Carter's Notes - SciFi, AI, Enshittification and more
Hey Friends,
This is Carter's Notes - where I share what I've been up to and into.
What's happening with me
I'm writing from my mom's place in Northern Michigan. Fall is in full swing and the days are still warm and sunny here. I'm looking forward to spending a little time on Lake Superior before heading back to Juneau for the winter.
Between life stuff and family time, I've been deep in coding projects. I have two freelance projects going, a – yet to be announced – personal project, and a 2D game engine for fun, learning, and (no) profit. It feels good to be exercising that muscle again and I'm excited to share what I can as it progresses.
Great rules for business and life
Notes To Myself by Seth Godin.
I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. Here are a few of my favorite entries:
Reliability is a superpower
There’s usually an opportunity to be of service
I am not stuck in traffic, I am traffic
What I'm reading (and re-reading)
They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson.
I love short story Sci-Fi and this is a fun – very short – counterpoint to Cixin Liu's Dark Forest Theory (beware: spoilers for those who haven't read Three Body Problem).
Compelling as it is, I'm still working my way through Empire of AI. Frankly, I don't think you need to read a massive tome like this one to understand the havoc these companies wreak in their quest for AGI – but you should know about it.
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Tiktok's enshittification by Cory Doctorow @ Pluralistic
I love the Internet and its underlying technologies but corporations are ruining it and I'm more than ready for a few of them to extinct themselves.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
What I'm drawing
Gah, clouds are hard! This was a good learning experience in any case.
That's all for now. Thanks for being here. As always, please let me know what you're up to or if anything here resonates. I might be slow to respond but I read everything.
Carter 🧛♀️ 🎃 👻