[Saadia] No?

A few reflections on AI, catching up with friends, and saying no.

An async podcast by Saadia Carbis and Joshua Wold.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:18 AI again
• 6:35 Catching up with friends
• 10:46 Google vs Apple Maps
• 14:34 Fix it or leave it?
• 16:11 Saying no

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to Async. This is a back and forth conversation between me and Joshua. I'll be recording this episode and you'll hear his voice on the next episode or the last one if you want to catch up on the conversation. I'm going to follow up on a few items from Joshua's last episode to start with. So let's talk about AI. Man, you've heard me on this podcast. I've always been ambivalent about AI and AI's effect on jobs and maybe even like kind of dismissive, you know, like, oh, it'll be fine. AI is not going to take over jobs anytime soon. It's not good enough yet, maybe in the future, but that's starting to change really. Partially actually because of what you shared last week about ChatGPT's ability to render reasonably good designs based on a rough markup, a rough sketch. But also like I've started hearing stories and they're concerning stories. I think we're just on the verge now of hearing about AI inspired layoffs. A company I follow recently had a bunch of layoffs and digging around, sort of reading between the lines, it really seems like they are replacing engineers with AI or if not directly just with AI, but maybe with more effective engineers that are using more AI. And so that's a bit concerning and I don't love it. You know, I've got a really strange, tense relationship with these LLMs because I use them all the time and I really find so much benefit and a lot of value out of them. But also I really don't like it when I I see LLM inspired writing or LLM writing, not inspired, but LLM blog posts or, and my wife said that to me just yesterday. Oh, I used ChatGPT to write a blog post. And, you know, I congratulated her because I think we all sort of had to go through that phase of what can ChatGPT do? But also I kind of hate that it's this like essential part of us. And we really, we think through writing, that's how we form opinions. And it's dangerous, I think, to let someone take over that aspect of our lives or a machine rather. So that's interesting. Also, I've been writing, you know, I'm studying, I'm studying a master's degree at the same time as working. And let's see, like I, I use LLMs a lot for study. I get it to summarize notes. I get it to watch a video for me and give me the top points, things like that. But when it comes to writing essays, I don't know, like I, maybe I don't particularly want to write this essay. It'd be very easy to just go, oh, can you write this paragraph for me? It is so easy to do. But I've been really forcing myself to, well, what I've been doing is, especially on tough ones that I don't really want to write, is just give me dense notes, packed with references. And then I can use those notes. And I often reorganize them and restructure. But I can use those notes to pull out interesting parts of the text that are relevant to a particular section I'm writing. And so that's how I've been using an LLM to write. Anyway, back to, back to jobs. It's kind of scary. What's, what's happening in the world? And I don't know, I guess that's partially why I'm studying my masters of teaching is to hedge a little bit. Maybe if everything goes pear-shaped, I'll still have a job as a teacher. We'll see. But I think taste is something you touched on last week. And that's the key here is you've, LLMs can do the work, but they have no taste. They don't know when it's one bit of text, when one paragraph sounds better than another. And neither do people necessarily, because there is no better. There is no definitive, oh, this is better than that. This design looks better than this design. That doesn't exist. It's all subjective. It's all down to taste. So maybe taste is the key to working with LLMs. As a designer, you have, you should be getting paid for your good taste in design and being able to differentiate that using AI. And as a developer, I have a good taste in what makes code work well. And that's not a word we use in engineering very often, taste. We'd like to think of it as, I don't know, all very logical and not so subjective. But it is about taste. It is about, oh, I have a feeling that's going to be hard to read for somebody else. So I have a feeling that bit of code might introduce a bug. I'm not sure how, but I'm just going to like reword it or restructure it slightly, maybe split it onto two lines just so that I don't accidentally introduce a bug in the future. And that sort of taste is not something that LLMs have necessarily. And so often I'm employing that taste. If I'm using AI to write code, I'll get the code. I'll have a look at it. Yeah, it works, but it would be better if, and I can apply that taste. Same with writing, right? Everybody has a unique writing style. So it's an interesting and ongoing difficult conversation. But as of this week, I'm a little less dismissive and a little more concerned. Another thing we've been talking about is having conversations with people as a way of inspiring ourselves, as a way of refilling our cup and getting the creative juices flowing. Because creativity is so important. I mean, we could relate that back to the previous topic as well. Like we're creative beings and we have to be creative. And I think we're at our best when we're in a creative space. Everybody. I think that that is universal. And one of the ways we can do that is just sitting and listening and having a conversation with someone in real life. I find that that's really, really helpful. I did that yesterday with an old friend and he's not old. Well, I guess we are getting old a bit, but I've just known him for a long time. And it was so refreshing. It was so nice. We sat in a nice cafe right on the water and sunrise. And it was just spectacular. The cafe staff was super friendly. All the people in the cafe were all those like early morning sunrise