stealing thoughts

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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

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simple enough to be boring

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There is no right answer in PKM. There are only processes that work. The test of PKM is whether it works for you. A person’s PKM practices will change over time, and the most important aspect is being aware of how we seek sources of information, make sense of our own knowledge, and then share it at work, in communities, or through networks. —learning & the future of work (2015)

It might seem harmless – it’s just another AI assistant! To-do app! PKM tool! – but it will catch and keep you in an endless cycle of vocabulary changes that never shape or produce the words you so desperately want to share … I’ve started to see the loudest voices and influencers in the productivity space as little more than productivity tourists; the travel influencers of the various Getting Things Done cults, all of whom pronounce that they’re becoming better people for their experience and documentation of the world, and none of whom stay in one place long enough to absorb anything meaningful. —JA Westenberg (2026)

“simple enough to be boring” — that’s my PKM framework:

Seek > Sense > Share

That’s it.

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follow the women

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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

Shared by my Daughter” “I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are”. In response to “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”. via @itisboller

The Odyssey may likely be the first example of misogyny in a written work. —Retrieving Gender Balance

“One day, Penelope comes downstairs and she hears a bard singing very sad songs about how difficult it is for people like Odysseus, her husband, to get home. And she says to the bard, quite understandably, ‘Oh bard, play something a bit more cheerful.’ And this young, wet-behind-the-ears teenager Telemachus comes over to her and says, ‘Oh mother, shut up. Speech is man’s business.’” —Mary Beard

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bottoms up

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The decentralized web made of blogs and open publishing inspired PKM. Traditional knowledge management (KM) was top down, as Dave Pollard noted in 2005, “So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [personal productivity improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.” It was obvious 20 years ago that top-down knowledge management does not work for people.

Then the open web created a way to curate knowledge bottom-up. It was fuelled by bloggers and sharing on social media. I started this blog in 2004. This worked for a couple of decades until generative AI and large language models scraped everything we collectively had shared online and now big tech offers it back to us served from a black-boxed set of algorithms.

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a wasted crisis

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On 11 March 2020 the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. By 21 March, lockdowns were in place in Canada and most travel was suspended, including commuting to work for most people. By 26 March I noted that now is the time to look at new societal infrastructures to implement post-pandemic. If not, we may go back to the old systems that got us into this mess in the first place. The shifts to working from home and learning online can also significantly decrease carbon emissions. We are seeing clean cities for the first time in decades. Let’s keep them clean, and slow down climate change at the same time. Why waste this crisis? The time to think about change is now.

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millions and billions

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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.

“I reject the idea that we have to be slaves to surveillance capitalism in order to participate in the modern economy.” —Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, after rejecting a 350-acre data centre outside of Winnipeg, via @Dulce Maria

“When I first encountered a word processor, decades ago now, it was as if my writing and my mind were suddenly liberated from the text-to-paper prison of yesteryear. Free to add, subtract, shift, experiment, hone, refine, or chuck and restart, I found that the entire writing process became an exciting adventure. I have no interest in offloading that excitement, that adventure, to AI.” —@jd

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focused on the wrong literacy

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In 2018, while working for the government of Finland, I developed a model of network literacies. Today our Prime Minister says that Canadians need to develop AI literacy and he even has a Minister of AI to implement it.

Let’s look back at network literacies —

They could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People can learn through their various communities and develop social literacy. Information literacy is improved by connecting to a diversity of networks. But control of networks by any single source — such as Generative AI platforms — destroys the ability for people and communities to develop real network era fluency, which is not good for society in the long run and may kill innovation and our collective ability to adapt.

Mass network era fluency can ensure that networks remain open, transparent, and diverse — therefore reflecting many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, is necessary to deal with the many complex issues facing humanity. We cannot deal with complex issues and networked forces unless we can knowledgeably talk about them. This requires fluency.

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everything has been said before

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Self-determination theory (SDT) is one of the core pillars of my professional practice. I was glad to see that a past client of mine, the association of certified human resources professionals of Québec (CRHA), has adopted this framework for their profession. In my presentation in 2020 I concluded that while there is a modern HR system today, it is still informed by some old traditions that may no longer be appropriate. All professionals should understand the underlying assumptions of their field, question them, and determine if they are still useful.

The CRHA posted a good graphic on SDT on LinkedIn and I would like to share it here. It is also available in French.

I am posting this here in 2026 because — “Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” —André Gide (1869–1951)

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mansplaining as a service

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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.

Anytime anyone says: “thoughts and prayers” — my response is going to be: “pitchforks and torches” —@Julie Webgirl

Could this be because they can recognize it as mansplaining as a service? — @Diogenes Pontifx
“… women were consistently more skeptical than men that AI benefits would outweigh its risks, and were less convinced that their professional lives would gain because of the technology.” —Fortune

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“trust is flickering”

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Knowledge flows at the speed of trust, I wrote in 2022, further stating that when trust is lost, knowledge fails to flow. This happens in organizations. It also happens at a societal level. Networks of trust are what create value at all levels for human society. The onslaught of generative AI and large language models is destroying our trust in much of the information that informs our knowledge.

My last post on organizational knowledge was based on an article that had been written with the help of AI. It was only through my trusted human knowledge network that I found out. Not only did I lose trust in the author but I think I eroded the trust of my readers here. I will have to be more careful if I continue to blog here and I am wondering what the future of my writing will be.

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