Friday Five: Five Unrelated Ideas I’ve Been Mulling Over This Week

The end goal of a big portion of the AI hype right now is using “agents” to take care of administrative and structural tasks you were previously doing. Honestly, this is a far more compelling pitch than “we can’t make AI smart enough to do your taxes, but look it can draw a pretty picture or write a sonnet!” I want a computer to do my taxes to free up more time to make art, not the other way around. That sounds lovely, actually. (FWIW I feel more prepared to walk into my CPA’s office this year than ever because I used Claude to help me organize my financial documents, understand some complex things, and make a list of questions. YMMV.)

In an age where previous moats and competitive advantages like having a well-designed website are no longer high trust signals because everyone has access to better tools, it’s still difficult to express how much craftsmanship, care, and deep knowledge of artistic disciplines matter and differentiate what you do. “[W]hen hopeless, cynical, dismal slop is weaponized into capital of maximum reach, that which requires thinking or feeling is friction; it abrades audiences. Making anything good now is a sacrifice. It should be respected.” — David Rudnick

Building space to be still and quiet in my day is more important than anyone lets on. Walt Whitman said, “If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders” but if I never give myself margin for my mind to wander, I only focus on the next task to be done, and I never find the giant wayfinding arrows pointing to the things I actually care about.

Sean Illing may have coined “marauding narcissists” with this reply: “[While the kids are awake, you come last] is a blueprint for raising tiny marauding narcissists who believe they’re the center of the cosmos.” Modeling a life of curiosity, kindness, community-seeking and community-building, and resting to take stock of what you’ve accomplished is good for my children, but I cannot do that if I prioritize their every need at every moment of the day. They need to be bored and on their own sometimes so they can figure out their own taste, ways of being, and how to be comfortable with themselves. “Give them patterns for a fulfilling life, and also give them time to be alone and bored and unscrutinized.” — Zach Klein

Is Colonel Mustard or Professor Peacock a more ridiculous name for an antagonist? No clue. “Hard to imagine a more embarrassing death than being beaten with a candlestick in a library by someone named colonel mustard” — @frozenaesthetic