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Last Notes

2026-10-19 17:31:58 GMT

Does making your computer look like paper help with focus? I looked into this for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/paperman-makes-your-laptop-screen-look-like-paper/

2026-09-03 17:58:43 GMT

What’s the most complex “app” you’ve replaced with a text document?

2025-05-23 00:12:58 GMT

Tech is making things easier—just not for you
“Technology makes everything more complicated,” an elderly relative said to me. It’s hard to argue with.
In this specific situation she had paid to reserve a parking spot that, it turned out, she didn’t need. She tried to get a refund only to find out that’s not possible—all you can do is try to sell your parking spot to another customer on the parking complex’s “innovative” re-seller platform. Since situations like this did not happen in the recent past (when the company would have simply had one more spot to sell again), she blamed the technology.
That’s not an irrational feeling, but is technology to blame? Or is tech making life easier for companies while making it harder for their customers?
The tech investment class has complained, loudly, that mainstream society has a negative view of technology, allegedly due primarily to what they see and read in the media. I think people’s negative views of the tech sector has more to do with that parking spot, and situations like it, than anything else. Every day people experience companies using technology to make their lives worse. Those paper cuts, more than media narratives, are the reason people have increasingly negative views of technology.
The economics here are not complex. Customer service is an expense; companies are also always attempting to lower expenses, and now technology makes it easier than ever to shift more of the cost of customer service onto the customer themselves.
The parking spot is an example of this. Not that long ago a customer could reasonably expect to get at least a partial refund for an unused parking reservation, likely by talking to a person on the phone. It was easy for the customer, but it wasn’t optimal for the company, which had to pay a human to talk on the phone and then actually give money back to their customers. Now, technology could have made that faster for the customer by automating the return, but the parking barons saw an opportunity for more. Thanks to the internet, they can instead keep their customers’ money until someone else buys the parking spot (the parking lot takes a cut of the sale, of course). The customer does not benefit from this change—only the company does.
That’s not technology making things more complicated. It’s a business making things more complicated and using technology to obscure that. Pay attention and you’ll see this all over society. There’s stores replacing their clerks with self-checkout, forcing customers to do what was a paid job. There’s ‘home screens’ on our televisions full of service offerings we don’t have, obscuring what we are trying to find when we turn on the screen.
Anyone who has waited on hold for customer service is experiencing this same phenomenon. The company could, in theory, employ enough customer service agents so that you wouldn’t have to wait so long. They don’t, though, because that would cost more money. They could use technology to let you hang up and call you back when an agent is ready to help you (and to be fair, some organizations do), but even better to keep you in a holding pattern until an overworked agent is available or (ideally) you give up.
And there’s a brave new world of cost cutting coming up: AI customer agents. Instead of waiting for a person to solve your problem you can talk to a bot! This, if implemented, will allow companies to lay off thousands of workers, so they’re going to try. There’s only one downside: AI bots have a habit of making up policies, which can sometimes cost companies money. Ideally this would discourage companies from using the technology until it’s ready (even if that day never comes). More likely, though, the company lawyers will be sure to draft language that puts the burden of working out whether what the bot says is true or not on the customer.
Am I being pessimistic? Possibly. But the pattern is a clear one—too many companies, when given the chance, will happily use technology to increase their revenue by making their customers do more work. Technologists who want people to have a positive view of technology should start thinking of ways to reverse that trend.
Image source.
https://justinpot.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Screenshot-2025-05-22-at-5.11.26 PM-1024x659.png

2025-05-09 20:16:59 GMT

The End of Windows 10 is coming (and other stuff I wrote this week)
More people use Windows 10 than Windows 11, but later this year Windows 10 will stop getting security updates. What does that mean? I explained over at WIRED and outlined your options. In summary: you can upgrade, you can get a new computer, or you can switch to a different operating system. I also wrote a few articles for Mac users, if you’re more into that sort of thing.
‘Cotypist’ Adds Autocomplete to All Your Mac Apps Lifehacker One of the more interesting uses of AI I’ve come across.
This Extension Gets Rid of YouTube’s Annoying Clutter Lifehacker Turn a potential rabbit hole into a useful tool for learning.
This Mac App Gives a Much Needed Upgrade to Copying and Pasting Lifehacker Copy a bunch of things and then paste them in order.
https://justinpot.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/windows-10-closing-1024x387.png

