As I mentioned back in February, I’ve been musing about a longer piece about AI, the catch-all if imprecise term lobbed at the current crop of large language models (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Co-Pilot, Grok, Gemini, etc.). I get more examples of videos and articles motivating me to write that longer piece on AI every week. The current hucksterism selling AI strikes me as the same overconfident idiocy that led some to believe microwaves would replace…
This isn’t the first time I’ve posted about work-life balance, but it does feel that, in 2025, more people have the assumption that WORK has won and the imbalance is fine. We know it. We’ve felt it. I’m sure some researchers have excellent terms for it, but I’m thinking of it these days as overproductivity. And it succeeds because we have zealots, who probably get up at 4am, who push for overproductivity. And when they,…
Hobbies, those interests to pursue without it being a “side gig” and often without the need to be at all expert at them, were something I started focusing on, ironically, in the Before Times. I believed (and still believe), it’s very healthy to have some pursuit that is not monetized, potentially not judged and evaluated like job performance might, and perhaps free of some of the wacky things outside of your control that one can’t…
I began this year advocating creating art as a hobby and I tried to practice what I preached shortly thereafter. Most people who know me generally observe I’m pretty darn busy which is one of the reasons that I feel the need to carve out time that is entirely not productive. It’s hard in today’s “make every job a gig and make every gig a hustle” economy — and heaven help you if you want…
I had the opportunity over Presidents’ Day weekend (aka Washington’s Birthday weekend for OPM sticklers) to do something I can’t remember doing in a long time, if ever: painting miniatures. Many of my gamer friends have various Warhammer and related armies and I know my efforts are not remotely in their league. They paint minis regularly. In fact, for several, it’s a bona fide hobby. One preditor friend (that’s producer-editor for the uninitiated) has taken…
I thought I had already posted this article by Sean Kane from 2016, but evidently I hadn’t. So go ahead and read up on seven darn good scientifically-backed reasons why you should make art even if you’re not “any good” at it. A perfect example of simply making art is Inktober, an annual event to do an ink drawing every day during October. I did this with my son –and moms and dads reading this,…