Not really going anywhere with this one. I just read Ava’s post about the LLM circus at her work. I get Ava’s blog on RSS but in this case she blew up on Hacker News, for better or worse. (I use adblock to vaporize the Hacker News comments section because it always leaves me in a bad mood.)

Hey Ava—I have the same LLM circus at my work! It’s ridiculous. Everyone is being asked to show how they are using LLMs to make things more efficient and yet all of the use cases we have are either more inefficient or solving problems that don’t exist.

One of the shittiest use cases I encountered was an executive who asked the LLM team to build him an agent that would automatically generate thank you letters. Who wants an AI-generated thank you letter? Just send me nothing, at that point!! Or send me an obvious form letter instead of pretending to actually care.

I wish I knew where all this LLM stuff would end up. I’m not one of these extreme anti-AI types who thinks they are never useful or that they are always bad for the environment (that depends on what the LLM is replacing). But the good use cases are few and far between. And we’re already paying a steep price in terms of the social upheaval and workplace tensions caused by companies pushing this AI stuff way too hard.

My friend has a birthday coming up and her friend, who I barely know, started a huge text thread to coordinate a group gift. She wanted everyone to supply personal anecdata: a favorite memory, a “silly photo” of the protagonist, other particular template items.

This is a very annoying idea for a gift IMO! It is confusing two well-established categories of gift that serve mutually exclusive purposes:

1. Group gifts, where everyone pools their money in order to buy one big gift
2. Personal gifts, where you choose/make a gift that is highly individualized and expresses your unique relationship with that person

Group gifts are organized by one “representative” friend and fanned out to lesser friends and acquaintances. They are especially useful in awkward coworker scenarios where you want to get someone something but have no idea what would be good; the group gift defers that decision to someone who actually knows the recipient’s taste with the added benefit of allowing people to chip in the amount of money that is appropriate to their level of friendship.

Personal gifts are for when you are the best (or a close) friend. The thing that makes them personal and good isn’t just the DIY aspect—it’s the intimacy of it, the way you work in shared experiences and memories that wouldn’t make sense to someone outside the relationship.

The “group personal” gift is neither of these things. It asks you to be personal, but you might not be ready for that. It asks you to be intimate, but then requires you to share the intimacy with 25 other friends you don’t know. It asks you to be creative, but then imposes a template that may make no sense for the relationship at hand. Not everyone takes silly photos! Some friends live far away!

This is a cynical take, but it’s my dumpster site and I get to leave in throwaway content: I think the real motive for these group personal gifts is a dominance play. It’s laying claim to a best friend slot and then demanding that others subordinate their expression of intimacy to the template permitted by that specific friendship. And then making them feel inadequate as friends if they don’t have a specific silly photo.

Well, either it’s a dominance play or just extroverts being super fucking weird.

Anyway, please don’t do this shit! If you want to congratulate your bestie on their birthday and want to put a lot of effort into it then just do that—may I suggest a PowerPoint?—but don’t cramp anyone else’s style.

Post-coffee addition: I think another reason people reach for these kind of structured gifts is as a nostalgia play. When we were kids, friendship was about unconditional loyalty and concentric circles of intimacy. The best friend, whose friendship with the birthday haver often traces back to high school or earlier, understands the relationship on these terms and wants the gift to reflect and energize that conception of the friendship.

Adult relationships, by contrast, are more compartmented and situational: You may share everything about work and family but avoid discussing sex, for example. Non-group personal gifts allow you to express intimacy that is neither all-encompassing nor subject to a hierarchy of closeness. That very fact is a challenge to the bestie’s identity. The bestie recognizes that the protagonist’s life has expanded and misses being #1. Organizing the photo album is a way to relive that inaccessible past.

It’s not wrong for the bestie to pine for the past. I also feel a sense of grief over the kinds of innocent, unyielding friendships I had in elementary and middle school. Being an adult and having to impose and respect boundaries is kinda exhausting sometimes. The question is what you do about that grief. Do you recognize the maturity it represents? Or are you stuck with the sense of loss?

We’ve all heard the line “If you aren’t paying for a service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product,” yeah? My problem with this quip is simple: They’ll make you the product either way. End of post.

Jk, let me give a few examples:

• I pay for shit on Amazon but they still have tracking and metrics on every page, creepy suggested products, and constant upselling and guilt tripping about not having Amazon Prime.
• I pay for a Costco membership and they still make me listen to a dump spiel about, idfk, “executive hour” or something and how I should buy the more expensive membership.
• I pay for public transportation with my taxes and then again with my rider’s fare and I still have to endure ads in the subway. Sometimes the ads are bright, distracting, and offensive, sometimes for products I find objectionable like sports gambling.
• I don’t pay for anyone’s Patreon or whatever, but apparently it’s very common for the so-called “direct access” to creators that you get through these subscriptions (ability to DM, etc.) to actually be outsourced to ghostwriters/LLMs.

