customer contact, equipment use and creative coordination. An RTO mandate is a policy about who decides the mixture.
Canada should ‘keep our options open’ on acquiring nuclear weapons, former defence chief says
Canada’s former top soldier says this country should keep its options open on the question of acquiring nuclear weapons, broaching a subject that has largely been closed to debate for decades.
Retired general Wayne Eyre was speaking Monday at a forum in Ottawa. The event’s topic was national sovereignty and Canadian military capability in an age of geopolitical turmoil and shifting alliances.
Mr. Eyre, who stepped down as chief of the defence staff in 2024, said Canada can’t be fully autonomous when it comes to security and defence unless it has nuclear weapons.
“I would argue that we will never have true strategic independence, absent our own nuclear deterrent,” he told the event, which was organized by the Conference of Defence Associations Institute and advisory company Catalyze4.
I like David Chisnall’s post about the rudeness of the users who use LLMs. Recently, someone emailed me to promote their book on my YouTube channel but the ENTIRE email was written by AI. So this is what I wrote back to her…
” Thanks M. This email has been written by AI so I don’t trust it. Can you please tell me why – in your own words, experiences and expressions – you think I should review this book. What’s your personal connection to it? Have you got a business interest behind it? What did you hear exactly in my video that made it connect to me? Have you got a family acquaintance who wrote this book?”
and this is what she responded with:
Hi Helen,
You’re right to question my email. I used AI to help write it, and I’m sorry it sounded personal without giving you a real reason to trust the recommendation.
I’m helping with outreach for so yes, I have a professional interest in finding people who might consider reviewing it. I don’t have a family connection to the author. I also shouldn’t have implied that a particular video of yours led me to contact you—I can’t point to one. I was drawn to your channel’s stated focus on finding lessons in books, but my email went much further than I could personally support.
I haven’t shared a firsthand reading experience with you, and I don’t want to invent one now. You have every reason to decide whether a book belongs on your channel based on your own reading and judgment.
I’m sorry for the impersonal approach and for taking your time. Thank you for calling it out.
Kind regards,
Then this is what I wrote:
Thank you for the response M. Nowadays we are bombarded with AI designed and written communications which sounds and looks personal (and written well) but it comes across as disingenuous and disrespectful to the receiver.
The personal and individual approach and the intention of the communication is not there. Therefore it lacks an emotional response and a potential for something greater, more emotive to happen like a new idea, a new connection, a new story?
There comes a point where it’s tiring to read the “sameness” of AI generic responses so what happens then, is that the receiver will not even bother with the request.
Why even bother to respond to words created by a bot?
I’d like to think there are still humans behind those messages so that’s why I responded the way I did.
I was looking for spelling mistakes, personal story, a link to my work and yes, even something saying your true intent and reason for the request. Thats what makes it endearing, memorable and human.
What I’ll do is to look at and see if it’s a book or a story aligned to what I usually read (I don’t read debut novels but focus mainly on literature and classics and translated texts).
Thanks again for the response, I appreciate that you explained it all. All the best with the promotion of your book.
……
This is what I’ll be doing with all future requests now. Calling it out. Hoping that it changes or inspires another behaviour….
Well said, Helen. The AI slop that we are wallowing in is getting me to retreat further from the online ‘social media’ world. I was never into computer tech, having failed my only FORTRAN course back in 1978. The web excited me because it was about connecting people and that has been my focus for the past 30 years. I think that period is over.
My thoughts and sentiments exactly. It’s hard not to think, “what’s the point of sharing anything online now?” There’s no way things will return to how they were. Personally, I believe that my work had its time and place and it was back then with that technology context and situation. Now that it’s changed, what remains? Our human connections, friendships, collaborations and relationships. Maybe now we do this at a local level – and we all do it within our own local or neighbourhood spheres – to get the technological out of the equation completely.
I am focusing on local now but I miss the diversity of that now-gone online world. It’s how we met.