I can’t help associating Mother’s Day with another holiday: Thanksgiving. That’s because, in 2011, my mother passed away on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the last holiday I spent with her. I owe my mother far more than I can ever properly credit. For 10 years in my early childhood, she raised me as a single mother. When she passed away, my mother had worked at a garment factory in southeast Arkansas for 23 years.…

Ryan Leaf is a great redemption story, even if you’re not a sports fan. The No. 2 pick of the 1998 NFL draft (second only to Peyton Manning) is widely known as being one of the biggest busts in NFL history. FUN FACT: Leaf recently declared himself the greatest bust in NFL history so that fans could save their breath by no longer having to argue about the topic. Leaf’s status as an NFL bust was worsened by drug addition, for which he served time in prison.…

I just heard the news that Steve Albini died a couple days ago. Excuse me while I get all up in my feels and repeat myself from my microblog: Albini has always had a special place in my heart for producing Pixies' Surfer Rosa. Surfer Rosa was one of those albums that blew my young mind. I later realized that one of my favorite parts of it was its simplicity.…

Would we need therapy if we knew how to slow down and unplug? How to stop distracting ourselves from ourselves? Convenience has robbed us of these opportunities. As certain tasks have gotten easier, we can now more quickly move to something else. We can more easily switch contexts in the name of productivity. But is productivity always the goal? Maybe if you’re a widgetmaker. But any widgetmaker who stumbled upon this post has likely clicked on to something else.…

Since ChatGPT was released to the masses in late 2022, far too many companies have asked how they can integrate large language models (LLMs) into their core products. Unfortunately, the ‘solutions’ often include having generative AI write for users. Most implementations of the idea are stupid because the last thing writers want is for AI to write for them. Any company that serves and understands writers will be unsurprised to find writers want to protect their own voices, no matter how hard putting things into their own words is.…

Back when I listened to his podcast regularly, Cal Newport often stressed the importance of place. Newport, not a supporter of working from home, recommended renting some cheap office space down the road rather than setting up shop in the corner of your bedroom. He’d often share stories of writers who secluded themselves in cabins or certain wings of their estates to focus on their craft. Newport’s point wasn’t that you must be able to afford these spaces to be productive.…

‘Jake, you’re a big critic of generative AI. So you must hate it, right?’ Not so fast. I don’t hate technology. I hate the overhype and overselling. I want tech to stay in its lane. I am the driver, not technology—even generative AI. Yesterday I used Anthropic’s Claude to help me prepare for a phone interview. I didn’t ask Claude to fabricate a resume. (I’d already submitted my resume anyway.)…

I’ve recently fallen in love with Manjaro Sway. While things started great, my experiment using a 2012 MacBook Air in 2024 hit a bit of a snag. 4GB RAM can take you only so far these days. So I started looking at Linux distros to replace an unsupported version of MacOS I was able to install thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I started with Linux Mint, which was great until it wasn’t.…

I’ll always appreciate the MobiScribe Wave as being the device that proved an e-ink tablet has a place in my life, but after nearly five months of use, I’ve realized I can’t recommend the Wave to others. Or, perhaps more accurately, I can recommend it only with specific caveats and to a specific type of person with a specific mindset and specific expectations (basically anyone who’s looking for an affordable e-ink writing tablet, and who doesn’t mind dealing with some tradeoffs).…

What series of events–what algorithm–led to this bird in my tree? I often ask this question any time I’m entering or leaving my driveway. A tiny owl of some sort has decided to make its home in a small tree in my front yard. The tree is really close to the driveway. I could probably jump up and touch the owl if I wanted to, though I wouldn’t, because he very well may chomp off a finger.…

All too often, we contemplate how we want to succeed. What would you do if you knew you were destined to succeed? Go do that. So the wisdom goes. But sometimes it pays to look at the other end of the spectrum. What if your venture is doomed to fail? For this thought exercise, assume there’s no way to salvage things. You’re going to fail, no matter what. The question is how you’re going to fail.…

In so many ways, the internet sucks. Social media engagement algorithms have made it even harder to find quality content worthy of our attention1. These algorithms don’t push stories you care about. They instead push stories other people care about in the hopes that you’ll fit into the same bucket as other consumers. They provide access to an abundance of content, but the content is often, quite frankly, crap. (Feel free to substitute a stronger word if you like.…

