Focus of the letter 44

This summer, I of course tested applications to ensure the rhythm of the publications, I also wanted, between good and beautiful exotic breaks, to take advantage of it to explore a little further the coding vibe on personal projects, those that we have been thinking about for a long time but that require time, reflection and calm.

The first is called FluxCap, in a nod to the time convector of Back to the Future. Every day the same observation: a tide of monitoring articles to read, ideas for projects that arise, flying notes and more or less urgent tasks, both professional and personal. This flow is fuel, but without structure, it risks overwhelming. I needed a tool that would accompany me, but also to get out of this accumulation of tools that don’t talk to each other and subscriptions that are emerging. In short, to group and organize.
FluxCap does not block the flow, it imposes a course: three distinct flows (the day before, the notes, the tasks) that converge on a single point, the line of sight of the day. A daily selection of tasks limited to 3 or 4 rather than an infinite list, a mandatory closure at the end of the day on each task of the day, and above all without a guilt-inducing counter such as “there are 20 tasks left to finish”. FluxCap is a reflection and a personal adaptation pushed to the point of deployment, not just a prototype that remains on my machine, a tool for my daily life.

The second gesture is currently only visible to curious eyes: the English translation of the site is almost finished, it is for the moment only accessible by a small almost hidden globe and you will certainly be among the first to discover it. I chose not to just do an automatic language switchover from the browser, I co-built it with a generative AI dedicated to the code, “by hand”. After several weeks, what I remember most from this project is the twenty or so incidents encountered along the way, documented rather than hidden so that it can perhaps be used by others: categories deleted by mistake, an overwritten publication date, invisible ghost drafts. Nothing spectacular, just a reminder that building something yourself is also about making choices and trying. In an environment where one mistake can ruin three years of work, it means taking responsibility for what breaks, repairing, starting over and starting again.

Last week, following this same summer movement, I published the 6th version of my subjective selection. Once again, 60 tools chosen out of the nearly 1300 identified since February 2023, re-examined and updated, divided into 10 categories and 3 levels of appropriation, from first contact to advanced use, with 24 additions or deletions since the last version.

These three publications may seem anecdotal, but in preparing this back-to-school letter, they brought me back to the broader question of the place of generative AIs.

In two months, it will be 4 years since the public release of ChatGPT and the massive arrival of generative AIs in our uses and let’s say it in our lives. A social fact that is now total: something that touches the societal, the economic, the legal, the ethical, the aesthetic, the religious even with the pope’s encyclical, all registers at the same time. To be convinced of this, it is certainly enough to look at the invasion of visuals (too often ugly or at least very marked…) in our feeds and on our walls to feel it concretely, we already talked about it in letter 42 in June, and France Culture devoted an article and a video to it, to be found in the shared readings…. When productions made with the same specific tools become so present, I think that these tools no longer necessarily become a conscious choice, they almost become part of a set that we might not see anymore.

And we don’t see any slowdown. It’s so far away, the SMS-like interface of the beginning! Text, then image, then search, then sound and voice. Then agents, like Aye tested this summer, capable of analyzing a page and planning and executing actions for us, without us having to click. Then the generation of video worlds with sound in which we navigate in real time, as with Happy Oyster published last night, with new announcements, certainly guided by marketing, around the promise of general AI… One brick is barely stabilizing when the next one is already coming, driven by announcements of ever more powerful models, in all sectors at once.

And yet, this summer, I believe that the three projects described above go a little against the tide of this movement that we most often watch go by. Publishing a 6th version of my selection means removing and adding 24 tools to keep only 60: a manual choice and sorting, assumed in the middle of the almost 1300 tools listed. Building FluxCap and translating the site also means not only observing what the machine produces or offers, but deciding precisely what I want it to do, while documenting the paths taken so that others can perhaps avoid the difficulties encountered or remix the existing to create something else.

We have already come across the word “agency” in last season’s letters. An agent like Aye chooses the steps of a task that is delegated to him. I choose the 60 tools in my selection from almost 1300. I choose what FluxCap will retain in my list of the day and what will be rejected. I choose how the translations will be carried out. I don’t think that agency will disappear in this total social fact, I believe that it just changes form: it is no longer in the execution, it is in the reflection, in the choice and the sorting.

In this week’s readings, Anne Alombert summons the philosopher Georges Canguilhem in the Fil Philo: a machine that calculates very well does not invent something new, it recombines what already exists. Perhaps the real invention that we need to preserve and further develop is no longer to produce content, AIs do that very well, but to maintain and increase our own ability to choose. The question for this new school year is certainly no longer whether we use generative AI. The question may be rather: what do we choose this year to create and share?

Echo:

• Letter 42, “Generate quickly or decide slowly“.