Hello, ether.

It’s been such a long time since I last wrote.

I suppose I could blame my change of jobs, which has taken up a lot of mental bandwidth.

I suppose I could also blame how my writing catharsis leans heavily towards AI/LLMs now (e.g. ChatGPT). Writing tends to be quite fungible for me, scratching the same itch.

What is more, writing here on edonn.com is more “writing into the ether” — there’s no response. But writing in ChatGPT (or Gemini etc.), despite the synthetic nature of its response, is still a response. Catharsis +1.

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And yet.

Here I am.

Hello, ether.

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A few months back I wrote about how AI felt so powerful; like if I (or anyone else) could wield it correctly I (or they) would be unstoppable.

And though I still somewhat believe that, I’ve also got a far more sober appreciation of what it can do.

You know, warts and all.

Went into Substack and subscribed to tons of AI newsletters. I was like a kid in a candy store – everything was so new, so fresh, so wonderful!

But I soon started to outgrow some of the writers, especially the less technical ones. It became increasingly obvious how much of an echo chamber it was. Just people who were friends/connections with other people rehashing the same things in slightly different ways.

And every couple of days someone would put up a post celebrating a new milestone of how many subscribers they had and how much money they were making and trying to teach others how they could do the same for the low fee of $99.

Sometimes it feels like Web 2.0 all over again.