I've made a number of ceramic molds for slumping fused glass into bowls. As well as wooden templates for ceramic mugs. I've devised a few carrying tools to move glass frit paintings from my studio down to my barn where the kilns sit without spilling the glass.
Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days.
> Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days.
I made that realization last year and since then it's just been random project after random project each one requiring me to discover a new tool or method to do some aspect of the project "properly". I'll never be a plumber or electrician professionally but it's so rewarding to start from zero and learn something new that is tangible in the real world. That's the one AI use case I've walked away from feeling like I actually learned something.
You can do interesting things with microwave kilns these days, I wonder if they get hot enough for ceramics? They can melt copper, I believe, so they’d be in the ball park.
The overlap between ceramicists and technologists is never zero. Part of my initiative to slowly replace every part of my house and home with things I've made... 1% progress is good, right?
I'm so glad i'm not the only one....well I have dreams and visions of a plan but the most i've done is a half baked Patreon and Substack scraper that only kinda works to capture my sunk cost of subscriptions I never used, a movie theater listing app that allows me to find classic movies that may get buried from the mass advertised slop, a custom sewn jacket that contains pockets for homecooked popcorn and locally grown fruit and well a 3-D printed sauce cup holder for all those sauce cups that I get from fast food restaruants.
Im slowly trying to extricate myself by cooking more from home only from local farmers and what I can grow from home (so far only one cucumber). After all, can you really build everything else if your own body molecules are being replaced by low quality things made by others?
I'll get around to 100% at some point before I die or I wont care anymore since i'll be dead: one of those outcomes is inevitable.
I'm ahead of you by a ways but your instincts are not wrong :) we have timber and plans to replace the flooring with logged and milled timber, sourcing clay from the property, making tomato sauce of the gods from home grown roma tomatoes. it's a lovely way to spend a half century I think.
> It is frequently asserted that users prefer chatbots
Who is asserting that? Is there data to back it up? And which audiences are we talking about? Which products? Which industries?
As far as how I'd decide, I'd ask people. Data is a good thing to use when making decisions. Don't let data dictate all decisions, but don't just blindly guess either. Ask, measure, analyze, and think about the results. Then decide.
"token" is a word with many meanings. There is no "default", it simply is a versatile word. The author may have their own personal default understanding of the word, but that doesn't mean that everyone who speaks the English language agrees.
If you ride a car, you can arrive fast. Maybe. If you don't wreck the car. Or get hit by a bus. Or have your tire go flat. And your engine doesn't blow. And you don't get pulled over by the cops. And there is no construction on the roads. No accidents. No bridges washed out.
So yeah, your analogy works. Better than you intended.
> but not many will want to work at a tech company today that doesn’t provide top tier AI tooling,
wat. No. There are plenty of devs who hate how AI is changing the work, and would be thrilled to go back to the old ways. I am seeing so many arguments that amount to "We all have to use AI because... we all have to use AI." People start with the assumption that AI will take over and then use that to work backwards and prove that we all must use it for everything.
If anything, we're starting to see the opposite. I'm hearing more and more discussions from my clients that the increasing cost is not sustainable, and the increase in problems is not the result they were hoping for.
There is a strong argument that such clients aren't using agentic processes correctly. But at the same time, when I show them how to improve such processes, the bills go even higher.
We have not yet landed on the tools and processes that will make AI take over all work. Nor have we proven that such a scenario is inevitable.
Your insurance will not necessarily pay the full cost of ER visits. Some plans have co-pays in the range of hundreds of dollars. High deductible plans might make you eat the full cost if you have not already had a lot of medical expenses this year. Just having insurance does not mean you won't get destroyed by bills... all it means is there is a max limit on the destruction.
> The woman on the other end of the line asked me, "Do you have a plan to continue your insulin pump therapy?" I said, "I guess. I will have to call my doctor and get my prescription for long-acting insulin moved to a pharmacy in Santa Fe." I don't know what she would have done if I'd said "no."
Just a PSA for anyone dealing with medical support lines of any kind in the USA. When they ask whether you have a plan, no matter what topic you are talking about, they are not just making small talk. They are at a decision point in their script - a nice little diamond on a flowchart with different paths for "Yes" vs. "No." Your answer will change path of the conversation.
The best move is to give a thought out, honest answer to that question.
My clients don't send spam. They are legitimate businesses sending product updates, nurture sequences, promotions, information, transactional messages, etc. The idea that emails are "spam" simply because they land in the spam folder is incorrect.
I hope you realize that what you just wrote could easily be read as: "They are legitimate businesses sending spam, spam, spam, spam, transactional messages, etc"
Just because you have one valid use case to send an email does not mean that anything you send is not spam.
I can understand this being your viewpoint. Nevertheless, I disagree with you.
I use Fastmail instead of Gmail or Outlook, but as far as I'm concerned, everything in your list but transactional messages is spam to me.
I don't want to hear anything from a business until I've bought something from them. When I make a purchase, all I want is my receipt, a shipping notification with a tracking number, and a reminder that the warranty period has expired and that all data pertaining me has therefore been expunged from their database.
If I cared about product updates, promotions, or information, I would visit the website; that's probably how I learned about the business and decided to make a purchase in the first place. Nor do I tolerate "nurture sequences". If I make a purchase at all, it will be before the business has sent me a single email. If a business intrudes on my solitude before I've decided to do business with them, there is nothing they can do to build trust with me.
Anything that comes from variations on no-reply@ or contains "notification" or "unsubscribe" in the body goes directly to trash and gets auto-deleted after 30 days. (Just in case there's a product recall.)
Why? Simple: My inbox, my rules. I decide for myself what is relevant to me. Not you. Not your clients. Not even God Herself.
I alone decide for myself.
If businesses can't accept that, I will dance on their graves. None of them are entitled to my attention or a moment of my time. I have no love for Google or Microsoft, but I'm always up for a rousing game of "Let's you and him fight."
TL;DR: your fundamental problem is that you stuck your head into Hume's guillotine. You're trying to derive ought from is, where the "is" is that your clients are trying to market by email, and your "ought" is that the rest of us should care that the monopsony resulting from the dominance of Gmail and Outlook makes things harder for your clients. You haven't persuaded me that I should care. Furthermore, your clients do not see me as a human being, but merely a means to their ends. I will not apologize for resenting that.
Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days.
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