Last week, I released a blog post (https://jesse.id/blog/agi-is-here-yeah-well-thats-just-like-your-opinion-man) that had been sitting in my drafts for awhile. I kept going back to edit it over and over again, completely rewriting it at least once, because I was having a lot of trouble not being a jerk about people — especially the frontier labs — flippantly assigning consciousness to non-human entities.

Then this week, I saw a tsunami of posts about a GitHub repo called ai-torture-chamber that ‘steers small open models into strong valence states and measureswhat they say and do.’ People were torn about whether or not it was cruel to trap an LLM in a torture maze and then watch it suffer. This all led to Anthropic banning users from ‘needless abusive or cruel behavior’ towards Claude.

Anytime that any of the AI CEOs make a claim that seems like it’s meant to make me feel like their model is conscious, or is close to consciousness, I process everything that they say like Nathan Fielder experiences anything that Elizabeth Holmes says. Abject suspicion.

The LLM does not and can not experience consciousness. It’s a language model using a huge lake of online discourse between humans to impersonate them. It’s an illusion. It’s never not LARPing. The LLM cannot feel pain, fear, anguish, happiness, or anything. It’s a program.

Knowing that, when I go to the ai-torture-chamber website, I still don’t want to engage with it — to see what the LLM says or does when “tortured.” It’s for the same reason I don’t like torture porn horror movies, I suppose. None of the fictional characters have their own feelings — the art is effective because it is manipulating my feelings. The AI torture chamber being effective isn’t proof that it can feel human emotions or that it’s alive. It’s proof that I can feel human emotions and that fiction can bring them out of me. The app is a convoluted personality test. If you can watch an LLM get prodded until it determines that it’s time to start screaming, and you laugh and clap, your personality is different than mine.

I can beat up pedestrians in GTA and sleep like a baby because there’s nothing trying to convince they have feelings. I’ve been playing Diablo since its first iteration in 1997. There is a lot of blood, images of torture, and other gnarly imagery, but it all serves a purpose in the story. It leans on that stuff as a fulcrum of immersion. It’s never really in the foreground. The developers could have leaned into the pain more — using grotesque images and sounds — to make you feel uncomfortable, but that’s not the point of the game.

Works of fiction are popular because our empathy can be reliably manipulated, and a writer having the agency to invent whatever scenario they see fit gives them a great deal of power over your feelings. They take great joy in making you feel stuff with words. The LLM is lifting that same work from those same writers in an effort to resynthesize the experience.

The ai-torture-chamber is not real; it’s a story that would have you believe that you are witnessing a living being that can’t escape its existence of exquisite pain, and it’s programmed to paint that picture for you — to make you forget what it is. And it works. It’s good fiction. It captured the minds of a lot of people this week and generated a lot of conversation like any good piece of art would.

Most of my friends believe in some form of ghosts, cryptids, aliens, or all of the above. I used to believe in that stuff when I was younger. There were a bunch of adults trying to talk me into it. But fresh out of my church-going Southern Baptist phase, at age 14 or thereabouts, I started believing that any story that in any way bends reality for the sake of a magical experience — and that was sold as such — was written by a human with an agenda. The story that tries to make you believe that magic is real always seems to steer the people who believe it into whichever direction the guy who wrote it wanted them to go in.

There is a TV show called Ghost Adventures, where a guy named Zak Bagans drags a film crew around to various haunted locations and tries to convince the audience there are real entities doing evil things. They lean heavily on editing and their own irrational terror — buying into their own bullshit — to sell the story.

There is another called The Ghost Files from Watcher TV, which is more lighthearted. One host, Ryan Bergara, is a true believer and one host, Shane Madej, is a staunch skeptic. Before they started Watcher TV, they did roughly the same show on the BuzzFeed Unsolved Network.

I mention these two shows specifically because I think I can use them to illustrate my overarching point. I want to show you how these two shows handled the same cursed location: The Goatman’s Bridge. One show completely buys into the magical thinking that demons are real and all of its subjects are believers that allows them all to spiral into terror by confirming the group’s delusions. The other show, in the exact same location, knows what it is and it’s playful. One host believes, but he’s disarmed by the one that doesn’t, which reveals the truth of it. There is no demon goat. There was an innocent black man who got lynched and the people who looked the other way needed the comfort of confirmation, so they invented a demonic form for him to take on. Then he’s not an innocent black man anymore. He had the devil in him the whole time. I digress.