Why should we create in the age of AI? How can we compete? This post from LMNT puts a different perspective on things: I take a little comfort in knowing that it will be impossible for “AI” tools—here on out—to differentiate between human-made and machine-generated content, thereby inevitably feeding on their own regurgitations. It’s already happening, of course. Over the next few years, while these “AI” companies try to sort that out (and fail), and search engines try to index only the sites that are what any reasonable person would consider genuine (and fail), the best thing we can all do is just create what we want while ignoring their problems, because they’re not our problems.…

Today’s target for artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be artificial general intelligence (AGI), a technology that is competent in many areas, like humans. AI is most often highly-specialized, focusing on one area with a narrow set of tasks. This sort of AI is best-suited for specialized audiences needing specialized tasks. But with AGI, the prophets of AI can achieve their dream: AI for everyone, everywhere. Or so the prophecy claims.…

Some people want to be left alone to do their own work and go home and call it a day. There’s nothing wrong with that—I support your right to curate your own experience. But by working in such fashion, there’s only so much you can do. There are only so many hours in a day, you have only so much energy, there are only so many tasks you can give your attention to.…

Only a few days ago, Manton Reece dropped a bomb on the micro.blog community: Subscribers of micro.blog Premium would continue to enjoy the perks they’ve come to know and love for not just one blog—and not two or three or four blogs—but for five blogs1. This pricing change is a rare example of a top-tier service getting better and offering even more value to its customers. Let’s dig a bit more into the value of micro.…

I could try to tell you what exactly Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires 1 is about via a traditional book review, or I could hope that an inspired rant might give you a better idea. If you haven’t already figured it out, I’m choosing the latter route. The tech billionaires have one simple goal: to shelter themselves from the world they’ve shaped with their outsized wealth, power, and influence.…

Yesterday I had an idea for a mock LinkedIn influencer. He’d be a tech bro dubbed the SaaShole, who would serve as a blueprint for how not to do tech marketing. The character would be a mix of Dexter Guff, from the satirical podcast Dexter Guff is Smarter Than You (And You Can Be Too)1, and Dom Mazzetti, from the BroScience YouTube channel2. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .…

This post is not a straight-up ‘MobiScribe Wave vs. Kindle Scribe’ kind of post because I can’t compare the devices themselves. As I said in my MobiScribe perspective post 1, I’ve only demoed the Kindle Scribe at my local Best Buy. But, as someone who’s used numerous Kindle e-ink readers over the years, I can speak to the advantages of the MobiScribe Wave over the Kindle ecosystem. And with that said, let’s get to it.…

Companies want customers to be passionate about their products and services. And they want employees to give everything to their daily labor. Companies want everyone else around them to be inspired, yet so many companies follow the industrial model in a race to the bottom, doing as little as possible to actually inspire. But inspiration doesn’t just happen. It’s hard to come by. It often takes work. Seth Godin has long been the voice against corporate conformity.…

The best part about the internet is sharing. And sharing is caring. If you enjoy this blog, maybe you’ll also enjoy the content that informs and influences it. You can obviously find such pieces in the sources I link to in the footnotes of my posts. But those links show only the most obvious influences. Sometimes something we read or watch or listen to plants a seed that germinates for a long time, meaning we forget where it all started.…

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The tech industry is sthe ultimate hammer in that it thinks tech is the best solution for every problem1. And many businesses buy into the tech industry’s thinking, as they scramble for that Holy Grail, that one SaaS solution to rule them all and bring order to the chaos. So they run out and sign a contract and spend months and years importing their data and working with their vendors to make templates and custom reports that fall short of what the nice salesman promised them.…

I don’t know what’s ahead for tech in 2024. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about it. A career in the volatile oil and gas industry has cured me of any thoughts on making bold predictions. So instead I’ll look at what may happen (instead of what I think will happen) and what I’d like to happen for tech in 2024. Will the generative AI bubble burst? It’s too hard to say if the generative AI bubble will burst in 2024.…

If you move fast and break things, do you ever come back to clean up your mess? Or do you just look for the next thing to smash? The October 2023 cover of Wired magazine irked me the moment I saw it. Cover of Wired Magazine featuring the leaders of OpenAI, with the caption: 'Dear AI Overlords, Don't F*ck This Up' On one hand, the cover irked me because it seemed to be saying that we, the commoners, are at the mercy of the lords of AI (let’s just scratch out ‘overlords’ for the sake of accuracy).…

