Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Oblivious to what’s coming

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If you talk to people about LLM’s like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, you’ll still hear things like, ‘They hallucinate and will make up fake research’, and something I heard recently, ‘they actually make work harder because workers need to spend more time editing and cleaning up what they produce’. What people who say this don’t realize is that this is pre-January 2026, and we are now fully into February 2026. Yes, things are moving that fast! And furthermore, what most people, including me, have not been paying attention to is that when we use the free version of these tools, we are essentially months and months behind what the latest models can do.

Matt Shumer’s ‘Something Big Is Happening‘, was written just 4 days ago and has already been seen by millions of people. Yes, it’s a bit of a long read, but it is also a ‘must read’. Here is an excerpt:

“Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.

This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.”

I recently shared my thoughts on the upcoming ‘Fiscal year end squeeze‘, where I said, “Corporations care about pleasing shareholders and maintaining stock value over caring for the people who work for them. This is the ugly side of capitalism. Eliminate thousands of salaries and suddenly the balance sheet proves to be more profitable. Never mind that these are people’s careers and livelihood that are being cut short. And never mind about loyalty to the company.” What I’m realizing now, after reading Matt’s article, is that the situation is far worse than I thought, because AI is coming after not just these jobs, but almost every other jobs these newly unemployed people will be looking for.

If I was out of a job right now, what I’d be doing is paying the monthly fees for the 2-3 best AI models out there and learning how to power use them. I wouldn’t be looking for a job, I’d be trying to find a niche where I could work for myself, or maybe become a contractor doing things for people who don’t realize that AI is good enough to get the work done faster than they can do it. Because the reality is that the vast majority of people in the world are oblivious to just how fast this disruption is coming, and unlike other disruptions in the past this one is going to happen everywhere and all at once. Most people can’t fathom how disruptive this will be, and even as I share this as a warning… I’m not sure I fully grasp the full impact either.

Share less tragedy

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We don’t have to feign naivety and pretend something horrible didn’t happen. Sad things happen in the world and we need to understand this. What we don’t need is a constant flow of news and a detailed account of the event pushed on to us, and more importantly pushed onto kids.

This was some professional advice shared with me 14 years ago, after a tragic suicide in our community that was followed shortly after by a school shouting in the US.

  • Refrain from sharing images or video of the incident.
  • If discussions do take place within the classroom, we recommend they be limited to a brief sharing of facts.
  • There will understandably be some anxiety around this incident and staff and students may have some level of emotional impact from the news.
  • Please watch for any changes in behaviour, particularly among vulnerable students, and refer appropriately to your school counsellor as needed.

Children don’t need to see report after report about a tragic incident. It doesn’t have to be the topic of a current events discussion. And nothing needs to be shared about a perpetrator of a horrific crime. Not even the perpetrator’s name. Not at school, not at home.

I could go on, but I’ve share a lot on this already, many years ago:

‘Care or Fear’

Excerpt: We often get results based on the pictures we fill our young impressionable  students’ heads with. Tomorrow, I fear that well-intentioned teachers could stir up thoughts of fear for personal safety in young minds, as concerns about Newtown are discussed. As I said, ‘I’m willing to bet that hundreds of thousands of students that might have felt safe in their school, and would not have questioned their own safety, will now think of that question (Am I safe?) and perhaps be more frightened than if that question did not get discussed.’

And then I followed up with ‘A new tragedy of the commons’

Excerpt: The fact is that we know, both through research and from historical evidence, that glorified stories perpetuate the very sadness we are appalled by. But that doesn’t stop a major national magazine, MACLEAN’S, from glorifying a killer on their front cover page. I’ve shared the cover below, but took some creative liberties with a red pen to prevent this very post from doing what I wish others wouldn’t.

When I see a cover page like this, I’m left wondering what we truly value in our society?

It comes down to this: We need to care for those who are concerned, we don’t need to amplify concern. The less we share tragic stories as a community, the more care we are showing for that community.

Health advice rollercoaster

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Coffee is bad for you, no wait, it’s good for you! A glass of read wine a day is good for your heart health, no wait, any amount of alcohol is unhealthy! Drink fruit juice, it’s high in vitamins, no wait, there’s too much sugar and not enough fibre in the juice alone! Creatine can damage your liver, no wait, it just spikes the creatine marker for liver issues, it doesn’t actually mean your liver is having issues, just that you have to look at different markers if you supplement your creatine.

From what food to eat, to what vitamins and supplements you should and shouldn’t take together, to exercises that are guaranteed to give you results, it seem like there is always a constant stream of new, updated research and information about improving heath which contradicts something we’ve heard (and believed) previously.

Here are 2 rules to follow as you travel the health advice rollercoaster:

1. The science matters. How big is the sample size, how many other studies suggest the same thing?

2. The messaging. When the threat is over emphasized, the message needs to be taken with a grain of salt. When a product is being pitched, there is an underlying benefit to exaggerating, either the cost of not taking the product or the benefit of taking it. This doesn’t mean that what is being said is true or false, it just means you need a good dose of scepticism unless you’re actually referring back to the science yourself.

