For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.
Regardless of the company making it, if you wonder if you should use an accessibility overlay, the answer is no. Accesstive’s overlay just happens to be the subject of this post.
“I have a Git server for my own private evil plans, and Amazon’s crawler discovered it through TLS certificate transparency logs and decided to unleash the hammer of God. And that happened. They had the flamethrower of requests just burning down my poor server, and it was really annoying because I was trying to do something and it just didn’t work. Also helps if you don’t schedule your storage on rotational drives.”
My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem.
A more advanced LLM may eventually be able to completely handle the middle piece. It can help with the first and last pieces, but only when operated by someone who understands both the problems to be solved and how to interact with the LLM to help solve them.
No matter how good these things get, they will still need someone to find problems for them to solve, define those problems and confirm that they are solved. That’s a job – one that other humans will be happy to outsource to an expert practitioner.
It occurred to me: what if I could simply tell a model what information to fetch, and it would automatically populate the data, structured, into the respective cells in my spreadsheet?
Open source framework for voice and multimodal conversational AI.