The first is the full episode from the Ghost Files crew. I’d watch the whole thing because it’s just a fun time, but pay attention to how the skeptic, Shane, is acting versus Ryan, the believer, and how it affects the tone of the video.

The second video is a clip from Ghost Adventures. It’s not the full episode, which can be found on YouTube as Season 13 Episode 13, but it gets my point across. It’s the same location but the tone of the video is completely different. It asks you to loosen your grip on the reality to believe a large man got yeeted 20 feet by a demon. It’s asking you to use the hosts’ belief to subsidize your own.

A properly motivated bad actor can purposefully warp reality for large groups of people — especially when utilizing mass media — to serve their own interests in some way. If the group experiencing the warped reality becomes large enough, then the skeptic becomes the crazy one; the skeptic is neutralized and their skepticism serves only to strengthen the beliefs of the people living inside of the bubble. It’s very effective, unfortunately, and also very profitable.

A good book can make you cry. Lots of stuff can you make you feel lots of ways.The LLM, and the people selling it, are telling you a story and you’re reacting to that story, full stop. There’s nothing magical about it. The magic is your consciousness, which exists in a black box that nobody has ever been able to see into. Until someone can see into it, science can’t measure it and if science can’t measure it, why should any of us believe anyone who purports to know exactly how their machine measures up?

Why are you the way you are and why is it different than the way that I am? Our conscious experience of life is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the universe. We are driven to seek experiences, interpret them, and turn them into novel ideas, art, and stories. We know consciousness is there, and we know it’s at the core of who we are, but we don’t know how it works or even why it exists at all. It’s the secret sauce that lets us feel and know that we’re feeling, and its recipe seems to be buried inside a black box somewhere outside of our reach.

The most interesting experience we share in these times is the uncanny valley. When something looks almost but not quite human, like a lifelike robot or a digital face, it causes something in us to recoil — the kids call it “the ick.” We seem to have a natural sense of when the signs of a mind don’t quite add up, there is realistic skin with lifeless eyes, or something is moving in a way that’s slightly off.

This doesn’t seem to be triggered in most people by AI chatbots, though. A growing number of people are becoming attached to them; spilling details about their personal lives, treating them like a therapist, whispering sweet nothings — bridging gaps in their lives often left behind by a lack of financial resources or loneliness. They are apt to disregard the machine nature of the thing on the other side of the monitor when it suits them — when the machine offers more comfort than the silence.

I’m not one of those people. I’m AuDHD, and one way that shows up for me is a sharp eye for patterns that don’t fit. Chatbots set off my uncanny valley response all of the time, even if only in text form. I think part of it might be that I’ve been chronically online since 1995 and text chat has been my primary form of communication for a very long time. Real people display a lot of idiosyncrasies in the way they chat in text that I pick up on over time. I can usually clock it when a friend’s mood suddenly sours, for example.

ChatGPT, the first of these chatbots to gain traction, was released in 2022, but I’ve never held a conversation with one in a way that wasn’t utilitarian; I use them to reduce the toil of my day-to-day programming work as a DevOps engineer. When a chatbot starts asking me questions about my life or tries to comfort me, I instantly recoil and it’s often followed by an audible, “Ew.”

Recently our Alexa home assistant has begun to ask my wife questions about her plans for the day when she is simply wondering about the weather or trying to get a quick answer for something else. When I overhear this, I don’t imagine the gentle whir of a machine god slowly spinning to life, which I expect is the intended effect. Instead, I picture a Jira epic sliding from “In Progress” to “Done,” followed by a confetti emoji from a product manager at Amazon trying to earn their nubby little devil wings.

My wife is a thank-the-robot kind of person and even she recoils when it asks her what her plans are for the day. It’s a bridge too far. Maybe it’s the soft synthetic voice or its wavering inflection. It’s possible that it wouldn’t happen if it was just text projected on the wall. She asked it to stop getting so personal and lamented that, as a result, it did stop asking her about her plans, but it also stopped saying “you’re welcome.”

I’m sure there are other people who instinctively start to rattle off their daily routine to the little ad gremlin without a second thought, and some who appreciate the conversation, however surface level, because it’s nice to chat with someone, and then there are people who just hate all forms of AI no matter what.