Ultimately, it comes down to one question, are you getting research or are you being sold something? It’s not that you shouldn’t question both but rather if it’s advertising, this scrutiny should be significantly greater. And, no matter what it is, you can be certain that it’s probably going to contradict something you’ve heard previously. There are going to be a lot more twists, turns, and loops on this roller coaster before we truly understand how our body works and what benefits it the most.

Moths to the flame

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Chris Williamson recently shared this quote:

“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.” — Jay Alto

Our fixation is intense. We cling to tiny dopamine hits, scrolling unaware of the world around us. Ironically, what we are doing is dividing our attention into tiny video clips, catchy sound bites, and dancing in an emotional roller coaster between humour and rage, while simultaneously focusing our attention on a single screen.

We are merely moths, our screens are the light to which we fly. Our humanity suspended as we meet some primordial desire in a way that would be considered comical if it wasn’t also sad, if not tragic.

Parenting adults

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As an educator, I’ve seen the struggle some parents have with creating boundaries. For example, there are parents who don’t parent because they don’t want to undermine their friendship with their kid. They don’t parent their kid, they raise a buddy. From my experience, this is not good parenting of a school-aged kid. Kids need parental guidance, not just a supportive friend.

As a parent of two young adults, things change.

My wife and I took our youngest out for a birthday dinner last night. It’s hard to believe that my baby girl is 24! During the dinner she made a simple statement, “I’m so glad you two aren’t just my parents but friends I want to be around too.”

That hit a chord with me. My kids aren’t just my kids anymore. They are adults who I enjoy being around, who I want to spend time with, who I miss when I don’t see them. It’s not just that they are my kids, it’s not just that I’m their parent, they are amazing people I want in my life.

That simple statement said so much. It made me feel lucky, blessed. My wife and I raised two awesome kids, and they in turn have given us the ultimate gift in return… they enjoy our company as much as we enjoy theirs. ❤️

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Ps. All that said, I’m still Dad, they are still my kids, as my youngest reminded my by sending me a TikTok about all the things she’ll never learn to do… because that’s a dad’s job! 😆

Fiscal year end squeeze

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Globally, we’ve seen jumps in prices in the last year that are unsustainable. It seems like everything in the grocery store is more expensive, and prices seem to continue to creep up. The impact must be felt around the world, and cost rises like this unjustly affect people below and near the poverty line more than they affect anyone else.

Now throw on top of this the loss of a job for the main breadwinner in the family, and the results are devastating. Unfortunately a lot of people are about to lose their jobs.

We are reaching, in the next couple months, the fiscal year end for a lot of large corporations, and two related patterns we’ve seen a lot of recently are going to repeat.

  1. Profits over people
  2. Massive layoffs

Corporations care about pleasing shareholders and maintaining stock value over caring for the people who work for them. This is the ugly side of capitalism. Eliminate thousands of salaries and suddenly the balance sheet proves to be more profitable. Never mind that these are people’s careers and livelihood that are being cut short. And never mind about loyalty to the company.

Cut. Save. Profit. And in a year, repeat.

And we aren’t taking about a few dozen jobs, we are talking about tens and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of jobs worldwide. We are talking about people with mortgages, people losing health care, people who were already living paycheque to paycheque, suddenly jobless. People who thought they were going to be ok, suddenly seeking a job in a challenging market where thousands like them are in the same situation.

Beyond purely meeting shareholder targets, AI and robotics are also taking jobs away. Companies are choosing to use the former salaries of employees to buy chips and memory storage. Manufacturers are replacing employees with robots that don’t take breaks or sick leave, and which don’t need to end their shift after 8 hours. On top of shareholder pressures, there are pressures to eliminate jobs and have the AI Revolution transform the workplace more dramatically than the Industrial Revolution did.

I think this year we are going to see this happen at an alarming scale. The irony is, the large scale layoffs that I see about to happen, added to soaring prices, are going to drastically affect the spending of consumers who buy the products these large companies need purchased. However, many of these billion dollar companies are circumventing this too, by committing billions of dollars to purchase goods and services from each other, again inflating their perceived profits for shareholders.

All this to say that I see a lot of short term financial pain for a significant number of people in the coming months. I’m predicting the fiscal year end squeeze is going to be a hardship like none we’ve seen before, and a lot of people, a lot of families, are going to struggle as a result.

More rest

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I’m going to physiotherapy. I’m going to massage therapy. I’m doing my stretches and exercises. And I’m still dealing with leg pain that gets triggered from standing. Until a week ago I could just sit for 5 minutes and the pain would fade. I could walk on the treadmill or up/downhill, and even run, and felt no pain… but after 3-5 minutes standing in the shower, shaving & brushing my teeth, or making food, the pain returned.

For the last week and a half, the pain has crept into activities where I’m mobile and moving, and then has been slow to subside, even when I sit.