2025-04-17 22:01:48 GMT

Practice Is The Point
Writing isn’t just my job—it’s how I think. When I’m not sure what I feel about something I start typing. I put down ideas, contemplate whether I agree with what I just wrote, and in this process figure out how I feel.
A lot of my blog posts start as me playing around with ideas. Most such documents never end up published, though, because the point isn’t the content—it’s the process of writing itself. Writing, for me, is a practice—a skill I improve over time and use to understand the world.
Lately I’ve been trying to put a finger on why I hate so much of the rhetoric that surrounds AI, and I think the answer is related to the human art of practice. I’ve been struggling to put this into words until I saw a Bluesky post by Sam Halpert:
…using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.
This metaphor really clarifies things. We all know that using machines to do physical tasks doesn’t count as exercise. The same things applies to our minds. Asking an AI to write about a topic isn’t the same as going through the process of writing. Sure, AI might be capable of writing a blog post not that different from the one you’re reading now. What AI can’t do, though, is give me the intellectual experience of thinking through these ideas. And that intellectual experience isn’t just some annoyance that’s slowing down my writing output—it’s the entire point of writing itself.
I’m reminded of that AI CEO who thinks making music isn’t fun. Here’s what he said:
It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.
Put aside, for now, that millions of people make music entirely because they enjoy doing so, and focus on his reason for saying people don’t enjoy it: because it takes practice. The assumption here is that we all want to skip the practice and get to the good part. This idea fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be human. The challenge of learning an instrument isn’t a barrier to enjoying making music—it’s a key part of why people like making music. You notice there’s something you can’t do and you spend time practicing until you can do it. That progress is rewarding because we are wired, as humans, for self improvement. Improving skills, over time, is enjoyable. So is using those skills to create.
This isn’t just true in the arts, or academic pursuits. It’s true in recreation. Take video games. These are fun because they offer challenges and give you a chance to get better at facing those challenges. The first time you play a Mario game you are going to run into every Goomba and fall into every pit. The fun comes when, on the second play-through, you get a little bit further than last time. The better you are at a game the more you crave difficulty, which is why games always get more challenging as you make progress.
Human flourishing demands these kinds of learning curves. Practice isn’t a barrier to enjoying life—it’s an essential tool for doing so. Technologists would do well to keep this in mind and think about how their tools can enable, not replace, this kind of learning and self improvement.
featured image of cat piano via Public Domain Review
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2025-04-02 22:54:08 GMT

Extrinsic motivation is ruining everything
Our culture is out of balance in all kinds of ways. One breakdown I don’t think is talked about enough: extrinsic motivation has completely overtaken intrinsic motivation.
This might seem irrelevant right now. Fascism is on the rise, a recession is looming, and (checks notes) there’s a nonzero chance the USA is going to invade Canada. Yes: there’s a lot going on in the world, but I promise you: motivation touches everything that’s happening right now, online and off.
To oversimplify: extrinsic motivation is doing something in order to get something out of it—money, fame, or avoiding punishment. Intrinsic motivation is doing something because you love doing it. Now, no one can be entirely intrinsically motivated. Food, for example, costs money, and for most people working is the only reliable way to get money. My contention is that we’ve tipped way off to the extrinsic side of the scale right now, and it’s making us miserable.
There are obvious symptoms of this. Take the idea that any hobby you have should become a side hustle. There’s nothing inherently wrong with making a few bucks selling your art at the farmer’s market, if you can pull it off. But you don’t need to sell your crafts in order to benefit from them. The act of creation, itself, can provide satisfaction. People like to play instruments even though you could just listen to music on Spotify; people like to bake bread even though you could just buy a loaf at the grocery store. Why? Because there is meaning and joy to be had in the act of developing skills and creating things.
That meaning is underemphasized right now. Throughout our culture we’ve valorized extrinsic motivation and, in some ways, made clear that it’s the only thing that matters. Take the internet (no, really—take it away from me).
At the risk of looking at the past through millennial-shaded glasses, the early days of the internet were built around experimentation and shared interests. People built blogs and posted on them regularly not out of any expectation of becoming famous or getting paid but because it was an interesting thing to do. Some of the most popular early websites, articles, and viral videos were people just messing around with a new artform for the fun of it. There was a vitality to that.
The advent of social media changed this dynamic. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok all prominently tell you how many people have seen a post, turning posting into a kind of competition Eventually there started to be real money at stake—having a post or video go viral could lead to a career. This inevitably led to the internet professionalizing. The cringy attention grabbing thumbnails on YouTube, the websites full of AI-generated re-writes of articles found elsewhere, and the trolling posts that are intentionally upsetting people to increase engagement are all symptoms of this.
Now, there are plenty of people who still post things online for no other reason than they love it. And there were certainly people posting in the pre-social internet because they wanted to build influence or start a career. And there is nothing wrong with wanting people to see the things you create. My contention isn’t that intrinsic motivation is good and extrinsic motivation is bad, only that the balance in our culture is tilted too strongly right now.
This becomes more evident if we look at sectors of the online economy that provide no creative output or tangible benefits to the world. Take sports gambling, which at this point is impossible to avoid learning about if you even occasionally watch a sport. Gambling apps take watching sports—something traditionally done for intrinsic reasons like pleasure, relaxation, and community—and add the extrinsic promise of profit. Gambling ads preach that it is not enough to watch the game for fun—you should be trying to make money at it. And the message is working: American sports gambling netted $13.71 billion in 2024, according to ESPN.
Or, taken even further, let’s talk about cryptocurrency, which is the most extrinsically motivated thing I can think of. Seventeen years after Bitcoin’s launch and these currencies still aren’t used to buy and sell goods on a regular basis. The value of these currencies is entirely tied up in the fact that they might be used for legitimate trade someday, and somehow this idea means crypto assets are worth $2.86 trillion according to Forbes. People don’t buy cryptocurrencies to use them as currencies—they buy cryptocurrencies because they think the price will go up, and the price goes up because people buy the currencies, who buy them because they think the price will go up. It’s an entire “sector” of the economy built on nothing but extrinsic motivation.
The same pattern is playing throughout society right now. It’s happening in arts. Walt Disney reportedly once said “We don’t make movies to make money—we make money to make more movies.” It’s hard to think of a sentence that less accurately describes the company named after him, which these days mostly makes sequels and “live action” remakes. In politics the people who care about actual issues, and want to take concrete steps to address those issues, are drowned out by those who are motivated instead to acquire and hold power for its own sake (or in order to avoid prosecution and/or acquire money). And it’s happening in the media business, as private equity firms acquire newspapers and digital publications only to gut their editorial staffs.
I could keep going. It’s one of those patterns you can’t stop noticing once you think about it. And it’s not something we can fix overnight. What I will say is this: the more time I spend doing things for their own sake the happier I am.
Image source
https://justinpot.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/stephens-natural-history-23.jpeg-1024x643.jpg