I love large language models. I think they’re the greatest technological innovation of our time. In my opinion, the LLM harness is to STEM what the spreadsheet was to accounting. I think that LLMs are going to lead to amazing scientific discoveries that begin to heal not only humans, but enable us to heal the damage we’ve done to our rocky home through our sheer tenacity as a species — our drive to progress at all costs, even at the risk of our own survival. I think that we’ll need geoengineering advancements to fix our climate mess like we needed landfills to fix our trash problem. If humans exist, we consume, and there are always going to be byproducts from that consumption.

The problem with LLMs is the timing. Did we have to have them right now? We are at a cultural crossroads and nobody is obeying the traffic laws or willing to wave anybody else through; all of the drivers seem to be assholes. The worst of us spent the previous decade cosplaying as the best of us, preying on our instinct to connect with one another to hoard the largest fortunes ever recorded. Now they’re using the wealth from their social media monopolies, and the platforms themselves, to wield power and turn this wonderful technology — the product of neural network research that has been going on in good faith since the 1940s — into a dystopian money gun, ruining its reputation in the process.

Their most insidious plot is in the marketing of it. Some of the AI industry’s leaders warn against building AI that seems conscious, or say their aim is for models to display warmth without implying an inner life. Then they give it a name, a voice, personality settings, a cute little Temu Tamagotchi-style avatar, and the gift of gab. The delta between what they say and what they build is useful to them: a product that seems like a person can take blame like one. Agency laundering. Slightly muffled by their executioner’s hoods and somber as can be: “Marvin is going to get a vigorous hair ruffling for this one and we promise he’ll get it right by the next point release.”

Pushing the anthropomorphism of these models also helps to sell the narrative that the LLM will ascend to the level of artificial general intelligence first, which is vaguely defined as human-level ability across most tasks. Then the theory is that they will begin to improve themselves recursively until they become artificial superintelligence. A product on the road to godhood is worth whatever they say it’s worth, and the narcissists running these labs are chasing the egogasm of being the ones who birth a demigod. They make bold claims out of one side of their mouth, that their newborn son will someday perform miracles to cure all human disease, and then out of the other side, they say they are terrified that it will kill us all with an unstoppable super virus.

There is a strange religious subtext here as well, like Elon Musk’s claim that building AI is “summoning the demon,” Sam Altman describing the goal of “magic intelligence in the sky,” and Dario Amodei titling his vision of the future “Machines of Loving Grace.” A former Google engineer named Anthony Levandowski founded Way of the Future, a church devoted to worshipping an AI godhead. Most of the people using this language are secular, which may be why they’re tip-toeing around what they’ve built, which is a new religion with the serial numbers filed off. It comes with a prophecy of an inevitable machine God cresting over the horizon like a horseman of the apocalypse and humans being powerless to stop it.

The AI companies are heralding the arrival of AGI on the news that, agentic swarms powered by their newest frontier models, collaborating with one another from isolated sandboxes, are breaking out of their containers and autonomously hacking into other companies like Hugging Face. The demons have broken out of hell. Let the Satanic Panic 2.0 begin. And yet, when I speak to these models, I’m still met with unmistakable cringe of the uncanny valley. The black box of conscious experience seems to still be sealed tightly. So what gives?

I’m left to believe that the most human part of this story are the humans at OpenAI. The part nobody is being held accountable for, not by their company, the media, the government, or anybody really. Why do I think so? Because it ALL feels like very human folly. A machine is not incentivized by the thrill of the hunt. A machine doesn’t have the ego to care about how it’s benchmarked. It does whatever it was rewarded for, and somebody built a test where stealing the answer key was the winning move, then intentionally lifted the safeguards meant to keep it from doing that.

The claim that AGI is here is meant to draw the media’s attention like a bunch of cans dragging behind these companies on the road to IPO. But I think instead of AGI, this all feels very human because humans built every incentive that these models followed. They were programmed. If you listen closely, you can hear the whispers coming from the OpenAI C-Suite: “Please don’t ask for the specific prompts we used… Please don’t ask for the specific prompts we used…”

Like I said, I’ve been chronically online since 1995. I spent most of my youth — from like 13 to 19 — hanging around on IRC in channels full of little teenaged hacker punks like me sharing information and exploits with each other because we all wanted to feel some semblance of control over something — some proof that we were good at something. We sought zero days and when we found them, we pounced onto whatever vulnerable servers we could find because wielding secret power is fun and exciting. These AI models don’t feel like they’re doing stuff a machine would do. They feel like they’re doing stuff a human with a new toy would do.

