Jumbled January

The end of Jan is slowly creeping closer so with that in mind, I decided to get some of my thoughts about this month into writing.

Thank you to everyone who believed n me and the incredible support. Those who didn't… well that makes you look like a dumbass!

• Dricus Du Plessis

Trying new things

As I touched on in my 2023 in Review blog post. I could feel that the energy that was around me in 2023 was changing and that I felt 2024 was going to be different. 22 days into the month, I can confirm that is the case. I feel a great tailwind at my back instead of headwinds. I feel a lot more motivated to try new things and get activities done. If that will be the case for the rest of the year, remains to be seen. One of those things is trying out new apps to help me in a range of fields.

These are some of the new apps I'm using:

• Pile

• Calmly Writer (what I'm using to write this blog)

• Headway

• Feedly

• Balance

• Amie

• Perplexity

• Vocabulary

• Strong (used to use this but locking in on the gym this year)

I'll do an update later on detailing my experience using these apps.

In terms of writing, this blog post will probably be all over the place in terms of ideas and topics. Future posts will be a lot more focused on a main theme/topic however I think will aim to do a monthly post that sums up a range of thoughts (cause this will give me room to explore random ideas lol).

Slowing it down

I came across this blog post by Jason Fried. These days we are encouraged to act faster, think with our guts, life is finite, and countless other adages. To a degree that quick thinking mentality is beneficial and generally holds true for a lot of situations. But there is something to be said about taking the time to slow down and collect one's thoughts. Instead of being dismissive of a thought or opinion, take sometime to think first and then react rather than the other way around. Jason said it best:

Learning to think first rather than react quick is a life long pursuit. It's tough. I still get hot sometimes when I shouldn't. But I'm really enjoying all the benefits of getting better.

• Jason Fried

This is something I'm trying to incorporate in both work and my personal life.

The day music (reviewers) died

Earlier this month Pitchfork was formally folded into GQ. As someone who growing up would love to read their reviews I wondered to myself, is this the death of music reviewing? To answer that in a way yes but also no. I can't honestly say the last time I actively made my way to Pitchfork and sought out one of their reviews on an album. Instead, I'd just go check Twitter/X, Youtube or TikTok. I think there lies the problem. Before the proliferation of short-form media content, I'd argue music reviewers and critics were the source of truth when it came to music. They possessed a certain cachet, offering consumers not just information but a trusted taste that could either elevate or dismantle an album. These days with app algorithms being so influential, anybody can press record dunk on an album without even listening to it and have it go viral, and a lack of trust around Media. Why, then, actively seek out a music reviewer's perspective when a tranche of information is at your fingertips?

For me, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and these other established music media giants became more politicised and sensationalist. I guess, in an attempt to keep up with the virality of times. So they focused more on the shock factor of their content rather than the substance. Which I think is a huge shame, examples of this are Peppa Pig scoring higher than Donda or the various absurd Rolling Stones lists. All of which seemed designed to set the internet on fire.

My refusal to say yes stems from the belief that the landscape of music media is changing. While formalised media is dying, the quote-on-quote “new media”. Influential figures like Anthony Fantano and other content creators are ushering in a new era marked by diverse voices and a range of experiences and opinions that were often overlooked by traditional music critics. In this era of new media, the democratization of opinions and the diversity of voices contribute to a rich and dynamic discourse that resonates with music enthusiasts worldwide.

I share similar sentiments about film as well but I think I'll save that for a future post.

Random:

Some random thoughts that I can't be bothered to flesh out but I found interesting:

• Domain Parking: I came across this AI related domain and god damn salute to all those people acting fast, hustling and holding down domains in hope of a pay check. I do wonder about those who hold domains for trends that never ended up taking off.

• Sleeper Agent LLM's and the case for transparent data collection: I came across this brilliant tweet by Andrej Karpathy. These powerful models continuously process and scrape vast amounts of data, raising concerns about the potential consequences of bad actors tainting the well of information. In my opinion, the likelihood of such tampering is not a matter of 'if' but 'when'. We know that there is a vast amount of data out there but there are no guarantees that those companies training those models have done enough to cleanse or clean that data. “Once a liar, always a liar.” That seemingly applies to LLM's as well, if an LLM was trained with poisioned data. Even after alignment training the LLM's could still act out maliciously (?!!?). This is a real threat and one I don't see being solved easily.

• Global Warming: It's been hot as fuck in Wellington, I'm complaining but also I'm not. It's not often you get to say “Can't beat Wellington on a good day” over the course of multiple days.

• Running: I got back into running after tearing my meniscus last year. It has been a slog to get back to even a fraction of what I once was. Yesterday, I managed to run consistently for an hour straight, averaging around 7:30 per km. It's definitely not the most impressive time, but for me, considering that I haven't been able to run properly pain-free, being able to go for that long and at that pace was huge.

Naveen