Will Chatham's Blog

I lead a team of eleven fully remote people, most of whom have never met in person, so I am always on the lookout for ways to build relationships, strengthen how we communicate with each other, and maintain some of the lost "water cooler chat" you get in an office environment.

I stumbled on this Gitlab Handbook that has some great tips for building what they call Informal Communication.

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/informal-communication/

I really like the idea of postcard swapping, which uses something tangible you can hold in your hand to build connection across distributed teams.

Another team-building strategy we used when I worked at CNN were weekly co-working sessions, where we'd meet online for an hour while doing our normal work. This would facilitate all types of discussion, learning, and cross-collaboration. Sometimes, when conversation waned, just being quite and listening to the clacking of each others' mechanical keyboards was enough to create a sense of belonging. Writing this article reminds me that I want to implement that on my current team!

It's been difficult to make myself come here and blog.

Somewhere along the way, things on the internet changed. I used to enjoy writing updates in a blog post, letting friends and family know what had been going on around here, what I was up to, or even just what I was thinking. I knew that there were certain people who followed my blog pretty frequently and would often comment or even just acknowledge that I had posted something. It was a nice community feeling, and I would read other people's blogs as well. Somewhere along the way this all shifted. I think it probably had something to do with Facebook becoming the predominant platform for people posting updates and being able to keep up with many more people in that format.

It's a real shame though, because now I've gotten myself off of Facebook, off of Instagram, off of Twitter, and I'm largely just biding my time here and on Bluesky.

I find myself not wanting to share content or updates or news or anything like that. I definitely feel more more guarded about what I share online.

Perhaps it's because of all the horror stories I've read about people getting stalked or swatted or whatever, just because they said something someone else didn't like or disagreed with. I've been thinking often about how the internet really has precipitated the downfall of humanity. It's pretty sad because I thought it was going to be an awesome thing for quite a while.

It definitely had an unjaded, innocent adolescence phare. However, what happened was that once the World Wide Web became more and more accessible and was starting to be carried around in everyone's pockets, everything started to change for the worse.

I remember back in college I took a class on how to use the World Wide Web. It was a great introduction into internet culture, what it meant to have a flame war, what spam was, and what good netiquette was.

That's a word you don't really hear anymore. Netiquette. It's a shame. Everyone thinks they have the right to just get very angry at everyone else now, and it's taken a lot of the fun out of the whole thing.

Maybe if people had been required to take lessons about the internet in order to access it, and had to learn how easily you can be fooled by misinformation and how you need to be able to discern between what's real and what's not, we might not be in the predicament we're in today.

So I don't know, maybe I'll take this blog down in the near future. Is anyone reading it? My web statistics say "no". So this is pretty much an exercise in talking into the ether. I'm putting things into it, but getting out nothing.

If you've ever ventured onto the social media platform called BlueSky, or certain corners of other platforms like Reddit, you will likely have run across a very passionate set of people who disavow and berate anything related to artificial intelligence technology. They get so rabid in their attacks, they lose sight of the fact that AI actually has some usefulness when applied to certain situations that don't invade privacy, don't steal intellectual property, and don't do things without asking you. However, if you try to point this out, you will get blocked, banned, ridiculed, and blasted for bringing it up. There seems to be no middle ground for these anti-AI people.

It's very unfortunate. I wholly sympathize with a lot of their concerns. I don't like the fact that AI is using intellectual property such as artwork, writing, music, and a host of other things that humans have created in order to train itself. I don't like that this is usually done without asking anyone for their permission. And I don't like that we're in this situation where we have to claw back what AI has taken from us. I totally understand why that has pissed some people off entirely because it has pissed me off for the same reasons.

I recently saw someone on LinkedIn post that AI is just a glorified spell checker. And I actually agree. It's not creative. It's not smart. It doesn't make decisions on its own. It relies on everything that it has been fed. So it's really way less than it's cracked up to be in many ways.

All of that being said, there are absolutely worthwhile use cases for artificial intelligence.

Personally, I've started using voice dictation with AI-assisted technology to help me speed up typing and relieve my aging fingers that have gotten slower and are usually aching by the end of a long workday. I'm enjoying that aspect of AI very much.

In fact, this whole article was written by me using a voice-to-text app called, VoiceInk. It does such an incredible job at recognizing my speech patterns, pauses, and corrections of myself. These things weren't possible just a few years ago with any sort of voice to text application. And it does it fast.

Anyway, these are just some thoughts I've had bugging me and I decided to get them out there.

I had a blog here at http://www.willchatham.com, originally based on B2, which later became Wordpress. It was over 25 years old.

I recently lost it all during a migration. And that is OK with me.

I turned the site into my music catalog. And here on this "blog" subdomain, a new chance to blog on a new platform. It's light, it's capable, and it is simple. It's Chyrp Lite.

I hope to increase my blogging here, but you know how that goes. Whatever the case, stay tuned.