Hey there, !

Don't send me a voice note. Or if you must, less than 3 minutes please!

I swear to god, this incessant trend of technology helping to support selfishness and convenience (not that it's ever done anything less than that) but like, seriously.

I mean, if you're texting someone - all good, the effort to type means there's a natural rhythm to the conversation - you know, you're taking turns, you're responding, you're reacting.

But then imagine, as a reply to your conversation, the dreaded 5:37 with a microphone turns up on your screen.

A voice note.

I mean, there are probably legitimate reasons why you would need a voice note (you're in transit and need to go hands-free, want to say something with your voice because you're a good storyteller, maybe someone cut your hands off?) but it's just this trend of pushing the effort of analysis on others that is really rankling to me.

Like, okay, you made like no effort to actually type anything to me. You just spoke. And now I have to listen to you speak. That means putting up my phone to my head like an idiot, or having to pull my headphones out and listening to it. And we could go through this all day, back and forth, if I sent you a clip of me speaking back. More head phones and headphones.

But really, it's just so much to process, especially if that 5:37 is actually the first in a set of 10 voice notes that become a 43 minute podcast of you telling me a story that frankly, I could have just walked away from if we were in real life.

I would STRONGLY PREFER if you sent me a wall of text because then I could refer back to it at length and go through the points one by one - what the HELL am I going to do to try and scrub through the podcast you've just sent me and reply to each point? I'm not an LLM; I can't listen and record everything perfectly!!?

Also, the time it takes to listen; I could have skimmed and read a typed message so much quicker. 5 minutes 37 seconds of my life vs 30 seconds of my life that I could have got the same amount of information for!! (which is also why I think 3 minutes is a good benchmark for a voice note because sometimes it does take that long to read a long wall of text)

AND ANOTHER THING on the subject of LLM's, the other thing that grinds my gears is the increasing use of AI from the people around you that is just, once again, pushing the effort of analysis on others.

Look, I use AI for work, and I'm not against the use of AI generally, but I APPLY MY BRAIN to the output and make sure I can explain it.

HOW MANY TIMES have you had someone just dump the output of an LLM at you and say 'welp here's the output' and when you ask just ONE question of them they CRUMBLE because they don't know what the fuck it has generated.

Code that makes no sense. Travel itineraries that are too vague to be useful. Nonsense content.

Absolutely NO vetting done and they expect you to do the review???

Please, put SOME effort into the creation of the work before I give you the effort of reviewing.

It's only polite.

Luckily, most of the people I talk to do not send long-ass voice notes podcasting their lives. Note that this post is NOT an invitation to do this for ironic purposes as a reply to this newsletter. You have been warned.

(ALSO I very recently found out that iMessage actually transcribes the voice notes for you which is HELLA helpful and discredits a lot of my argument. But still!!)

Love you, chat soon :D

(P.S. If you've got any feedback for the newsletter, just hit the reply button and don't voice note me!)

✔️Real Life Recommendations

1. Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere - so many thoughts on this, I may write a newsletter post for it...honestly, it didn't go as deep into the manosphere as I thought, and the way Louis approached the subjects was a bit old-school (so it somewhat backfired), but I think the main takeaway wasn't about the influencers themselves, but how many people in public came up to these influencers and said they were their role models. That's scary to me. Surely we're smarter than that? Perhaps not.

2. Uncle Yoon's - nice place in the city for Korean food - food was good, date was bad. Luckily, you can just get the food.

🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway

1. Tech boss uses AI and ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine for his dying dog - alright you got me this is an amazing use of AI to make a personalised vaccine for a dog dying of cancer. Literally such a beautiful story - I won't be surprised if this is touted more widely as 'AI getting better and more useful' but really it's the effort of the human behind it getting everything in place to save his dog.

2. Don't Make Me Talk to Your Chatbot - the bad to contrast the good. Learning to write is learning to think.

3. I taught my dog to vibe code games - okay okay you got me. Sometimes it's just funny what people do with AI.