Author Archives: David Truss

The internal conflict of doing hard things

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I don’t want to do it. It’s going to be very hard… it’s going to suck.

I have to do it. I’m going to do everything in my power to be successful… it’s going to suck.

That’s the internal conflict of doing hard things.

The suck in ‘it’s going to suck’ is the part that makes it worth doing.

If it were easier, more enjoyable in the moment, it wouldn’t actually be hard. It also wouldn’t come with as great a sense of accomplishment. It wouldn’t be something as memorable. The internal conflict is real, it might even be necessary. Because if there wasn’t an element of ‘suck’, it wouldn’t be as rewarding. The trick is to embrace the suck, and to understand that it’s one of the hard parts of doing hard things.

That said, do hard things. Not because anyone is watching, not for anyone else but yourself. Recognize that the internal conflict is just part of doing hard things, not a reason to avoid it. And so that challenge you’ve been thinking of doing, or that goal you’ve talked about but haven’t acted on even though you really want to do it… The one that’s going to be hard, that you know will in some way suck getting to the end…

Start it. Do it. And know that the act of doing it is the reward, even though it’s also going to suck.

Intentional Inconvenience

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I used my Extended Health benefits beyond what was allowed without a Doctor’s note and it was denied. Fortunately, I have a doctor’s note, so I sent it in via snail mail… something I had previously done without issue. Months later I followed up with a phone call when I realized that the benefit still wasn’t approved. After waiting an inconsiderate amount of time to speak to a human, I was told that it would be better to use the health care company’s app and upload the doctor’s note, so that it’s attached to the claim. I did this, as instructed and was turned down again.

Today, after once again going through the automated phone tree of options, I was told by an automated voice that ‘My call was important’ and also that due to too many calls, please hang up and try again. Twice. The third time I was lucky enough to be put on hold. At this point I was offered an opportunity to hang up and be called back, but I chose to stay on the line. I didn’t want a callback when it was inconvenient and then have to go through this process again. Upon finally talking to a human almost 30 minutes later, she was able to see the unapproved benefits on my file. She then informed me that their automated system can not read the attachment uploads on the app, and so no one looked at my doctor’s note.

Here is a synopsis. Don’t mail in the doctor’s note like you used to, we won’t connect it to the benefit claim that needs it. Instead, use the app, which will allow you to upload the doctor’s note… so we can ignore it there too.

On top of that the app itself is inconvenient. It has a series of check boxes and boxes to fill, but interwoven are also tabs that are necessary to go to, to toggle or choose other options not on the original screen. Even after using it several times, I still end up trying to complete a claim only to be told that I’ve missed a toggle/tab (or two).

In this day and age, I doubt if this inconvenience isn’t at least somewhat intentional. I wonder how many people don’t get their (deserved) claims just because the process is designed such that you need to make a very inconvenient follow-up call to ensure payment? I wonder how many seniors and people with disabilities lose out on opportunities to claim benefits because the process is too challenging for them to navigate? We are intentionally inconvenienced because servicing our needs is not seen as the purpose, but as an expense… We are seen as the inconvenience.

Existential Threat

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From Zain Kahn’s ‘Superhuman newsletter‘:

Over 1,200 employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter warning of runaway development
“The open letter cautions that AI could advance “beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems,” and calls on the US government to deliberately pace progress at the international level, which would reduce competitive pressure on each lab. Signatories include chief scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. The scale of the signatory list — spanning companies and roles — is a signal of how seriously insiders are taking the risk.”

I grew up believing that a super-intelligent AI would be created in a lab. The fear was that it would somehow escape into the ‘real world’ and only then could it dominate the world. The whole idea of some sort of firewall to protect us just evaporated when LLM’s were trained and unleashed on the internet. We completely bypassed any sort of protection or safety net that would allow human intervention in order to prevent a rogue AI from running wild.

Worse yet, we have unleashed AI into a world where any one person with ill-intent can use AI with nefarious intentions. I’ve said before,

“I don’t fear the famous scientist, I fear the rogue, unhappy misfit who uses incredible technological advancements for nefarious reasons. The same technology that can make our lives easier, and create tremendous good in the world, can also be used with bad intentions. But there are differences between someone using a revolver for bad reasons and someone using a nuclear bomb for bad reasons. The problem we face in the future is that access to the equivalent harm of a nuclear bomb (or worse) will be something more and more people have access to. I don’t think this is something we can stop, and so as amazing as the technology is that we see today, my fear is that it could also be what leads to our demise as a species.”

Now 1,200 AI employees are heeding a warning that AI could advance “beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.” That’s just AI systems acting on their own. That doesn’t include the danger of humans using these complicated and little understood intelligent tools with bad intentions. Sure we need to worry about AI running amok, but I think the far greater existential threat is a rogue government, or even a rogue lone wolf angry at the world, using AI in ways that we won’t be able to stop. Think of a cascading virus either electronic or environmentally contagious beyond our ability to stop it. Not created by scientists, but by a brilliant incel who feels cheated by the world.