I recently sold a couple laptops (Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and Lenovo ThinkPad X270), so I was looking for another laptop to take to the coffee shop or on those rare occasions I go out of town. I didn’t want to break the bank, and while I was looking into how cheap/old of a MacBook I could make do with, I impulsively bought a 2012 MacBook Air 5,2. So now I’ll definitely get some hipster cred while I’m sipping my mocha at the local cafe.…

There’s no such thing as the average person, or so the wisdom goes. The logic says that if you were to create a profile of the average man or woman through a variety of factors—height, weight, income, weight, tolerance for Taylor Swift, etc.—you wouldn’t be able to find the real-live version of that person. (So, the next time your friend says they just wanna be average, let them know that they’re chasing one of the least attainable goals of all time.…

Integrating LLMs into your business may not be a quick fix. Large language models (LLMs) seem to be expensive, energy-hogging toys at this point. Some companies—most notably Microsoft—think integrating LLMs like ChatGPT into everyday business is a great idea. But I’m not so sure. Below are some concerns I have for businesses going all in on LLMs. Hallucinations It’s well known that LLMs make stuff up (AKA they hallucinate).…

The internet isn’t fun anymore. That’s the claim made in a recent New Yorker article1. A claim with which I agree. So why isn’t the internet fun anymore? Let’s answer that by first looking at why the internet was fun in the first place. In the early days, people were on the internet because they wanted to be. These early adopters were curious and adventurous, at least in a digital sense, so they experimented to see what the internet was, what it could be, and how they could help shape it.…

Nietzsche shocked the world when he declared God is dead. (Kids in the Hall, not so much1) Now, digital philosophers hope to do the same when they declare the death of Twitter. On one hand, Twitter will live on through X, whatever the hell that becomes. On other other hand, the essence of Twitter was gone long before Elon Musk bought the platform. So what’s next? Most people are trying to answer this question by finding a comparable replacement.…

My son and I were walking the dogs recently when somehow the topic of AI came up. When you’re preparing to become a parent, so many fears enter your thoughts. How am I going to keep from screwing this little person up, and help him or her become a fully-functioning adult? How do I prepare this child for all the evils and threats of the world? How am I going to have THE TALK when the time comes?…

Like it or not, generative AI is here to stay. But writers don’t have to lose their voices to technology. iA writer has long been the writing app for writers. The company gets writers, as they’re constantly thinking of ways to remove distractions and make writing (and thinking) as simple as possible. As you’re likely well aware, generative AI has been all the rage since OpenAI released ChatGPT just over a year ago.…

The MobiScribe Wave isn’t the best e-ink device out there. But it might be all you need. Over the last few weeks, I’ve fallen in love with the MobiScribe Wave. Because the device is an interesting mix of value and compromises, you should do your research before you buy. This post is less technical than you’ll find on most other reviews. I hope to instead give practical perspective to inform your buying decision.…

As we rely more on AI, aren’t we at risk of sounding just like everyone else? The prophets of AI continue to promise their favored tech will make our lives easier. Thanks to AI, more of the things we want are only a click or a prompt away. You can now inject AI wherever you want, as AI can help you with writing, creating music, and editing images, as just a few examples.…

Building your own website isn’t quite as easy as 1, 2, 3. But it ain’t that much harder. 📝 NOTE: This post is now outdated, as I've moved my site back to micro.blog. But I'm leaving the post up in case it can help someone else in the future. This weekend I got the itch to customize my personal website again. (Just FYI, if creating your own website sounds like a horrible idea, then check out mataroa.…

A quick video in which I question the approach of the prophets of AI, and what it means for us Back in June, I recorded this quick video I posted on LinkedIn, in which I asked if AI developers are putting the cart before the horse. So now I want to share that same video with you. Thanks for watching. Or, if you prefer to read–no worries, just check out the transcript below.…

Either a work is inspiring or insightful, or it’s not. Stop qualifying the work by saying it was created by an LLM or another form of generative AI. I recently made a tongue-in-cheek post on LinkedIn, directed as a jab at how some people give large language models (LLMs) too much credit simply because they’re machines. Screenshot of my stupid post on LinkedIn criticizing LLMs This silly post got me thinking about content quality vs.…

The internet is full of people worrying about there being too much AI, too fast just around the corner. But what if there’s not enough in a timely manner? These days, people are worried about AI taking their jobs. And who can blame them, with all the stories circulating about AI’s great accomplishments. (P.S. If you’re looking for a counterweight to the hype, read Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis1.…

For the last few years, the oil and gas sector has been waiting to be reshaped through mergers and acquisitions. Is ExxonMobil’s latest move a sign of the prophecy? ExxonMobil recently shocked the energy industry with its nearly $60 billion bid to acquire Pioneer Natural Resources in an all-stock deal1. When the deal closes, one of the world’s supermajors will have the acreage and production runway of the Permian Basin’s top driller.…

Technology doesn’t progress on its own simply because we expect it to. On a recent episode of Andrew Yang’s Forward podcast1, Walter Isaacson shared an anecdote he picked up while shadowing Elon Musk for the entrepreneur’s recently-released eponymous biography2. In this anecdote, Musk made the point that people take for granted that technology progresses on its own, as if it’s an unwritten law of the universe. As if things just move forward with time.…

Can we be mindful in the 21st century? Introverts make up at least one-third of the population—maybe as high as one-half—yet in so many ways the world feels as if it’s made only for extroverts. How can it be that our social systems benefit one type of person while alienating the other?1 Pop culture often presents the introvert as being inadequate and odd, a type of person to be fixed or merely tolerated when possible.…

What does convenience cost us in the long run? Listen on Anchor As long as there are people, there will be questions about the human condition. How are people doing? What are their greatest struggles and fears and joys? And what does it mean to be a real human being1 at any point in time? Odds are good I won’t make it out of the 21st century alive. So considering what it means to be human in the 21st century seems a good place to put my energy for the next version of my blog.…

The more I learn about nuclear, the more I become convinced it’s the key to solving our energy woes. And Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never1 may have pushed me over the edge. Cover of Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never Photo credit: Amazon Why are environmentalists so strongly opposed to nuclear energy? Nuclear is abundant, clean, and energy dense. Yet so-called environmentalists (or, perhaps more appropriately, environmental alarmists) keep pushing for solar and wind, which are proven to be inefficient and terrible for the environment in their own ways.…

In November of last year I wanted a convenient way to carry my jounral, pens, and Kindle together. These items easily fit into my backpack I use for my day job. But sometimes I don’t want to carry my laptop and chargers and everything else I usually carry to and from the office. I wanted something that would make it easy to keep my writerly items together so I could easily remove them from my backpack in one motion.…

The Pilot Metropolitan tops most lists of starter fountain pens. The Metropolitan is a good pen. But it’s not even the best starter fountain pen within its own brand. That honor belongs to the Pilot Kakuno. That’s like naming a college football team #1 in the country when they didn’t even win their conference. I mean, it happens—but it doesn’t feel right. Image of Pilot Kakuno fountain pen courtsey of JetPens…

Let’s kill title case once and for all. Except for in one specific situation—when writing titles. But for everything else, kill title case and use sentence case instead. Title case has no place in: Blog headings UX/UI Calls to action (CTAs) Sentences Title case is a pain to read. Switching between capital and lowercase letters makes readers uneasy. Too many capital letters make reading confusing. Readers ask themselves if the capitalized words are proper nouns or important words.…

Writing is easy. All you do is string together a bunch of words. Or so some would have you think. Never mind the fact that so many of us are terrible at saying what we mean. Writing is much harder than some give credit. Because writing is more than words. Writing is research Finding the right words is much harder when you don’t know what you want to say. The words flow more easily if you’ve researched your topic.…

So many of us, over the last couple years, have been rethinking our relationship with social media and the internet at large. My own wonderings about technology have seen me dabbling into using only open source operating systems and software. But I’ve recently realized that while I appreciate open source and like the idea of all technology being open source, I am not an open source purist or absolutist. Like so many digital citizens, I have concerns about privacy and security.…

The end of the year is a great time to look at what lies ahead. Because I prefer asking important questions over making bold predictions, I’ve lately been wondering: What will digital marketing on a post-Web2 internet look like? When people think of Web3, they likely think of the blockchain and crypto and other related technologies. I’m not so sure that’s where we’re headed. But maybe those details aren’t so important.…