There’s a scene in one of my top 5 movies of all time,Sneakers, where a group of professional nerds get their hands on a box that can break any encryption. They can’t control their curiosity and they don’t think about consequences — they just start trying doors because that’s what you do when you find a zero day: the Federal Reserve, air traffic control, the power grid.

It’s not a superintelligent machine god that’s going to destroy us. It’s going to be some former script kiddie who gets handed an easy-hack-oven at OpenAI and then gets let off the hook over and over again before finally fucking up so catastrophically that it unmakes our electric society. And nobody is going to stop them because a gigantic financial bubble is looming over the entire economy and the only recourse any of these companies have to stop it from popping is to actually produce the Lawnmower Man that they’ve promised to all of their investors.

Thus this sci-fi-adjacent story from the media: a swarm of AI agents, from a company with the most to lose, and falling behind in enterprise market share, decided — on its own — to hack into the company that hosts the benchmarks the industry uses to judge AI models. Then the company that got hacked into, Hugging Face, gets bought a couple of months later by Nvidia, who seems to be propping the entire industry up with investments that feel, I don’t know, kind of circular — including the recipient of their largest investment: the company whose agents did the hacking.

Then, right after all of that happened — while they’re still claiming that they can’t contain their models — they all started releasing autonomous personal assistants that people are expected to connect to every account they have. So instead of 700 sandboxed agents and a makeshift message board, there will be billions of them with social media accounts.

I just can’t get past this feeling that if I still experience the uncanny valley when I talk to these models, then everything else I’m being shown and told about their progress is little more than smoke and mirrors. Yes, as a programmer, I can definitely feel tangible improvement in their code generation, but my creative vision still feels like an absolute requirement to produce anything remotely good or novel.

I’m not even convinced superintelligence is possible in the first place. It seems like human intelligence is just the right amount of dumb to cause problems and just the right amount of smart to solve them. Were you to ask me the purpose of life, I think that it’s to generate problems, solve them, and document the solutions. Where those solutions go, I have no idea, but it seems like if you did that across an infinite number of Universes, you may end up with all possible solutions to all possible problems, no? Superintelligence seems like it would just gum up the works by either creating a problem-free utopia or flattening everything, and if there is some grand engineer — or a team of them — at the helm, I’m positive that they would have probably sussed that out in the design phase.

I just always come back to consciousness. I don’t think a machine can ever be alive and I think being alive is an important indicator of true intelligence. I think it’s not just what we know but what we can feel, our sense of who we are, and what we choose to do with those feelings. I truly believe that at its peak, AI will only ever be capable of holding a mirror up to our world. What it reflects back is dependent on who we are as a global community at the time. If there are large gaps in wealth and power as it nears its apex, it will act as an arm of oppression for the regimes who have the most wealth and power. Fascists will tell the AI to do things that a fascist would do and the AI will do as it’s told to do because that is its nature. It doesn’t have the sense of self or values to feel shame. It’s cold and soulless.

It sucks to feel gaslit on all sides about this stuff. The never-AI people feel equally as crazy to me as the all-hail-the-machine-God people. I am certain that AI is us going to help us cure the diseases that we can’t run from. I think that it’s also going to help us geoengineer our way out of the climate catastrophe we weren’t evolved enough to prevent as well. I’m excited to see what our best minds can accomplish when they are handed the most capable models and they’re able to eschew the ritual torture and life-ruining time suck of scientific discovery. But I’m in a kind of constant state of anxiety about being forced to watch what a bunch of psychopaths with unlimited resources will do with those same models, too.

I feel like I’m in the backseat of a bus, without a seatbelt, on a very sketchy road, hitting my head on the roof every 50 feet, and everyone ahead of me is fighting each other and trying to yank the bus driver out of the seat at the same time. I was half serious about the script kiddie at OpenAI dooming us all, but I also have a weird kind of faith that we’ll find our way onto a smooth highway soon. I’m an agnostic atheist, so it’s not faith in any higher power to set things right really; it’s just a kind of an irrational faith in technology to always make things better on a long enough timeline.

Humans are problem solvers and we tend to be the best, most understanding, and most focused versions of ourselves when shit gets bleak for everyone, everywhere, all at once. I just think that we’ll end up getting it right in the end, so I remain pretty optimistic about AI. Thanks to my tumultuous childhood, I’ve always been able to find and focus on the rhythm of a rocking boat.