We don’t need to fear rogue AI nearly as much as we need to fear rogue individuals armed with a super-intelligent AI. This is what really scares me.

hand-phone meld

A stark contrast

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Today is Father’s Day. My father-in-law wanted to go to White Spot, a very BC, Canada restaurant, and so my wife, her sister and brother-in-law, and her parents went for lunch. I couldn’t help but notice families at two other tables, which offered a stark contrast in dynamics. Both tables had a person who looked like they were in their 50’s. The woman at one table was with her father, the man at the other table was with both elderly parents.

The woman was fully invested in conversation with her dad. She kept eye contact on him and leaned forward again and again to hear what her father was saying. The conversation seemed to flow, and they looked like they were having a wonderful meal.

The man at the other table was on his phone. He didn’t let it go, it was an extension of his left hand. Even when he spoke to his parents, he did not look away from it. He was typing full paragraphs into it at times, and he scrolled. And he scrolled and typed, scrolled and typed. Food arrived and he occasionally shovelled food into his mouth but his phone stayed glued to his left hand. I wasn’t watching all the time, but at no time when I looked did I see him making eye contact with his parents. The woman at the other table was always looking at her dad.

Back at the doom-scroller’s table, parents had finished their meal and their son was only about half finished his meal, still typing and scrolling as his parents waited. I had to get up to let my brother-in-law head to the bathroom and I looked over at this man’s phone. He was on Instagram. After desert his parents pulled their phones out as well, but I didn’t really pay attention for how long they had their phones out too. I can say with certainty the man never once let go of his phone during the meal. The last time I looked over, his dad was paying for the meal.

It was so stark that I had to make sure that I was paying attention to my own table, not to be too distracted by the entertainment of seeing this contrast play out in front of me. Put your phones away at meal time, if you struggle with this, don’t take your phone to the table. Your family deserves more.

Happy Father’s Day!

Almost too much on the go…

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Yesterday I came back from a wonderful overnight school field trip to Merritt with a group of students, to go fishing for ‘Fish School’. I arrived home and was surprised by my mom, who came to celebrate my retirement, with events happening tonight and next week Thursday. I’m off with my wife and friends tomorrow night to see Mamma Mia! live at the theatre. And then I had planned to go to an event all day Saturday but I’m realizing that I need a break… and I’d like to spend the day with my mom.

Even when all the things that are happening are things you enjoy, sometimes they can feel like they are a little too much. I know this pace isn’t going to slow down too much (or at all) in June, and so I need to start really thinking about rest, sleep, and keeping up with all my healthy habits. The last thing I want to do is run myself down over the next month.

I can remember an age where I could metaphorically ‘burn the candle at both ends’ but I’m not that age anymore. No, I’m used to one, maybe two events a week. This non-stop series of events in a week is making me want to crawl under a blanket for 2-3 days… And yet I’m looking forward to the next couple days. That said, I am cancelling my event Saturday, I’m understanding the need to find some more down time… and I’m going to attempt to burn only one end of my candle at a time doing all the rest of the coming events.

A wonderful surprise

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I knew my oldest daughter was coming home from Victoria. She came over to the mainland for a retirement celebration I’m having tomorrow. So when I got home and she was there, it was nice to see her… what I wasn’t expecting was that my wife had flown my mother out from Toronto for the celebration as well. This is the second time my wife has completely surprised me. The first time was with a trip to Vegas for my 40th birthday… 9 months before my birthday!

Well, she did it again. Here is the video:

I feel so blessed. This is wonderful. <3

___

Here it is again from my younger daughter’s angle:

Not evenly distributed

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Futurist Richard Campbell came to speak with Inquiry Hub students today. He’s presented here a few times. I wrote about his visit in 2022, and what I really enjoyed about his presentation is that while I often think of the dystopian possibilities of the future, Richard’s message was that ‘The future holds promise‘. To start his presentation today, he quoted William Gibson, “The future is here – it’s just not evenly distributed“.

There are a lot of things Richard discussed that I might elaborate on in the coming days, but this quote immediately started to churn in my mind. I’d heard the quote before. I’ve even used the quote before, but often in reference the uneven distribution of change… which is often connected to new technology that will be fully adopted in the future. What got me really thinking about this, hearing the quote today, is my suspicion that this is more exaggerated now than it ever has been.

Zoom out of your everyday life and take a look around the globe and you’ll see a very uneven distribution of technological advances. I recently heard about a live stream of a robot doing package sorting for days on end, comparing this activity to the same being done by a human.

This sort of manual labour is something that will be replacing humans sooner rather than later. That said, it is going to be distributed very unevenly. It’s already happening in China where their one child policy was leading them to a shortage in the labour market. China is winning the robotics race and we are going to see a lot of progress and development from China.

Here is my wonder: Will there be a massive divide of have and have-not states? Will the distribution of future technology be even more unevenly distributed, or will we see the costs go down and the technology spread even more evenly in the decades to come? I think Richard and I would disagree on this topic, although I hope he’s more right than me.

UCI rather than UBI

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As AI and robotics continue to scale at unimaginable speeds, with AI getting exponentially smarter and robots increasingly more agile, we’ve got to realize how many jobs will disappear in a very short time period. This isn’t a gradual transition, it’s not a move from one field to another like farmers transitioning into factory workers during the industrial revolution. It’s a massive shift from human labour to machine labour that the world’s economies simply aren’t designed to absorb.

