Nathanael Yellis

This week, I had a few conversations about the real use cases for AI. We're about 15 months into the hype cycle. It went from early adopters to tech journalists to wide usage almost a year ago. In the year since then, seemingly every company, although more properly every software company, including mine, put AI into their teams or toolings or talking points. That's worked more or less well: doubtless the Microsoft inbox assistant helps people read and write more useless stuff into Outlook; if you want likely wrong but there text, a bot can give it to you; if you'd like a generic but never seen before stock image, it's a prompt away. But the actually compelling use case, one where a novel problem is solved or a problem is solved in a much better way, remains a bit elusive.

I've been out of politics as a job for about seven years. When I pivoted to software, my consumption of political media went from work-related or at least adjacent back to where it might've been best all along: for 'pleasure.' Between quitting most social media and dialing back what I needed to follow for work, my intake of news and politics dropped significantly. This gave me a little bit  of perspective–enough to realize that the authors I read directly predicted my opinions.

When I worked in advertising, our design brief had three initial options for the overall style. They were traditional, modern, or other. 95% of the project briefs ticked the modern box. This was surprising: our firm did creative work for southern small business owners and southern politicians. They were, almost to a person, the old boys club members you'd expect. They were so conservative that I'm not sure they believed Pepsi to be an acceptable soft drink. It was only Coca-Cola and our clients were Coke classic incarnate. Yet, they asked for their designs to be modern.

Eventually, everyone buries their parents. Some of us have already had to bear that burden; it's coming for the rest of us. Whether your parents die tragically before their time or at a ripe old age, it's a lonely, sobering journey.

I spend a lot of time reading articles online. In 2016, I decided to do something productive with all of that reading. Inspired by my brother’s Sunday Evening Post, I began a weekly roundup of things worth the time to read.

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Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not WWW.NYTIMES.COM

This morning, I reviewed the last year's worth of posts on my site. Most of the posts were these weekly emails; I also published a few longer form articles. A year ago yesterday I published a retrospective: a requiem for Revue.

In John Updike's autobiography, he describes winters in Ipswich as dark and lonely unless you made your own fun. His set of middle class bohemians had their cocktail parties and poetry readings and volunteer choruses, all of which make excellent appearances in his short stories. But the biographic detail from his autobiography that struck me is the weekday trips to New Hampshire to go skiing.

Twice a week, I ride the train to Boston. My commute starts with a quick walk to the suburban station near my house, after forty minutes on the commuter rail, I either walk a mile or jump on the trolley to East Cambridge. The people watching is varied: sometimes it's townies heading to the big city for a day, there are some high school kids heading to school, and you get quite a few tourists. On the train, though, it's mostly commuters. We're a quiet bunch. Unless you sit with your friends, you're usually reading, sleeping, or staring off into space.