The Tech Savvy Admin
Lessons learned about life; pearls of wisdom I’ve gleaned through pain, failure and honest reflection
quiet morning rain
the tranquility of clouds
this day beginning
It’s a rainy morning in greater Seattle, which I have a certain fondness for. Memories of dark, calm coffee shops with a book, or a new magazine, and time. It sometimes didn’t feel as beautiful as I can now see. Time brings wisdom, I guess.
I just watched this video and it got me thinking about the future of tech. One of the key things they point out is how many of the AI prognosticators are now so walking so much of it back. Companies are hiring back some of those laid off. The drive to push everyone into using AI for everything is hitting up against costs, as tokens are no longer free, or subsidized. Anyway, check it out! It’s only about 10 minutes long.
I’ve written about AI before, and about how the current costs are not the true costs. That much of the operational costs of AI have been underwritten by investors. And that’s not tenable. I’ve been seeing more and more articles about these costs being passed long to users. I’m seeing companies burn through yearly token budgets in the first quarter of the year. I’m seeing companies pull back on the requirement to use AI. Yeah, the hype seems to be waning.
So, are you seeing the same signs? Let me know what you’re seeing.
Happy Friday, everyone! And it’s a long weekend…Monday being Memorial Day and all.
I find this old bit from Ren and Stimpy to be joyfully nerdy and, thus, delightfully obnoxious, in a dad joke sort of way.
Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful, refreshing, and joy-inducing weekend.
The writer of the piece below is someone I’ve known a LONG time. I’ve always delighted in Addy’s creativity and thoughtfulness. She wrote this post last year, but I just found out it was published in a print version of Flaunt magazine. I’m quite proud of her!
I don’t want to give too much away, but this post is a personal look at trauma and recovery with a poetic bent.
So, without further ado, please follow my recommendation and give her a read.
Justice for late summer, using fish to tell the future, and giving yourself permission to move on. Read on Substack
shortly after dusk
the trees embracing silence:
birdsong before dawn
Today, May 6th, is Sigmund Freud’s birthday. So, call your Mother!
Yeah, I know how wrong this is….
night air cooling
quiet breeze moving gently
holding drifting mists
rainfalls lovely sound
pollen’s excess washed away
the air now refreshed
I spent several years of my life in the US Navy on submarines. Now, I had NO issues with the cramped spaces, nor with being many, many feet under water. I even crawled into very tight “void spaces”. Things like tanks. Not a problem! However, that’s not the case anymore. I look at this image above, and I feel claustrophobic. Deeply. And this isn’t that crowded. I’ve seen other images/videos where the train staff are literally pushing people together into the car. People are crushed into each other! Yeah, I’d be hyperventilating big time.
For me, this juxtoposition is striking. Nothing traumatic happened in the decades since. I have simply lost any tolerance for confined spaces. On a related note, I also didn’t have any issues with heights back then, but now I struggle.
Weird, methinks. Have you noticed any evolutions like this in your life?
I stumbled upon this image on Pinterest. It brought back some stuff for me. I have long had a fondness for typewriters. I have long valued my typing skills highly. Once, I could type over 100 words a minute with high accuracy. Well, my speed is still pretty high, but my accuracy has weakened. I chalk that up to, first, spell-check, and later autocorrect. The tools have made me lazy. I’m working on building that back up, as I still value this.
Anyway, though I first learned to type on a typewriter, they were electric (I’m not THAT old). My first typing experience was on the IBM Selectric. A lovely, if noisy, machine.
I used these heavily from high school all the way through the Navy. Then they faded from dominance, though I’d still need to use one on occasion (usually for government forms). By the 2000s, they’d vanished.
Now, though I liked the act of typing, I was also motivated by envisioning a future dominated by computers. Being able to use the keyboard would be a powerful, powerful tool. Clearly, I called that right!
Yeah, perhaps the image above is AI (I’m quite confident it is), but that’s not really the point. I found it fun and “enough”. Which might be AI’s main contribution: it’s enough. Mediocrity commoditized. But it’s enough to get me thinking, to capture a mood. Enough, I guess.