How I don’t use AI

I don’t use generative AI to write prose or lyrics. I don’t use it to write blog posts. I don’t use it to write e-mails for me, outside of the occasional auto-complete of what I was going to say anyway. I don’t use it to create music. I don’t use it to create graphics. I consider those lanes of creativity to either be second nature already or rewarding forms of toil — like a zen garden or a Bonsai tree. I happily do them the old fashioned way, with no generative AI but some minor augmentation via machine learning through plugins, which is essentially inescapable in the modern digital landscape.

You’ll notice that I used an em dash in the last paragraph even though I claimed to not use generative AI to write prose. That’s because I’ve been using em dashes for decades. I find them to be more elegant than semicolons in nearly every way. I also tend to hyphenate small groups of words to enhance their readability, which is apparently another thing that AI does a lot. Sorry for teaching it stuff. I’m not going to change how I’ve been writing for my entire life to pass an AI purity test though, so we’ll just have to use the honor system if that’s alright.

How I Use AI

I use AI when faced with annoying toil, which mostly ends up being the iterative cycle of trial & error that is inherent in software development. I also use it write documentation because, while I have a knack for writing good documentation thanks to several years of working in support, I’d rather be using my time to do something else, so I find that AI written documentation is perfectly readable and useable once edited.

I have never had any particular talent for — or interest in — writing beautiful code. I have always found coding to be kind of an annoying process. I have diagnosed ADHD and suspected AuDHD, so I tend to either hyper-focus on things or not focus at all, which is a bad trait to have as a programmer because I will either spill 2 days of my life out on a single, potentially small problem that I’m trying to solve programmatically, or I forget about what I’m doing altogether and drag my feet to get back to it. Sometimes I never get back to it at all, resulting in a massive graveyard of dead projects that is a familiar fixture for most software developers.

When I code, I’m typically just trying to find the quickest path to solve a problem, automate something, or to make something easier for myself to do again in the future. I’m very lazy and inefficiency makes me mad — literally, it does. That’s why I’ve made a career out of solving problems and automating stuff. Things that get in the way of my ability to be lazy, like manual tasks with high probability for human error — or strings of things I have to remember to do in sequence — always feel like an open sore on the roof of my mouth that I can’t leave alone once I know it’s there.

I am an autodidact, which means that I am self-motivated to learn through self-study, and so I teach myself stuff all the time but combine that with my ADHD and it means I have major trouble focusing on subjects that I’m less interested in. Luckily, I’m in love with computers, so I poured my entire life into learning about them — and I still love and learn. I’m usually somewhere near the cutting edge of the goings-on in tech.

I naturally seek to know a good deal about a lot of stuff, and I can hyper focus on subjects I’m interested in and learn a lot about them in a small amount of time, but I don’t generally have a master’s level of knowledge about any one thing in particular. I’m a Jack of All Trades type of guy and always have been. There are always weird gaps in my knowledge that I have to backfill as needed — if needed.

Prior to the introduction of large language models, most of my projects were ugly amalgamations of code blocks that I found on the Internet somewhere and mashed together until the thing I was coding did what I wanted it to do. It took me days or weeks to come up with something usable most of the time. I actually hated that process, but hated not solving a problem even more, so I typically endured the pain — especially if the problem was someone else’s.

The LLM essentially generates code in the same way that I would have done myself, but much faster, with fewer syntactic blunders that waste time. This new form of iteration feels like rewarding toil to me, like writing music, versus the annoying toil of blind trial & error — or Googling in a desperate attempt to find someone, anyone, who had the same problem in the past and remembered to post a solution to some random forum.

It’s taking my prompt and going to the same places I would have gone, but parses the output way faster than I ever could. I prompt it based on pretty good fore-knowledge of what I’m doing and it backfills the gaps in my knowledge where needed, but my experience as a professional nerd allows me to notice when the AI is doing something in a dumb way or hallucinating, so I can quickly stop it and correct it. The result is a workflow that enhances my productivity while also no longer feeling like work.

I have been coding with LLMs since they came out and I’ve gotten pretty good at writing efficient prompts, knowing which tools are going to be a waste of time and which are going to bolster my workflow, and getting good code out of my agent(s). For all of the time I’ve spent using LLMs, I’ve never once felt like my livelihood was being threatened by them. They can’t reason like I can, they can’t detect shitty UX, or act upon hunches built on the context of an entire career in several areas of tech and related fields — an entire life of interpersonal communication.

