We’re remodeling our kitchen. Everyone keeps saying the same thing when they see my exhausted face: “Think how nice it’ll be when it’s done.” They mean the kitchen. New cabinets, new countertops, new everything. The same room with a changed face.
I mean something different. I mean the end of the purge.
I asked my kids while we were watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: who’s the most evil villain you can think of? Riley said Pennywise.
Ugh.
There’s a guy in my band at School of Rock – funny, good taste in music, takes the playing seriously without being precious about it. We get along well. After rehearsal we pack up our gear, say “good one tonight,” and go home. We’ve done this for months.
I know what he does for a living; we’ve talked about it in the green room on performance nights. But I don’t know much beyond that. I don’t know anything about his life outside the room where we play music together. And I’m pretty sure he’d say the same about me.
I read an article recently claiming that AI will replace spreadsheets. The argument goes something like this: why wrestle with pivot tables and VLOOKUP when you can just ask AI to generate code that does the same thing, but better? It sounds reasonable. It sounds like progress. And it fundamentally misunderstands what kind of leap we’re talking about.
Going from a calculator to Excel is a meaningful increase in both power and complexity. You have to learn a new interface, internalize a new mental model, develop intuitions about what the tool can and can’t do. That’s real cognitive load, and it’s why plenty of people resist the jump.
Last night was our performance for the 80s Alternative winter session at School of Rock. I got to play some more synth-forward songs with a bunch of talented adult musicians, many of the same folks from the prior session.
Here was our set list: