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moor

isomorphisms

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Shoes

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creepy

regardless of later events, i still win because it's friday

dungeon

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Read

In my experience observing LLM users (I've never touched one myself, save reviews foisted upon me), all "productivity gains" they get from velocity are lost into doing the low-importance tasks which LLMs help most with.  I think it's the same kind of pseudo-productivity that previously caused people to spend more time writing emails back and forth than doing the tasks that really "count."  I don't think that the actual throughput has really increased since these tools were adopted.  This is probably also related to writing code not being the bottleneck anyhow.

Advertising technology has advanced hugely in this same timeframe.

Has it?  Perhaps from 2010-2015, but I don't think there's been anything huge since then even there, although admittedly this is not something I know much about.  As far as I know, micro-targeting and recommender systems are still the basis, and this technology was around back then.  I'm also somewhat cynical of the claims that modern advertising is like mind control anyhow, it feels like criti-hype to me.

I agree that modern software isn't made for users though, but it's not for advertisers either.  Modern software is made to attract venture capitalists, eventually get acquired by a hyperscaler, and to get the founders enough money to go on a quest for immortality and/or Mars.

Egyptology

Right now it's the annual Tolkien reread for me, so I recently read The Hobbit again, and I'm just about to start Book 3 of The Lord of the Rings.  I'm enjoying it just as much as ever, despite having read annually for over a decade now.

Other than that I've been reading a whole lot of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels over the last year.  They're (almost) all very good, although perhaps somewhat same-y.  I still have far to go before reaching Poirot's final case, however.  The last I read was The Hollow, in which Poirot himself is barely relevant to the plot.  I suppose that was something of a novelty.

I probably should start cross-posting the "What I Read This Month" blog posts I've been endeavouring to write in this thread too.