I’ve seen a growth in the number of people talking about the need for Universal Basic Income (UBI), but I fear this isn’t enough. I fear that the idea of giving millions if not billions of people a basic income, but no real means for most of them to supplement those incomes as an insufficient solution. We don’t need UBI, we need UCI – Universal Comfortable Income. It’s not going to be enough to give people a basic survival income. We are going to need to see governments, and maybe even companies, share their resources and wealth with people, or else who is going to have the resources to buy the products and services AI and robots will offer?

The potential for dissatisfaction and ultimately unrest seems scary to me. A world with a couple dozen trillion-dollar companies, and a handful of trillionaires running them, is also a world with vast populations of people eking out a subsistence lifestyle, unable to do more than meet their survival needs. A basic income, requiring additional sources of income to appreciate the offerings of a fully automated economy, will not survive without a revolt for too long.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are other solutions to this problem. Maybe I’m too bullish about to how far things will advance in a short time. That said, the potential for the scenario above to occur in the next decade is not zero. It might be a pessimistic bad-case or even worse-case scenario, but it’s possible… and scary. If things advance as fast as I think they will, we can’t continue to have UBI conversations, we need to move the goal posts and start really thinking of UCI.

Honing Observation Skills with Questions

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I love this quote by James Clear:

“Observation is a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained and honed.

Even if you’re not a negative person, you may be skilled at noticing negative things. Sometimes people are good at noticing the reason things won’t work out or have a tendency to fixate on the latest distressing story.

But you can train your eye toward the opportunities each day quietly presents. You can become competent at noticing your good luck: the little moments of joy, the stranger who helped, the small things that went right, the opportunity in front of you right now.

What are you competent in observing? And which types of observations seem to serve your life best?” ~ James Clear

I’d add one more question, and that is, ‘What questions are you asking to ensure you are making the right observations?‘

‘Why don’t things work out for me?’ …is a very different question from, ‘I wonder what good will come of this?’

‘What else could go wrong?’ …is a very different question from, ‘What opportunities will present themselves now?’

James Clear makes a great point about needing to observe opportunities, I just think the path to get there is giving our brains, which are massive answering machines, the right questions to ask and then answer.

Trying to rebuild old posts

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Yesterday after work, I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole. Apparently my ‘Subscribe by email’ button isn’t working on my blog and a relative asked me to add her to my subscriptions because hers was broken, and she was no longer receiving blog updates from me. I spent a bit of time looking at it, but even with AI help, I think I need to add a plugin to fix it and the first one I tried had an expensive subscription that I didn’t want to sign up for. After playing around for a bit, and then moving all my old ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ subscribers to Daily-Ink, (not fully realizing what I was doing), I decided to hold off on any more tinkering with subscriptions.

However, now I was on the back end of my blog and I realized that a post I was looking at had a related post with a broken image. So I clicked on the post, ‘Alan November: “Do learning”‘, and discovered that the image, probably a screen shot of a Tweet, was the point of the entire post, and I don’t have a back-up of it. It was an Alan November tweet, so I thought I’d go to X.com and find it, but Alan deleted his account and so now I have no idea how to fix this?  Essentially, the post is meaningless now, and there’s nothing I can do about it. That said, I will dig up my old laptop and see if I have it saved there as a last resort.

This happened because I used a proxy website, Posterous -now defunct, to be able to blog from my phone when I lived in China. However, as I meandered around my Daily-Ink blog I also found additional broken links. I was able to update 2 videos that were no longer available, with the same video at a different link. I also found references to other people’s blogs and those links are no longer working. I can’t do anything about this. Then I realized that I have shared a bunch of links with different link shorteners that are defunct. One of those is tr.im, which is also in a few of my old presentations. And there are a bunch of links across my blog where I used my own link shortener 2di.me (from my ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ blog days). I still pay to use this domain, but at $40 a year, just to maintain old links, it seems like a waste of money. But before I give it up, I think I’m going to do my best to find these links and update them with the full URL. That will take hours of time, but I have a plan to do it in the next year.

I don’t know when I’ll eventually give up my blogs and let them go the way of the dinosaur, but even these posts will disappear one day. What I’m surprised about is how many links to blogs I’ve referenced are already gone. Bloggers I admired and respected have let their blogs go, links to them just hit ‘404 – Not Found’ pages. Sometimes these links and broken images are not essential to the message I’m sharing, but other times what I shared loses its meaning without them.

It’s sad, but also not really worth worrying about. With over 2,500 posts now, all the broken links probably don’t add up to 2% of these, and in all honesty, nobody is seeking out Daily-Ink posts from over a decade ago. I’ll update what I can as a labour of love… and keep blogging. This too shall pass, but not yet. To misquote one of my favourite poems, ‘there’s miles to go before my blog sleeps’.

So, as a final thought, to those that subscribe, read on social media, and meander here occasionally, thank you for finding your way to my writing. I’ll do my best to keep this space tidy, with live links, and working images.