open doors and blood robots
Sometimes I wonder if it was a good thing that the internet opened all of the doors. Free media heck yeah and all the websites that came before. Open access to everything, all the time. And with it a devaluation of culture and sometimes a feeling of entitlement. “This is all for me after all, so it should cater to my tastes.” Easy ways to get all the songs, movies, shows, without paying a dime. Add to that one or the other streaming service and you have a media pool that will never dry up and that you will never dive too deep into. Always only on the surface.
There is great fun in here too. When I got a list of bands to check out sometimes in 2011 I had to go look for quite some time to find the good stuff on some blogspot blogs. I would scour /mu/ sharethreads for something new and shiny. And now it all collects digital dust on a hard drive. So many bands and songs that I sucked into my own void. Hastily and greedily. Sometimes a shuffle will resurface them and I will remember a band or a song quite fondly. But they are not present. Which is good, kinda, I don't want my head to remember absolutely everything after all.
It is the same with books. eBooks disappear into my eReader and I forget about them. Unless I write them down in a list. But I can not look at them on my shelves. When a friend recently asked me for book recommendations I could close my eyes and go though my physical shelves. But I could not go through those I'd read digitally. Should I maybe keep a “public” list on a goodreads like service? I don't know. I don't really like those very much.
What got me back into this? It was A swarm of blood robots. Here Craig Mod writes about coding with Claude to build his tools.
Yet, I want to know these tools, these new tools of increasing weirdness and danger. So I use them, daily, amid a constantly fluctuating state of bafflement and delight and horror (pessimistic, optimistic, manic). Over the last couple of months I’ve continued to use mostly Claude to work on a bunch of projects. Claude works fine for me and I’d rather be making / analyzing things than fiddling with alt models; the Anthropic vs OpenAI arguments feel like the 2026 equivalent of Emacs vs Vim neckbeard battles; ultimately, things are moving so erratically, we may well not be using either company’s tools in five years.
And the tools sound neat! There is a goodreads alternative in there and many tools were built, that made his life easier. And from there I go to Robert Hart's ‘Not healthy’ LLM use is more common than you think and Hank Green who fell into producing too much for his own good, aided by LLMs.
Green’s case illustrates a different kind of reliance. He said he used it as a research aid, helping him locate papers and other material on a given topic. There is little to suggest his use of chatbots in this way was inherently problematic, despite the furious responses it provoked or Green’s apology.
I have friends who use LMMs that way. They are somewhat forced to, because search engines are shite now. It is here that I point to a book that I actually have on my shelves called Love Machines:
Friends. Lovers. Therapists. 'Deathbots'. Artificial intelligence is now fulfilling new roles for millions of us every single day. How are these new 'relationships' changing how we view technology – and each other?
That book was really great! Anyhow. Blood Robots. Making tools. I am tempted. But I also do not feel right jumping into these waters of making tools when I know about the costs. Environmental and to my own skills and reliance on a probability machine doing the thinking for me. I think I'd rather not have a tool. Or find an existing tool. And here I come back to media. On some level I need to be okay with not consuming something that looks cool. (What an incredibly entitled and shitty thing to say.) I can use the library and the media I have. Actually read the ttrpg tomes that are on my shelves and not scour the trove for more pdfs to gather digital dust.
I don't know. This here is mostly for me to think it through while writing it. I did not reach a conclusion. <3