Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Phone Presence

Leave a reply

I’m writing this on my phone. My laptop is only 20 feet away from me and I’d definitely write faster on it, yet here I am on the couch tapping away with one finger at about 1/4 the pace of typing on a real keyboard. I could use voice to text but I find that I am not as reflective when I speak rather that type my thoughts. If I was writing more than a few hundred words, I’d probably head to my laptop, but I’ve gotten very used to writing my blog on my phone and will continue to do so most days.

Phones have become an essential part of our environment that we kind of live in as well as on. We’ve developed a sort of autopoiesis – a kind of a living system that allows it to maintain and renew itself by regulating its own composition and maintaining its own boundaries. It’s sort of a symbiotic relationship where we feed the phone with time and energy, and it self-perpetuates by giving us information, connections, entertainment and other functions.

Our phones help dictate how we interact with our environment and how the environment interacts with us. Phones have become ‘our environment’ that pulls us away from being present in the world beyond our phones. Case in point, there is a very high probability that you are choosing to read this on your phone.

I, for one, spend too much time on my phone. I am slowly learning to change that. I’m not checking email into the night, and I actually have all email notifications turned off. I am going to start keeping my phone on the counter instead of in my pocket for periods of time in the evening. And I’m going to continue to keep my phone on ‘Do not Disturb’ for most of the day, with my family and a handful of closest friends having the ability to ping me when it’s on this mode.

If I’m honest, I will still live in my ‘phone environment’ a fair bit, but I want more choice about when and how much time I live in its presence.

Getting Rest

Leave a reply

It’s not always easy getting enough sleep. Sometimes, no matter how much I try, I feel like I’m not recharging my battery. I’m in bed early, and I wake up many times during the night. Or I actually get to sleep early and get a good night of rest one evening and then my body won’t let me sleep the next night.

Sleep doesn’t seem to accumulate as easily as lack of sleep. I can get a nice recharge from a few good nights in a row, but one bad night undermines that pattern and puts me in a deficit again.

I’m currently on a challenging cycle and it’s making my regular routine difficult, and exhausting. I’ve got to reset a positive sleep pattern, but if I’m honest… I’m off to a crappy start.

What it means to be literate?

Leave a reply

Can you read? Can you do basic math? Is that enough?

The critical thinking required to make sense of the world today is ever increasing. We have a world leader using magical math to make a trade deficit calculation into a reciprocal tariff calculation, and claiming that this is, “Kind reciprocal, not full reciprocal.”

What? Help me make it make sense?

Meanwhile, I saw a video that someone created using AI. He uploaded a pdf article for two AI‘s to discuss, one of the AI’s was a version of himself, with his voice, and the other was a female at a desk. The only thing that suggested to me that the conversation was between two AI’s was some awkward hand gestures. Take those movements away, or make them a bit more natural/realistic and I would have no idea that I was watching an AI conversation.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, there are some wild claims about structures under the great pyramids, and while the evidence is unclear, I’ve seen many videos explaining these not-yet-proven structures. These claims include that they are a network of power sources connected to other structures around the world, and another theory claiming that aliens created them.

And speaking of aliens, wasn’t it just a few short months ago that we ‘discovered’ aliens living in our oceans? What ever happened to that story?

It’s becoming almost impossible to be informationally literate today. By the time you have time to seriously fact check something the story is already old, and there are new crazy claims that require your skeptical attention. What’s the source of this information? Where did they get their data from? What’s the bias of the news source? How is this data being manipulated? Who paid for the study? Is this a real quote? Is this video real, or CGI, or AI?

Who is fact checking the fact checkers? Meanwhile, here in Canada, a fact checker hired by one of our news stations was let go because trolls that don’t like their favourite political party being fact checked brought so much negative attention to her that the news station let her go.

What? Help me make it make sense?

The reality is that reading and writing and doing basic math is not enough to be functionally and informationally literate today. The critical thinking required to simply consume the information being thrown at us is overly demanding. I think the way forward for the short term is to find trusted sources and rely on them… and yet that’s the very thing that has seemed to get us into trouble. How many people get their news from just one or two biased sources? I’m literally now suggesting to find an echo chamber to sit in… hopefully you can find one that echoes facts, common sense, and some semblance of the truth.

Perceptions and misperceptions

Leave a reply

I remember when I was in Grade 9, in a Grade 7-9 Junior High, and I was 4’11”. I was the second shortest Grade 9 and the shortest guy was very popular. I thought about my height a fair bit back then and it bugged me a lot. My perception was that I was tiny and that I’d never grow. The only time I was physically bullied was being put in a locker for all of about 5-10 seconds, and I honestly don’t even remember who did it… but I got a lot of comments about my size and they weren’t always nice. It didn’t help that I was nerdy and only had a small group of friends, but they were good friends and they looked out for me. The reality is that my (lack of) height didn’t really hinder me much, other than in sports, and yet I let my height bug me quite a bit, because I could see everyone growing and I just stayed the same.