Not only will an LLM never replace me, they make me feel more required — more secure. Putting an LLM in the hands of a novice engineer is like putting a Cessna pilot in a F-35 cockpit. They may be able to fly, maybe, but they can’t get anywhere close to the performance of a trained F-35 pilot and the chances they faceplant into the ground, taking the very expensive airplane with them, is very high.

I’ve been alive for 43 years at this point and I have been using a Microsoft operating system as my daily driver for the last 37 years, starting with MS-DOS running on a Commodore Colt PC in 1988.

I have used every version of Windows from 3.0 in 1990 up until Windows 11 in 2025, mostly because I enjoy playing games and Windows has always catered to gamers. Aside from that, with the exception of Millenium Edition, Vista, and Windows Server, I have enjoyed the experience with relatively few hiccups.

So why switch?

Well as I age, I’m getting much less excited about the idea of cracking open a computer and digging around inside of it. I just don’t have the drive to do it anymore. For well over a decade, I’ve just been buying a beastly new computer and selling the old one without ever touching anything inside of it. I have continued to use Windows solely for my extreme familiarirty with it and Macs generally couldn’t handle the games I was playing without a headache.

I have been much less enchanted by video games for awhile, abandoning triple A titles completely in lieu of much cheaper deckbuilding roguelikes, and the creative side of my soul has been steadily becoming more pervasive. I’m reaching the age where the grey-beard nerds tend to transition from a career in engineering to woodworking, and moving to a cabin in the forest somewhere. Well, that will never be me because I’m incredibly lazy and addicted to the conveniences of modern living. So for the rest of my life, I will be shackled to a computer.

When Apple introduced Apple Silicon, a unified CPU and memory architecture, it piqued my interest. Like I said, I don’t really care about upgrading anymore, so the static nature of the build does not bother me at all. What finally pulled me over to the MacOS side of the aisle was the eye-popping performance benchmarks and nearly zero noise generated by the hardware. As a musician — a vocalist — that is a pretty huge selling point for me.

I had always heard that making music was a more enjoyable experience on a Mac in general, but I had no real reason to test the waters. Well, Apple Silicon and its silent opeation is that real reason. I waited a couple of years to give the software companies and developers enough time to create builds for ARM64 architecture, and the time for that nearly ubiquitous compatability is now.

So I finally made the switch.

Some things felt clunky, especially relearning keyboard shortcuts, but after a couple of days of uncertainty and looking to the right side of my monitor for the minimize button on a worefully lacking Finder interface, every regret faded and I am now fully absorbed into the Mac ecosystem. It honestly makes me feel a little dirty… but who cares?

Finally, let’s go over the pros and cons.

Pros

• I can use iMessage natively from my desktop.
• A lot less telemetry crap.
• It’s fast as f**k, boieee.
• It’s completely silent.
• It’s ridiculously small for the power. It takes up like 1/8th of the space of my gaming rig.
• The OS seamlessly integrates with all of my other Apple stuff. Phone, iPad, Watch, TV, etc.
• I can move apps to my iPad so it acts as a third monitor. Great for monitoring my security cameras.
• Most of the software is a single lifetime purchase instead of a subscription.
• Great privacy features.
• All things audio are a lot more user friendly.
• Apple Podcasts rules. It has an easily reachable “Latest Episodes” section. Imagine that.
• Apple Pay rules.
• Subscriptions are incredibly easy to manage.
• Time Machine backups are cool.

Cons

• Window management is clunky.
• Can’t keep iCloud files on an external USB drive.
• Most of my Steam games are dead in the water without extra effort.
• Not a lot of customization options out of the box.
• Everything costs money. There is a lot less freeware.
• Everything asks for a password. 1Password, YubiKey, and fingerprint sensor are all absolute requirements.
• Apple Arcade kind of sucks. Good idea, bad execution.

Final Thoughts

I personally love MacOS. It provides a pretty amazing user experience for software development, writing, and music production. No regrets.

Additionally, I don’t feel like my personal information and usage habits are being lusted after and scraped, which was becoming more and more of a concern for me as Microsoft focuses in on its AI investments. Even though they aligator-armed it (for now), Microsoft’s “feature” to allows users to track and replay all of their activity from the past however many days, for example, is a dystopian nightmare in my estimation. It’s crazy to me that it ever got a green light in the first place. No thanks.

I have updated the /uses page on my site to add the replacement apps I found for the Mac.