people. And so everyone's smiling. They've got their dogs and everyone's having a good old chat with each other, happy to chat with strangers. And Ross and I, we sat and had a conversation for two and a half hours. It was really nice. Here's something that I did that I think I'm going to continue doing just on a whim. I left my phone in the car because I knew that I could pay with my watch. So I left my phone in the car and I didn't, I didn't take it into the cafe at all because we do have a tendency, don't we, to like look up the answers to our questions. There were a couple of times he had his phone. There were a couple of times when I was like, what's that movie I want to recommend to you. I can't remember the name. Oh, that's right. It's, and he looks it up. Yeah, that's it. That's the one. Monkey Man was the movie, by the way. It was great. We're also talking about Victoria, which was also another great film. Anyway, if you know those films, then listen, as I'm speaking to you, not Joshua at the moment, then you'll know that they're, they're great films. And if you don't know them, look them up. Victoria isn't really edge of your seat. Like almost, um, it's almost so intense that you want to take breaks, but I really enjoyed that. I think it's like 2015 German film. Anyway, really cool. Um, so we talked for ages and I took a notebook in as well. And a couple of times I just like jotted down things on the notebook or the other thing you could do is like leave yourself a note using Siri on your, on your watch maybe. Um, but it's kind of weird speaking into your watch going, Hey, dingus, make a note. Remember to do this. Uh, so I just jotted down a couple of ideas of things that I want to continue thinking about, continue exploring. I wasn't taking notes on the conversation, just like he said something and that inspired, Oh, what would it look like if we inverted Bloom's taxonomy hierarchy and, and started with creating instead of remembering and worked our way up to remembering from there, that would be really interesting. I wonder if that makes any sense. And so I just wrote down inverted Bloom's taxonomy. And, uh, I think that that's a good way of engaging in a conversation. It sort of forces you to listen. If you do have any questions, you really need to look up later. And there are a couple of things that he recommended to me, a song. Um, it's called, please don't move to Melbourne by a Brisbane band. I can't remember the name now. And it's a lot of fun. You should check that one out too. Please don't move to Melbourne. And it's, uh, it's very catchy and he wanted me to listen to it and I didn't have my phone. So I wrote it down on my notebook. All right. I recommend it. I, you should try it out. Why don't you try it out, Joshua and listeners try it out and report back to me how it goes. Some more follow-up Apple maps. You said it doesn't work for you and you're using Google maps. Shame on you. I don't, I mean, whatever, use what you want. I don't care. I don't have a Google account and I pride myself on not using any Google products. I don't trust Google to not use my location data and the places I visit and things like that to show me ads. So I'm not a huge fan of Google maps. Also, I feel like I've seen ads in there before. Not, not a fan. Apple maps works great for me though. And so if it's not working great for you, what are you going to do? Maybe ways a lot of, a lot of, uh, people I know like, like ways it's an Israeli company, you know, so a lot of Jews around here, they like have the habit of using ways it's huge in Israel. Uh, although it's owned by Google too. So if you have those same data privacy concerns, then maybe ways is no good, but Apple maps, it works great for me. It's actually done a few things for me that, uh, were surprising. One is it seems to update maps based on my driving habit. So when I first, uh, started using it and, and was living where I live, if you ask directions to my house, it would, you would end at the end of the driveway, by the way, if you ask Google maps for directions to my house, it will take you on a route that doesn't even exist. It wants to take you down this particular road that it thinks has a connecting road, but it doesn't actually. And people get, I have to tell people literally have to tell people, Hey, if you're asking directions to get to our place, don't use Google maps and, uh, or, you know, take this particular route anyway, back to Apple maps, uh, people used to end up at the start of our driveway and we have a long driveway. It's maybe 200 meters long, maybe more than that. And, uh, uh, so eventually though, and also the, the trouble is we have, uh, grandparents living halfway along and they've got like an a, uh, letter after the number. So the, the numeral and then a after, whereas we're just the numeral on its own. And so if you put it in theirs now, it will give you directions down the driveway and to their front door in their, in their like little side driveway. And if you put in our address, it'll take you all the way down the driveway, all the way to where we park our cars. Cause Apple maps is, is aware of, uh, you know, it's been able to update that because it sees when we put in the directions for this address, this is where we always end up. Um, maybe that's also privacy invasive too, but I've found it useful. And then also, uh, with businesses on Apple maps, yes, they are sometimes out of date. I've found that that's true, but I report them. I just go in and say, Oh, this business, uh, needs its details updated. And at least in Australia that happens really quickly. Like inside of a week, it gets updated. I will also say on Apple maps that occasionally there's this one particular route to Brisbane. And it always wants me to take this right-hand turn and go on some back roads. And that's annoying. Cause I know that it's better and faster to not take that turn and just continue straight ahead. And whenever I do the ETA drops, like it, it takes me from, you know, 30 minutes until arrival via this back road to 28 minutes via the main road. And that's kind of annoying. But