Little did I know that I would grow 7-and-a-half inches in the next school year. My mom had to buy me new pants 3 times in that year because it just wasn’t cool wearing floods (pants that didn’t at least reach your ankles).

Today I have a false sense of my height. I’m a little shy of 5’10’ because I’ve shrunk a bit in the last decade, but I often think of myself as taller. I am often surprised when I get close to someone and I realize that I’m 2-3 inches shorter than them… My first impression being that I’m the same height as them. I don’t know if this misperception is related to confidence or something else, but that’s the way I see myself.

I remember playing basketball against a colleague that I’d worked with for a few years. I went to check him and realized he was a lot taller than me. I literally asked him when he grew, because for years I considered us the same height and he’s 6’1. It seems weird to me that I would have this perception of my own hight considering where I came from in Grade 9.

I wonder what other misperceptions I carry with me that I’m not as aware of as this one? What are the things that I think about in ways that help or hinder me as I move about the world? Do I sell myself short in ways that do not serve me well? Do I walk around obliviously confident in other ways that help me navigate things better than I should?

Have you ever had a friend tell you that you needed to work on something that you thought you were good at? Or have you had them compliment you on something you thought you weren’t good at? I think that’s one of the strengths of a good friend, that they don’t see you with the same misperceptions that you see yourself. Because it’s really hard to see your on misperceptions… if you could see them, they would just be perceptions.

Dire consequences

Leave a reply

The inability to process the consequences of your thoughts, words and action is a good definition for stupidity. The thing about stupidity is that even intelligent people can perform acts of stupidity. But repeatedly doing stupid things suggests a lack of intelligence.

I watched a video yesterday of people doing stupid things and getting hurt. One example was a guy standing on someone’s shoulders on a diving board and trying to dive, but slipping while pushing off and landing face first on the diving board. I don’t know if alcohol was part of the decision making, and I don’t know how smart that person might be, but this is a good display of stupidity with dire consequences.

If I said that there’s currently a display of stupidity on a global scale by a political administration, you would automatically know exactly which administration I’m talking about. The difference between the stupidity of the guy on the diving board versus this administration I mention is the scope of the consequences. The diving board guy was the sole sufferer of his stupidity.

I honestly feel like when I am listening to the words and watching the actions of this administration, I am watching a blooper reel of accidents. I’m watching a repeated display of stupidity with dire consequences, and yet the bloopers keep coming: Insulting and even threatening allies, slashing support programs, dissolving institutions, and making economic blunders, all of which are alienating not only global friends, but dividing their nation, and harming their citizens.

This blooper reel isn’t going to be fixed with stitches on a forehead, needed because of an impact with a diving board. The suffering for this stupidity won’t be felt by a single person. This is going to hurt a lot of people, and it’s going to take a long time to recover. The question is, when will the stupidity stop?

I don’t think the guy on the diving board is going to try to repeat that stunt. The question is if he’ll do something equally stupid again… it’s the repeated behaviour that truly moves someone from making a stupid choice to actually just being stupid.

Returning to routines

Leave a reply

I’ll be back at work this morning after our 2-week March break. I’m already enjoying that I’m back into my routine, writing and exercising in the early morning. It’s easy to get off track, and to upset routines when on holidays. I missed workouts, I spent evenings looking for times to write, and I didn’t always eat well.

I am realizing more and more how valuable routines are. Routines are ways to instil discipline and habits so that they are almost effortless. I know what I will be doing next, with no thought and minimal effort to get started. It’s that simple.

When I head into work, I’ll also fairly quickly find myself in a routine. I’ll order my day (barring too many unexpected interruptions) so that I prioritize my team before outside distractions. I’ll create a ‘To Do’ list of priorities, and I’ll also try to find things to enjoy along the way… be it a conversation with students or interactions with staff. In other words, I’ll follow my routines, but also look for some novelty.

There is comfort in routines, but there is also the use of routines to find efficiencies so that I can also do things outside of my routines. My routines are an important part of my journey, but they are not the journey.

Propaganda hyperbole

Leave a reply

I remember visiting Dandong, China and going to a museum about the Korean war. Our tour guide translated the name of the museum for us: “The Museum to Commemorate the War Against American Aggression”. To the Chinese, the loss of that war meant the US having access to North Korea, dangerously close to Chinese land and major ports.

