This isn’t quite an end-of-year post, but technically, we are approaching the end of the year, so why not. At present, there are some things I’m high on (ideas, not substances), and some things I’m a lot lower on. In an attempt to stay positive, I’m going to counter each of my lows with a high. I know, I know — but this is how hard I have to try sometimes to keep my grumbling at bay, or at the very least somewhat moderated.

Low: Generative AI

I mean, do we even need to go here? I tried. God, I really, really tried. But this thing reeked of disingenuousness and hand-waving almost from the day it hit the zeitgeist, and now we’re here. The whole thing hasn’t collapsed yet, but the general mood has soured dramatically even in just the last couple of months. We’re certainly getting the downside — spam, shitposting at scale, customer service chatbots, people repeating made up nonsense from ChatGPT on national news broadcasts, plus massive (and needless!) energy and water use. But the upside continues to be utter vaporware, breathlessly described by a bunch of grown up Ready Player One dorks again, and again, and again, but never actually turning into anything people can use. Even in the enterprise, white-dollar knobs like me are subjected to endless prompts to use “AI assistants” in already awful, user-hostile business applications that (1) do not work, (2) do not know whether they worked or not, (3) constantly promise they will get better, (4) never get better.

This is going to take forever to wind down, because so much of this is motivated by ego and funded by entrenched companies that print money doing something completely unrelated, so there’s no forcing mechanism to make any of them give up the ghost. We could be here for a while.

High: Not-Generative AI

The Photos app on my TV is really pretty amazing. I spent a couple hours in my late 20s teaching my (long since discarded) iMac what a bunch of my friends and family looked like, and then eventually added my kids. That’s all it took, apparently, for THE MACHINE to provide me with a lifetime of whimsical albums, slideshows, and movies about so many awesome times in my life. Sometimes it’s hard to even go to bed, with so many good memories available to enjoy (and after around 2012, to enjoy in pretty consistently high quality).

Low: Most Software

The web is a disaster — search is useless, everything is computer generated chum, and social networking is dead for anything other than pissing matches and engagement bait. Despite that, web browsers are where we spend all of our desktop computing time, using crappy apps built with generic, high level frameworks that are slow, battery-soggy, and easy to turn into even crappier desktop apps. DO NOT GIVE ME A DESKTOP APP WITH A “RELOAD” BUTTON IN IT.

We’re really stuck with this now, aren’t we? We have no good HTML to view in our HTML viewer, and yet somehow that’s the application we use all day, every day. Two menu bars for everything. I still can’t believe it.

High: Some Software

God bless you, indie developers. Rogue Amoeba, I just bought your entire $200 bundle thing. Do I need it? Probably not — I needed Loopback, but everything you make is just so beautiful, and thoughtful, and functional, and faaaaast, I couldn’t say no. There are also some gems in SetApp (along with some weird stuff, but whatever) like CleanShot, the venerable MarsEdit, OneSwitch, Permute, and a few others. And of course, Logic and Final Cut continue to grind along like the champs they are despite coming from a massive corporation, and the general eyebrow-raising quality issues that have snuck into a lot of Apple’s software over the last few years. Here’s to hoping they don’t ruin Pixelmator.

Low: The News

It’s rough. Plus, I canceled my Washington Post subscription after nearly ten years thanks to Jeff Bezos’ truly groveling decision to block the paper’s presidential endorsement at the last minute. I’m not saying it mattered, but I’m not subsidizing that guy’s vehicle for sucking up to Donald Trump.

High: Other… news?

Hey, somebody has to do journalism, which means I need to pay for it. I’m currently subscribing to The Village Green (my extremely local newspaper) and The Verge, which just rolled out subscriptions and has slowly evolved from a run of the mill tech dork website to a legitimately thought-provoking and investigative entity. Good job, guys.

Low: The New England Patriots

Drake Maye = pretty good! Everyone else = pretty bad! No one should (or will!) feel bad for us, but those twenty years of regional dominance were pretty fun if you were from the region, as I am.

High: The Boston Celtics

WHAT THEY GONNA SAY NOW? WHAT THEY GONNA SAY NOW????

Low: I’m Not in a Band

This is quite the drought for me, but I did put out the first of two short acoustic albums, and that was fun. The second one’s basically done, but I need to sit down and mix everything, because AI isn’t real and can’t do it for me despite it being a common, theoretically low-skill grunt task that is basically a bunch of math.

RESOLUTION LIVES FOREVER

Did I have to get a job again because I’m a coward, and built the most conservative version of my passion project possible, largely driven by a fear of failure that almost certainly played a role in my project largely… failing? Probably. AND YET! This coward’s conservatively constructed application is still 100% live and accepting payments, friends! I use it all the time, even for my real job that actually makes money, and the monthly costs to run it are laughably low. No state of the art GPUs required. Even for Brian?

Yep, even for Brian.