anyway, aside from that, I, I can ignore that cause I know the better route, but, uh, aside from that, it's, uh, it works really well for me. All right. Another fix up, follow up, fix it or leave it. This is the question is like, as things start to break around the house, do you fix it immediately? Are you on top of things or do you sort of leave it until you really can't ignore it any longer, man? I am, am busy. You know, I wish I could fix things straight away and get straight onto it, but I have five kids. And as I'll discuss in the next topic, um, I have seven kids at the moment and I, I wish I could fix it straight away, but I just don't have a choice in the matter. Actually, we just had all this huge amount of rain, um, in, in the week that's just been, and our roof started leaking. I had to put a bucket on the floor underneath a particular spot in the roof, which is terrible, but I can't imagine when, when I can't imagine that I'm going to be able to have find time to get to that before the next rainstorm. So I think next rainstorm will have another bucket. It's okay. Well, it is what it is. I have a various, I live on a large property and in an old house. So things are breaking all the time. I even have things in the dome that need to be fixed. I've got, uh, you know, doors that don't quite fit and window, uh, one particular window pane that needs to be replaced and a bit of the floor has fallen. And I've got this huge, if I made a list of all the things that I need to do around the property, it would take multiple, multiple pages. So, uh, that's your answer, I guess. Topic for this week saying no, I feel like I've just had too much on lately. And I had a bit of a, um, yeah, personal hour now at a real like stress break yesterday. I had a bit of a meltdown just because, uh, I don't know. I've got, I feel like I've bitten off a bit more than I can chew in terms of, um, doing uni and work at the same time. But then, uh, and I mean, it's a particularly busy week with uni and I want to make sure I keep up with work. So, you know, all of that sort of thing. Uh, so, and then this thing happened to us a couple of weeks ago, actually around the time that you sent the last podcast in and why it's been so long in replying. Um, so a friend of ours, uh, she, we've been friends with this couple for a long time and they split up a number of years ago, maybe five or six or more. And they've got three kids and two of them live with their mom and one lives with the dad and the dad, he, unfortunately he has like this terrible neurodegenerative disease. I think it's ALS and he, you know, he struggles. He's, he's losing the ability to walk slowly. He's doesn't have long left to live. And, uh, he's, he's a really nice guy. I get along with him well and, uh, consider him a good friend. Um, and he's, uh, you know, far away from the rest of the family, um, who, who live in, uh, in Melbourne. For whatever reason, I'm not sure. Um, the mother decided to, uh, fly to Israel because she's met a guy and she didn't have anything to do with two younger sons. They're eight and 13. So she asked if we'd look after them. Um, and you know, I was actually in Germany at the time. And so Talia just said, yes, which is fine. I, you know, fully back the decision to look after his couple of kids while mom goes to visit Israel. And, uh, you know, I, I guess like we assumed that she would be back in a week or two. Um, anyway, these kids have been, you know, they're, they've, they've come from a difficult background. There's not a lot of money involved in their family situation. I don't think mom works. And so it's a lot of charity and government stuff that they rely on. And, uh, you know, they can be a bit difficult in terms of behaviors and expectations, but we've managed to fit them in with our family. Uh, especially with like homeschooling stuff and things like that. We've already a big family. And so fitting two more in is, is difficult. And that's, that's been, um, it's been a little challenging, but it's definitely doable. The problem though is mom shows no signs of coming back from Israel. We're a little concerned that she's not going to come back. And, uh, we've got these two kids with us sort of indefinitely. We've been texting her, telling her, you know, uh, we, we need you to come back and get your kids, but she doesn't sort of respond or she seems to ignore us a little bit. And so, um, it's, uh, it's been difficult because these kids, they're feeling really dejected and rejected, like nobody wants them. And I feel really, really bad for them. Also, sometimes you have to say no, you know, recently, you know, I've got this, uh, one particular startup, um, Amber Hour. It's an app that I built with my brother and I just haven't had time to work on it. So I had to step down. I said, I said no in this case. Um, and I, uh, you know, I'm taking a huge equity cut and I've put in a lot of hours into it, but I don't have time to build on it and I'm holding people back. And I'm like just in this really tough place at the moment, Joshua, where I'm not sure what to do with these two boys. I, uh, I, I feel really bad if I'm saying no to them. They've got nowhere else to go. Maybe their mother can find them somewhere else to temporarily stay. Um, you know, like texting people that she knows, um, and, and we can take them to the airport to go stay with some other people for a little while, but they're just going to end up in child services in the foster system, you know, in a couple of months really. And so we're wondering whether or not we should just keep them. And then there's the question of like, maybe we can keep one and not the other. And then what does that mean for the other? You know, like, uh, it's, it's tough, man. Uh, it's been a huge, like mental strain and emotional burden. And yesterday I sort of spazzed out, I don't know. Um, I had some sort of break and some stress related break. I found that like, I couldn't stop, um, twitching and I was stuttering and things like this. Um, but I can't really afford to take any time off. What do you think? Should I say no?