/reader

I am breaking that personal rule because this trend has spread from the blogging world to the world of face-to-face conversations. As I see it, I now have two options: 1) Projectile vomit on the next person who attempts this in conversation or 2) Blog about it. Maybe if I were a stronger, better person I could find some third or fourth option. Too bad. Here we are. 

So, um, listen: 

I care about you but I do not care about the hallucinating robot and I do not care what specific combination of words it glommed up from the dark reaches of Scrapelandia and cobbled together into seeming-sense and bracketed between the servile, saccharine phrasings of a pretend personality and spewed onto the screen at you. 

I like your personality. I like the stuff you make and do. I like how you see the world. I care about your thoughts and feelings. I want to see your imperfect output and your unfinished projects. I’m into your insights and your mundane observations. I care about your art and I enjoy your dumb jokes and I’m curious about your music taste and I want to hear your hot takes. 

But I do not care about the plagiarizing pretend bot or what it told you about your personality or ideas or business or art or future or whatever.

I don’t think AI is the devil. But I know that AI is not your friend. Or your coach. Or your therapist. Or your business partner. Or your dev team. Or your editor. It cannot know and it cannot think and it cannot feel and it cannot even summarize properly.

It is a tool, a piece of tech. It has its uses. 

But it’s not you, it’s not anything like you. It’s not interesting. It’s not alive.

I don’t care about its feedback or opinion or observations because it literally cannot produce any of those things. It is a glorified search engine cobbling together random bits of knowledge from what humans have actually produced, arranging it into a facsimile of conversation. That can be useful but it is not interesting. 

What are you having for dinner? How will you prepare it? How did it turn out? Did you like it? Will you have it again? How much garlic did you use? (Use more next time, trust me.) I care about that. Tell me. But I don’t care what your refrigerator thinks about your dinner selection. And I don’t care what a chatbot says about you. 

I also don’t like writing on my phone.  I get annoyed. I’m a slow thumb typist. I’m a fast touch typist. My own inefficiency when writing on my tiny iPhone 13 mini screen irritates the heck outta me. I like a bigger horizon. Give me some space. I want to spread out. I want split screen. I want room for long sentences to breathe. 

But I don’t like being on my computer all the time. More accurately, I’m on my computer all the time for work and it is sometimes hard for my brain to accept than I can use my computer for other things. 

So the languishing iPad is perfect. 

I didn’t do anything complicated but I like it and I’m using it.

1. I ordered a case with a bluetooth keyboard. I got a cheap one because I wasn’t sure if I’d actually use the keyboard but I have used it quite often. 

2. The main apps: Orion, Tot, Ivory, Lire, Reader, and Raindrop. 

3. The home screen is just those apps (plus Kindle) and a shortcut to my secretly published blogroll because I like RSS but I also like traipsing through the actual blogs. So much personality. 

4. I set up Orion as the only browser and set up the blocklist and a couple of lenses from Flamed Fury. 

5. I switched to Lire as my RSS reader and organized my feeds in folders so that’s made my brain happy. 

I’m popping the iPad open in the morning and reading blogs. Sometimes I want to make a note so I’ll pop Tot open in split screen and that works beautifully.  

Anyway, nothing complicated here and I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking a bit. Let me know if you have suggestions for cool things I haven’t thought about.  :)

Long live the small web.