What if Web3 isn’t an evolution but a move to something like the web’s original form? Not an arrival but a return. A regression of sorts. A devolution in the most positive context. These are some of the questions I’ve been asking about Web3 over the last few months. And these questions hint to my hopes—but not my predictions—for the future of the web after the apparent falls of Twitter and Meta.…

“It’s like putting together a puzzle.” That’s how my buddy explained oil and gas abstracting. “Does that sound like something you’d be interested in?” Yeah, I told him. I’ll give it a shot. I still had no idea what “abstracting” and “chain of title” and “runsheet” and “mineral ownership report” meant, but it all sounded better than selling cars in the middle of the financial crisis. It didn’t take long to see what he meant by saying that my new job was like putting together a puzzle.…

So many of us have this habit of romanticizing great writing. We dream of the genius writers sitting alone at their desks, sipping on a cappuccino as the perfect words flow from their minds through their hands and onto the page. And so, when we sit down for our own writing, this is the image we’re seeking to emulate. Romanticizing great writing is harmful for a couple reasons: It makes us feel as if we can’t write great works because we’re not the same kind of genius.…

Writers often worry about word count. Now that writing has gone digital, many also worry about character count, especially on platforms like Twitter. The problem with word count Is word count really what we should be worried about when character count is not an issue? Word count tells only part of the story. One word equals one word. But word count alone doesn’t give clues about how difficult a sentence or piece of work is to read.…

Job interviews suck. There’s no denying it. You never know what you’re walking into. An interview may be a one-on-one affair, or it may be you seated across from six other people all staring at you like a jury eager to convict. Or maybe you go through multiple interviews back to back. And there’s always the chance someone will join the interview late and ask questions you’ve already answered. Of course, the latecomers always ask the questions you had the weakest answers for.…

I’ve been rethinking my relationship with technology since I started reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. After mentioning this book is usually when a blogger tells his audience he’s deleted his social media accounts and can now be reached only by smoke signal. But this is not that kind of post, dear reader. I appreciate that Digital Minimalism is not a book of prescriptive, one-size-fits-all advice for living with technology in the 21st century.…

Part of succeeding in the real world is unlearning what school has taught you. This is especially true with writing. So what are some of the lessons writers need to unlearn? Forget minimum word counts. School teaches us to drag out our writing, to string audiences along as we inflate our writing to meet some arbitrary minimum word count. Enforcing a strict maximum word count would be far more effective. Teachers should ask the impossible of students.…

If you’ve ever sought advice to combat writer’s block or to rediscover inspiration, you’ve likely stumbled upon the advice to go on a walk. And if you’re in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, I would amend that advice by recommending you take a walk on the Rock Art Tail in Grapevine’s Parr Park. The Parr Park Rock Art Trail is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a path lined with painted and decorated rocks.…

If you had to sum up in only a few sentences the WeWork debacle to someone unfamiliar with the situation, how would you do so? The following quote from The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell would be my candidate. But prior to the prospectus becoming public, bankers and other advisers had continued to shower [Adam] Neumann with praise–giving him criticism too infrequently and too meekly.…

I entered college knowing only that I wanted to write for a living. I had accepted that I wasn’t going to support myself on the paperback royalties of novels I would never write. Technical writing sounded unimaginative, and I’m not sure my university offered such a program anyway. Therefore, journalism seemed my only option, so I stepped onto campus as a journalism major. By the end of my first quarter, I had switched to Undecided, as I then had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but journalism was not part of those future plans.…

When you hear about Texas, a few things may come to mind: Cowboys The Alamo Salsa and cheese dip Big AF state You likely don’t think of the state as possibly being home to America’s first UFO crash, which took place 50 years before the better-known Roswell incident. From my experience, most people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are unaware of the Aurora, Texas, UFO incident, even though it happened practically in their back yard.…

From time to time, someone will accuse me of having a morbid fascination with death. But fascination is inaccurate; my relationship with death is closer to a familiarity slowly working its way to acceptance. Death and the resulting losses and grief have had a big influence on me over the last few years. In short, loss has opened my eyes to certain realities, has shaped so many of my views, and has changed the very essence of who I am.…