Month: September 2026

Five ways to increase general well-being

You have seen this post. Five ways to increase your mental health. Sleep, eat well, exercise, connect with people, blah blah blah. You know the drill. Follow all the rules about how to be a good health-conscious citizen and certainly impeccable mental health will follow, guaranteed. (Narrator: it is not guaranteed at all.)

But what if it was not your mental health but that of the community’s that you were trying to increase? Try these.

One. Increase the amount of inconsequential words you speak in a day. The number of words we speak in a day has gone down. Mostly, it seems, we have not lost meaningful words as much as we have lost everyday random encounters. This means that people have much less access to practice social connection in situations that feel safe because they are not important. It’s easier to not care if your voice sounds funny if you are saying hello to a rando getting on the same bus than when it is your crush. So speak a little more every day when than feels comfortable. Say good morning when you arrive to that bus stop. Ask for directions or the time instead of taking out your phone. Compliment a stranger on their choice of a shirt. Not because this is somehow “connection” or “community” – those things take more. But because it lets people practice.

Two. Let people help. When someone asks “do you need help with that” don’t jump into saying no, no, it’s no trouble, I got it. Even if you got it, let them help. Helping people is a good mood boost like few others. Give it to them.

Three. If a situation feels hurried or tense, but there is no actual immediate danger, slow down and release control. Don’t try to hurry it along or quickly fix it. Let it be. Likely it will fix itself, and if it does not, you have at least not made it worse, and you can still try and solve it.

Four. Everyone has quite enough random thoughts in their own head. No one needs more unfiltered random thoughts from other people. Filter what you share, don’t just re-toot everything that feels cool. Consider your audience – will they think this is cool? Be mindful of their time, too. Is this really a thing you want to add to their already busy heads day? And no, it is not “raising awareness” when you post a new detail about something everyone pretty much knows about already.

Five. Never make fun of someone when they change their mind for the better. If your child tells you he has realized he needs to work more for his math grade, don’t roll your eyes and point out that’s what you’ve been saying all school year, ask them how you can help. When someone post on social media that what’s happening in Palestine is genocide and that’s actually not considered good, or that maybe they should not have voted for Trump after all, don’t repost that saying “now they notice, lol”. Let them quietly slip on the side of good guys and let the past lie. No one likes to be reminded about the sins of their youth.

(Now if I could just remember to take my own advice!)

How LLMs are the Spinning Jenny of information industry

A friend linked to a post by an experienced programmer about why he is not using AI anymore.

Something about how people debate AI has bothered me for a while. There seems to be artificial divisions. Some people think that the division is in knowledge and understanding: people who can use AI are pro it, people who object just don’t understand it or have not really tried it. Or people who use AI don’t just understand how many mistakes it can make and how biased it is, or how immoral, while people who do not use it are the ones who understand the issues.

The linked post is by someone who has tried, and who does know that with some measures efficiency does increase, and still objects. And the objections are quite familiar from a completely other context.

The term Luddite is often used these days to refer to a person who objects to new technologies out of backward thinking or unsubstantiated fear. The original Luddites, however, did not object to technology. They worried about its impact on products, professionals, and society.

Specifically, they worried that the use of machines might lead to mass unemployment to the people while the rich owners of them got richer still. They worried that while the cloth industry machines could produce a lot of material in a short time, the material would be of inferior quality, leading to the need to buy new things when the old ones broke, and thus to waste. They worried about physical safety in the factories, but also about the mind-numbing conditions of the factories, where the individual worker was disconnected from the product. They lamented that professional skill in making quality items would be replaced by unskilled labor mass-producing lower quality work.

Looking at the issues that current day’s fast fashion has given us, I don’t think they were wrong.

LLMs are the Spinning Jenny of software industry (and other forms of information industries). A development has started where it is easy to mass produce great amounts somewhat functional code, but the code produced is of lesser quality. It is not easily maintainable. It is not easily repairable. Producing it is mind-numbing and bad for one’s mental health. It reduces the skill needed by the programmer, and eventually the skill is lost. It concentrates profit in the hands of a few rich individuals getting richer still, instead of spreading it to those who produce it.

The programmer Brett C. I quoted in the beginning of the post is no more anti-technology than the Luddites were, as his homepage proves. He seems to love programming. He uses it for both work and play. What he does not like is mass-produced code and the effects the mass production has on the industry, on the product, on the people involved. And he is not alone.

Maybe in a decade or two we will have artisanal programmers and doctors whose services you can buy to self-care for yourself after you have spent a mind-numbing week at a program or health factory. Or maybe this time, we will have a successful neo-Luddite movement.

I, for one, conscientiously object to mass-produced science and mass-produced healthcare services. I believe we can do better, and in these fields, it is very seldom that faster is better.