Weeknotes 26:33

Posted 3 hours ago

Week of August 9–15

The picture is pretty fuzzy, but it summed up my Sunday. The board shows my flight for Chattanooga, departing about three hours later than the original departure time.

A series of storms in Chicago shut down the airport multiple times and delayed or canceled many flights. My first flight from Indy was delayed and delayed again once we were on the plane and had just pulled away from the gate. We sat on the tarmac for about an hour.

I was glad I got back to Chattanooga just after midnight. It was a long day and one of my craziest plane trips. It still does not touch the time when my wife and I got stuck in Amsterdam when we returned from living in Hungary for 9 months. I felt blessed that I made it home. There were a lot of other people that were not as fortunate.

I had written my weeknotes post for last week in the afternoon at the Indy airport. I had just finished up the post and was getting myself mentally ready for boarding when I found out our flight had been delayed.

A local adventure

What started as a trip to Aladdin Printing in downtown Chattanooga for my youngest to print some resumes led to an hour adventure exploring afterwards. We had fun looking in several shops and taking some pictures at different landmarks around the printing company’s building. I had taken off Monday after my long trip home on Sunday.

Around the workshop

  • I continued working on the “Hub” page for the Study Through The Bible for Wonder of the Word. By the end of the week, I was much happier with the interface and I chose another font for the headlines which was part of Wonder of the Word branding. It was also fun to see more of it come together as I worked with our backend developers to bring in more content on the Hub page. I was also able to make some directional decisions and update other templates that I had already worked on. I felt much better about my progress on the project by the end of the week.
  • Late in the week, I started working on the digital version of our Fall newsletter. This newsletter celebrates Revive Our Hearts 25th Anniversary. There are going to be several more interactive components that we don’t normally have in our other newsletters. The newsletter is still in process and had a major editorial change happen earlier in the week. I decided it was better to get the current content and then make updates later so that I could go ahead and get started. I will be out of the office next week for three days so I wanted to get a good jump on it so I can have it ready for review the last week of August.

Around the house

As I returned home from helping my son to move to Indiana, the focus shifted to helping my youngest to prepare to move off to college this next week.

  • I serviced both her car and our van which we will be taking her stuff in. Both needed oil changes. Hers needed an alignment and we needed to rotate the tires on our van. And then some unexpected things needed attention as well. Ain’t that the way.
  • My wife and youngest were out on Thursday and had a rock or some sort of debris hit the windshield and left a 12 inch crack. I immediately called the insurance. Their partnering glass company did not have an appointment before we are suppose to leave on Tuesday. They found another local company that could come out on Friday. But their vendor did not have the complete trim kit so it got delayed to Saturday. And then Saturday, the glass company realized the windshield they had received had a crack in it. So now we are looking at Monday afternoon. Nothing seems to be coming easy right now in these life situations.

AI related articles I read this week

I read several articles and watched a video related to AI this week. All of them were more of the bent I lean toward which is more anti-AI. I wish I had more time right now to try to write some of my own thoughts about this subject. I have resonated with a lot of the things that I read this week. I applaud The Gospel Coalition’s stand and think it is a very appropriate one for a Christian ministry.

We talked about AI as an organization several weeks ago. It is challenging when we have a lot of different perspectives on it. I was challenged and encouraged by something Tim Challies wrote a couple of weeks ago. “As I have said before, we are on the frontier of a new technology, and we will need to explore its functionalities and ethics together, granting one another a lot of grace along the way.”

I want to keep this thought front and center as I continue to wrestle with my own thoughts, concerns, convictions, and boundaries that I want to set for myself.

  • A License to Act (Jim Nielsen) – Jim argues that we are no longer building the capacity to act but we are renting that capacity and borrowing it but not developing it ourselves.
  • I recently sat down for coffee with one of my oldest friends in the industry (Jordan Scales) – Both a humorous and harrowing look at interacting with someone who is a little too into LLMs. (I borrowed the description from Piccalilli.) They hit it on the head and I found no reason to try to improve it or do my own take.
  • No cost, no value (Johanna Larsson) – Johanna argues that using LLMs to create things creates no value for us because we did not invest anything into the creation. She end with the admonition, “So go find the things that you think are worth investing your time and energy into. Create genuine software by not taking shortcuts. Go talk to some humans, draw some diagrams, and type out a whole lot of code. Go have fun!”
  • Some Thoughts on AI (Daryl Dash) – Some brief reflections by a pastor in Canada that I follow.
  • Evolved antennas, LLM-generated code, and a potential antifuture (Eric Bailey) – Eric shares his many concerns about LLMs are creating inaccessible code and shaping who can and cannot use the Web. He didn’t say it but I feel like what he was trying to say is “take back the Internet.”
  • I’m done using AI (Brett Codes) – Brett went all in with AI. And he has come to the conclusion, “The cost of using LLM-based tooling is way too high and absolutely not worth it, in my opinion, for myself or society.” He has decided to stop using AI for coding at work. He knows there may be consequences. I admire him for living out his convictions. It is well worth your time to read his thoughts or watch them. He also made a follow-up video, Why I don’t use AI for just the easy things.
  • Mea Culpa – Dark Hours (Terry Godier) – Terry apologizes for his irresponsible use of AI to build an app that was basically a clone of an open source project.
  • The Fruits of AI (Jim Nielsen) – Piggybacking on Terry’s article, Jim argues that “carelessness” is the grain of AI. Careless outcomes are the default. “Good fruit requires cultivation and care.”
  • Trevor Sheatz (Facebook) applauds The Gospel Coalition’s decision to draw a line in the sand “to use 100% human written, proofed, and edited articles, as they state writing on spiritual topics is most effective when it’s distinctly written from one human to another rather than from AI to humans.” Read about The Gospel Coalition decision.
  • Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? (Aaron Horwath, NOEMA) – This article gets more the philosophical and existential reasons why this disruptive moment in history. It gave a very different perspective than a lot of the other things I read. Highly recommend.

An update about Instapaper

A couple of weeks ago, I shared my displeasure with the recent redesign of Instapaper. Since then, I updated several of the settings and have disliked the interface less than my initial response. I still miss the simplier interface from before but I found some ways to make it much better experience. I decided to turn the reader off by default so that I only see the reader if I click on an article.

I also reached out to the Instapaper team asking if they could add a setting so that I could turn off the counts. They have this functionality already in the iOS app. I got a response that they have created an issue and will address it in the near future.

Other articles I read

Caught my eye

Josh Crain’s website – I came across this using the personalsit.es random site link. I love the look and simplicity of his site. I loved the choice of typefaces, colors, and layouts. Nice theme toggle as well. It just felt nice to be on his site.

Ordinary Abundance – I loved this visual essay. I am seeing more and more of these type of things popping up.

What I watched

  • American Pickers (Samsung TV Plus)
  • Mad About You (Samsung TV Plus)
  • Creed III (Netflix)
  • Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy (Network TV)

Books I am reading

What I played

  • MLB The Show 23 (Orioles) – I went 4-1 this week. I won the final two games against the A’s to sweep that series. I won a series 2-1 with the Blue Jays after I blew a save and a one-run lead to lose the first game.
  • FC 2026 (Barcelona FC) – I won the only game I played this week.

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