In broken English there were translated signs describing pictures of American prisoners of war holding up peace signs, with a description that even the Americans knew the war was wrong. This was an excellent display of blatant propaganda. But it also made me think about what I knew about that war, and I realized my view would have been filled with American propaganda.

Our perspectives truly vary depending on where we live, and the media and information we are privy to. With that, I have to say that the US propaganda machine is currently spewing hyperbole as if it should be taken seriously.

This is US Vice President JD Vance sharing the American Administration perspective on Greenland, “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.”

And here is a perspective from outside the US: On TikTok, or saved here.

I’ve been avoiding news more than consuming it recently, but I can predict what Fox News versus MSNBC would have said about JD Vance’s Greenland speech. I just wish both broadcasts would spend a bit less time on myopic hyperbole about how they see their political leadership, and maybe, just maybe share some perspectives from other parts of the world.

Our global economy does not benefit from the rest of the (free) world perceiving the US as weak, or threatening, or laughable. No one is buying the current messaging, no one is blindly accepting the propaganda, no country is going to be bullied into thinking the US should have sovereignty over them.

The US either has to drop the propagandized dogma, or align it with their allies. Their current messaging isn’t just off brand, and offensive, it’s laughably embarrassing.

The Light Source

Leave a reply

I’ve just started listening to Annaka Harris’ new audio documentary, LIGHTS ON: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe.

I find it incredible that the mind is one of the 3 deep unknowns we know so little about: deep oceans, deep space, and deep minds. All these years of scientific discovery and we still really don’t know how consciousness works; what turns the lights on; what makes this group of biologically animated atoms conscious and self aware?

We can’t point to a part of our anatomy and say, ‘this is what makes us conscious’, or ‘this is the spot that makes us know that we are human, that gives us subjective experience’. Will we ever really know? We are still discovering new species of animals in the depths of the ocean. The James Webb telescope is making us question what we know about the origins of the universe, in these areas there are new groundbreaking discoveries all the time… And still we seem to be stuck questioning what makes us conscious, with relatively little new information updating what we can say for certain.

One area that seems to suggest new insights is in split brain studies where people have damage to different areas of the brain or have the left/right brain connection severed. But to me this says more about our hardware than our software. In an oversimplified metaphor, if you have a wiring issue in your house and a light switch no longer works, that doesn’t give you more information about how electricity works. This really doesn’t give us more information about why the lights were on in the first place.

I think it’s fascinating that Annaka chose to question both philosophers and scientists including physicists like Sara Imari Walker, in her quest to understand consciousness. This won’t be an easy listen. I think this is an audio book that will require more time than the length of the book because I’ll need to rewind and re-listen to parts of it. Still, I’m looking forward to learning more, and to pondering big questions about what consciousness is.

And I’m sure that I will be sharing more here.

—

Related: What does in mean to be conscious?

Awake

Leave a reply

How often are we asleep when we think we are awake? Walking without awareness through the day. Going through the motions, doing what’s expected, participating within normal conventions, and doing what needs to be done. Playing the role we were dealt, to the best of our ability, using the resources we were given.

Sometimes it’s good to wake up, to step out of our sleepwalking state and to question what we see. Be observant of the roles we play, the patterns of our relationships, and the routines and rituals that both help and hinder us.

Sometimes it’s healthy to take some time to look at things from the outside in, to wake up and see the way we sleepwalk, and then to step back in… fully awake.

AI text in images just keeps getting better

Leave a reply

One of the biggest challenges with AI image generation is text. A new model, Ideogram 3.0 out of a Toronto startup, seems to have cracked the code. I wanted to try it out and so here were my two free prompts and their responses:

Prompt: Create an ad for a blog titled ‘Daily-Ink’ by David Truss.
The blog is about daily musings, education, technology, and the future, and the ad should look like a movie poster

Prompt: Create an ad for a blog titled ‘Daily-Ink’ by David Truss.
The byline is, “ Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.”

While the second, far more wordy prompt was less accurate, I can say that just 3 short months ago no AI image model would have come close to this. Now, this is coming out of a startup, not even one of the big players.

I didn’t even play with the styles and options, or suggest these in my prompts.

As someone who creates AI images almost daily, I can say that there has been a lot of frustration around trying to include text… but that now seems to be a short-lived complaint. We are on a very fast track to this being a non-issue across almost all tools.

—

Side note: The word that keeps coming to mind for me is convergence. That would be my word for 2025. Everything is coming together, images, text, voice, robotics, all moving us closer and closer to a world where ‘better’ happens almost daily.