Bread and Circuitses on Creativity Hacker

Spinners of the Web

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 09:54:09 +0000

The internet is full of advice on how to spot AI-generated images, videos, articles, newscasts, etc. But IMO, that’s entirely the wrong conversation.

Forget “How do we spot them?” We need to be talking about how society is going to function when the answer is: You can’t.

Tilder Disease

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:53:22 +0000

One thing you won’t find on this site is any TL;DR summaries. That’s by choice. I can see their value when browsing a site (like Reddit) where the culture is all about short-beat conversations. In that world, hitting a longer entry mid-scroll feels like hitting a bridge abutment on the Autobahn. But do we really want all our discourse to be reducible to the textual equivalent of a sound bite?

The Ethics of Blogging

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 08 May 2025 05:51:21 +0000

Creating online communities is easy; but doing it ethically is not.

Over the last few decades, we’ve developed many hacks and tricks - a playbook, if you like - for tempting communities of like-minded humans to gather into online echo chambers, where they can be manipulated in demographically unified buckets. So before I go too far, I need to ask myself an important question: Is blogging inherently evil? Or is it possible to thread this needle without crossing over to the dark side?

The American Dream is a Funhouse Mirror

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 22:05:05 +0000

Over on TrustCafe, James Young was trying to make sense of the broken American system that is being twisted out of all recognizable shape by the current Republican regime. He asked simply, “How did my country get here?”

I replied with my own take on the question, and then realized that my answer fit perfectly into this new blog stream that I’ve been thinking about.

Shopping Online Is Greener

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:51:46 +0000

For years I’ve felt guilty about my use of online shopping. All those little packages coming from big Eastern cities, all the way across the continent, to be driven to my door by a harried little man in an overworked Honda. Surely that’s wasteful compared to me just going to the local bigbox outlet and buying it in person, right? Well, I recently had a thought that has me questioning that logic.