The problem is that money is valuable. That’s true for the skeeviest for-profit corporation you can think of, but it’s also true for public utilities, non-profits, and random bloggers. Paying for a thing doesn’t remove the incentive to commoditize your attention. It’s just a way of asking nicely.

Basically, if you want non-enshittified service you have to either pay exorbitantly for it (billionares are not standing in line during Costco executive hour; they have people for that). And if you want non-enshittified service as a rule then you have to change the actual law to prohibit the bad thing.

I pay for Hetzner to host this dumpster fire of a website because, sure, they are providing a service that costs more than $0 to deliver and is pretty good for the price. But lots of companies offer similar stuff. A big advantage with Hetzner is that they are based in Germany, which has actual data privacy laws that provide a modicum of reassurance that Hetzner won’t try to, idk, monetize my blogging cycles to detect my nonexistent period cycle. Not that I think the GDPR is perfect or anything—but if I can’t change the laws, at least I can kinda change jurisdictions.

It’s very hard to make someone relate to something that is foreign to them. People who don’t see why, idk, Tech Decks are fun will probably never get it. You can explain and demonstrate but if someone doesn’t have the fidget impulse then it’s just another TikTok.

But harder still is to make some relate to not relating to something. This is my problem with food. People like food. They think about it, vlog about it, talk about it, argue about it. It’s a big part of their life.

Food is not a big part of my life.

For me, food is a bodily function. It’s like showering or exercise. I do it because I have to. There are foods I like more than others, foods I really enjoy … but I don’t go out of my way to find the best food.

Foodies look at me like I’m crazy when I say this. They assume it must be a symptom of some deeper issue, like depression or autism. I try to explain it like this:

You know those screen golf things? Where you go and hit a golf ball into a screen that’s directly in front of you? It’s no fun, right? It’s a simulation of golf, golf minus all the good parts, just moving the ball from here to there without actually going outdoors or watching it go zoom. That’s what food is like to me: just one of the steps of the digestive process.

And then they go: No, I actually love screen golf, and I love food, and I feel bad for you for not enjoying those things.

But I don’t feel bad. I just have other things I enjoy!

Another example: horror movies. I don’t get it. From where I stand, I feel like a movie is either scary or not scary. If it’s not scary then it can’t be horror. And if it’s scary then that is, by definition, an unpleasant feeling. I cannot compute the idea that a movie can be both actually scary (not just creepy aesthetics) and enjoyable. But people say they enjoy horror movies. Shrug.

Idk, something about asexuality, pithy conclusion.

I know this is a crazy thing to say, but someone needs to hear this. You don’t have to be a nice person. You don’t even have to be a good person. There are a lot of situations in life that present you with the option of being good, and it’s just that: an option.

• You don’t have to tip 30% for table service.
• You don’t have to tithe.
• You don’t have to work long hours to meet deadlines, even if you work for a nonprofit, even if you believe in the mission.
• You don’t have to remember every birthday or travel to every faraway wedding.

Of course, you may do these things. Probably you should try them each out once or twice. It certainly feels good to be nice. But there’s no moral requirement. And if you do these things out of a sense of obligation or fear of being judged, you aren’t doing them for the right reason anyway. So get over the OCD moralizing and just do what you really want.

Today I got a coupon mailer from a pizza place. They had a really great deal, so I tried to use the coupon online but the website said no such coupon existed. So I called to order, and the guy on the phone tried the same thing and it still didn’t work.

So guy #1 transferred me to his manager and she tried it and she said, “Yeah, it doesn’t work, but we have a similar offer” and proceeded to read me an offer that was not nearly as good a deal. I told gal #2 I really wanted this deal so she transferred me to her manager (#3) who said the same thing as #1 and #2. Not only that, he denied the existence of the mailer entirely.

“Our owner doesn’t send out mailers,” #3 said.

“Are you XYZ pizza on Main Street?” I asked.

“Yes, but our owner doesn’t send out mailers. I can call him if you want,” he said.

I said, “Sure, call him, I’m holding this mailer in my hands.”

So #3 put me on hold for five minutes, then came back and told me that the owner (#4) had, in fact, admitted to sending the mailers but hadn’t activated the coupons in the database yet, But, #3 said annoyedly, he would manually enter the discount. So I got my discount.

At every step of this process, the overwhelming vibe I was getting was “Dude, just give up and pay full price.” And honestly, I could have afforded to, and I really wanted pizza, and I don’t know if I was making any of these hardworking people’s days better by making them play “fetch the manager” repeatedly.

But I wasn’t being rude or yelling or anything. I was just asking #1-4 to honor the terms of the discount that they had taken pains to mail to my actual house because they supposedly wanted my business so dearly.

Does this make me a bad, or perhaps not-good, or perhaps not-nice person? Maybe, but it’s time to stop caring so much.