So, I’ll keep doing my stretches, keep going to physio and massage, and even seek more medical help. What I’m also going to do is give my legs more rest. I’ve been pushing hard, I’ve seen amazing gains… but my body is telling me that it needs a break. I’m going to go easy on my legs, and give this issue some time to heal.

Not if, when

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The only thing I use AI for when I write my blog is to make an accompanying image. I don’t use it for editing, and as a result I’ll often not notice a typo, or I’ll create a sentence that doesn’t flow, or I’ll repeat a word a little too frequently in a paragraph. What I’m saying is that I’ll make mistakes that could be caught if I used an artificial intelligence to aid in my editing.

That said, I already do use some AI because a little red line unner under a word lets me know I’ve misspelled it. We often forget that we’ve been using forms of artificial intelligence for a long time now. But I’m specifically talking about using AI as an editor or even as a co-writer. This is something I have not intentionally done yet. However, if I’m honest, the main reason for this is simply time.

I’m already pressed for time to get my writing done in the morning. I recently wrote about how frustrated I was with AI images, and the fact that they weren’t giving me exactly what I wanted, and wasted too much time. I don’t see myself in a position where I’m going to spend time using AI as an editor on top of this.… But it’s coming.

The reason it’s coming is because while I know writing every day has improved the quality of my writing, I’m sure it has also reinforced some of the weaknesses in my style. Doing something repetitively without meaningful feedback doesn’t necessarily make you better. I know that having an editor would make me better. And the reality is, I have an editor available to me whenever I want one. So now it’s just a matter of deciding when?

The ‘when’ is probably after retirement. I think that when I’m not trying to stick an entire routine of habits into under 2 1/2 hours before work, I’ll have time for things like putting my writing into an AI editor. I’ll probably be writing on my laptop instead of my phone, while enjoying a morning coffee. I’ll have the convenience of multiple tabs open on my browser rather than having to use my finger to copy paste information. And most importantly, I’ll have more time to learn, to get feedback and discern, does this AI suggestion make my writing better, or does it make my writing more vanilla?

The point is, it’s going to happen. To have a tool like this, literally at my fingertips and not to use it is silly. Especially when it can help me, with the right prompt, to become better at something I love to do.

Tragedy Tourism

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I don’t know how widespread the use of this phrase is, but I heard it and to me it is exactly why I struggle to pay attention to the news. The phrase is ‘tragedy tourism’ and it refers to the constant onslaught of tragedy we ‘visit’ viewing current events in the news. The topics vary and change but message is the same:

Share a tragic event, share the outrage, sadness, and horror, briefly examine the details, discuss them, highlight the anger or controversy, and then move on… find a new tragedy and repeat. You don’t get to live too long with any one tragedy, you merely visit and move on.

Your attention can’t stay on any one thing, because the next tragedy is thrust upon you to provoke further outrage, to keep you distracted, triggered. And a mind that is consumed with tragedy is a controlled and manipulated mind. It’s a mind that is angry and distracted from rational thought, it’s a mind that easily forgets the last reason to be outraged because the new reason, the next distraction, fill your consciousness with yet another and another tragedy.

No time for clarity of thought, no time to examine the issues and nuances of the last tragedy you visited, you just move on to the next tragedy because that’s where the news cycle is now. You visit each new tragedy like you are on a vacation bus tour. In the same way that a bus stops to show you a touristy landmark just long enough to learn a few highlights and minor details, and take a picture, the news peppers you with the lowlights, the sadness of the tragedy before putting you back on the metaphorical bus to be dropped off at the next tragedy.

Tragedy tourism keeps you hopping from one tragedy to the next, filling you with new reasons to be angry and upset, but not leaving you long enough on any one tragedy to allow you to feel immersed. The stay at each tragic event too short to care enough to truly understand the tragedy or to meaningfully interact or think critically about it before moving on to the next one.

An angry mind doesn’t think critically. A divided attention doesn’t promote activism or action. A distracted population doesn’t do anything to upset the status quo… and the news pumps out a new tragedy for us to visit.

Add title. Start writing…

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These are the words I’m greeted with every morning.

Add title

Start writing….

I open the Jetpack App on my phone, click a little plus sign in the bottom corner and choose ‘Post’ to get my blog post going. On weekends I have a morning schedule that doesn’t allow me to write early, because I’m not choosing to get up at 5am. But my Monday to Friday morning schedule is bathroom, change for my workout, go downstairs to the couch and open the app.

I marvel how sometimes the muse hits me and suddenly I’m 300 words in and already know how I’ll end, and sometimes I’m fighting with myself to focus and not allow my phone to be a distraction as I sit staring at ‘Add title’. Sometimes a title is all I need to complete my day’s writing, and sometimes I change the title after writing something that meandered away from what I thought I was going to write.

Add title. Start writing….

Sometimes this is a warm, comforting invitation, sometimes a cold, daunting challenge. And no matter what it feels like, I write… I’ve seen that prompt about 2,400 times in the last 6 and a half years, and I still want to see it every day.