I am not required to have an opinions about every goddamned thing that happens.

And having an opinion does not require me say it out loud.

Looking west on Main Street, Wednesday evening

Having recently finished the last season of Stranger Things and faced with a day off from school and a big block of earned screen-time, the 13yo was faced with a dilemma about what to watch next.

When I came up from my office in the middle of the afternoon to grab a snack, I found him three episodes in to the first season of The X-Files.

“Oh!” I said, “You’re watching X-Files!”

“Yeah, you’re always going on about, so I figured I’d check it out. I thought I wasn’t going to like it because it’s so old-timey but it’s pretty good so far.”

I feel like I have won parenting.

🔗 From flexibility to structure | annie mueller

I didn’t realize how much I relied on urgency as a substitute for structure. It wasn’t good. I don’t recommend it.

💯

This balance is pretty tough to find at an individual level, and I think it is even more challenging to find it across a team or organization. But without it, you risk burning everyone out.

🔗 Is A.I. generated audio good for anything? (Besides shitposts):

The funny thing is, while fraud, slander, and reputation destruction may be the main practical uses for voice-cloning software, it’s not even clear that it’s actually all that good for those activities? Not only was the athletics director arrested and charged, but local Baltimore media twigged early on that the audio was likely A.I.-generated. Similarly, both scams Bethea covers ultimately failed, since the targets were able to simply call the supposed kidnapping victims on the phone and confirm that they were not kidnapped. It’s easy enough to read these stories and extrapolate out a future where even more sophisticated and frictionless voice-cloning technology creates an endless parade of unstoppable scams and scandals. But a much more likely, if no less dystopian, future is one in which amateurish and avoidable frauds and scams and campaigns continue forever while we never address the problem collectively at all, and instead individually develop a set of organic defense mechanisms against flood of obvious A.I.-generated audio hoaxes, the way everyone I know now declines to pick up the phone when they receive a call from an unknown number.