2025-03-21 17:41:37 GMT

Playing modern games on an ancient TV and other stuff I wrote
I recently wrote about why new tech only feels good for a short time over at PopSci. It’s a little bit outside my wheelhouse—it’s about tech, yes, but also about human psychology means a new TV or computer will never make you happy in the long term. There may be a spike in happiness after a wedding, a promotion at work, or buying a new TV, but that is temporary—people tend to eventually revert to their previous levels of happiness.
Other than that I’ve been keeping busy with things that aren’t yet published but here’s a few Lifehacker pieces that were.
This Free App Shows How Long You’ve Been Using Your Mac Lifehacker There should be a term for applications like this, which raise your awareness of your computer usage without harassing you or bogging you down in statistics.
GIMP 3’s New Features Make the Best Free Image Editor Even Better Lifehacker Honestly, for most people, this is the best image editing application.
Use This App to Send Someone a File Without Using Any Cloud Storage Lifehacker A simple tool that solves a problem, and with a memorable name: file.pizza
‘LikeTones’ Is a Guitar Tuner With No Ads or Upsells Lifehacker Sometimes I get obsessed with finding the right app for me, specifically, an then turn it into an article.
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2025-03-13 01:04:45 GMT

Read local news instead of doomscrolling
How does one exist online, right now, without being a constant mess of anxiety? It’s what I’ve been working on lately. I’ve told you about rejecting anxiety bait and not getting your news from social media, and both of those can make a big difference. But there’s something even simpler that I think can help: focusing more on local news.
Now, to be clear, I would never argue that there’s no point to following national news—it’s important to know what’s going on. But almost all of us aren’t paying enough attention to local issues, and that’s part of why we’re constantly freaking out.
The stakes of the national news constantly feel existential at the moment, mostly because they are. It also feels like there’s very little you, as one person, can do about it. Local news is helpful because the stakes are generally much more tangible and you can generally do something very concrete in order to change things.
There are reasons that we all read less local news than we used to. At one point “the news” was delivered to your house on physical pieces of paper, generally produced locally and including a mix of local and national news (called a “news paper”). Now most people get their news from the internet. In theory this could mean more local news but in practice it has meant the opposite. There are all kinds of reasons for this, from local newsrooms gutted due to disappearing advertising revenue to the tendency of social networks to flatten culture into the few news stories that go viral nationally or internationally. Overall people read less local news now than they used to.
And that’s too bad. Anxiety about the news is rooted in a feeling of powerlessness. Local news offers an anecdote to that feeling. You, personally, can have a much bigger impact on the political direction of your city and state than you can on the direction of the country.
Part of this is just math—fewer voters means your vote has more impact. But another part of it is the relative level of engagement. Your local city government, for example, probably doesn’t get nearly the number of phone calls or letters from residents that your senator or member of congress does, meaning any phone call you make expressing concerns is going to have a much bigger impact than calls you make to your national representative. And you have even more power than that: you can just show up. City council meetings are public. In most cities you’ll even have a chance to speak.
This is going to take some effort on your part. First, you are going to need to find a way to stay informed, which can be difficult in our current era—there just aren’t a lot of small (or even medium) town journalists anymore. You are going to need to be pro-active. I recommend regularly checking the homepage of any local media publications regularly, or even paying for a physical subscription. You can also start following local journalists and politicians you support on social networks—it’s a great way to add some local content to your feeds. Or learn when your city or county council meetings are and what they’ll be talking about—the agenda is public and typically available online.
The specifics don’t matter. Just take steps to ensure that more of the things you’re reading, watching, and listening to on a regular basis are talking about your local community. You’ll feel better for it.
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