Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. AI books are ruining the book market

I first wrote about AI books around two years ago, specifically how it could be a charming gesture to make a personalised AI illustrated book for loved ones, and again last year when I could see that people don’t really like the idea.

Unfortunately the phenomenon has gone into overdrive since. Thousands of crappy AI kids books now exist, mostly made by people trying to capitalise on popular search terms, like the names of famous people and films. YouTuber Jason McBason has some entertaining videos showing the range of the awfulness of them all here and here.

Elsewhere, somebody on the book rating site Good Reads has made a list of bad AI books, including spirituality and guidebooks, not just ones for kids, like pilates guidebooks. If you go through the list, you can see fake accounts are also giving these books 5-star ratings. It’s all a bit depressing.

Early last year, Amazon had to limit authors from self-publishing more than 3 books a day. This can’t have been a limit necessary for a human - who out there is publishing more than one per month even? Capping it at three per day was Amazon admitting that AI books were going to flood the market whether we like it or not.

And yes, many people are worried that AI will make many jobs obsolete, but I’d rather not end on a downer. Instead it’s important to remember that there are sensible efforts to train young people for whatever hard-to-imagine-right-now career options might exist in the future.

2. There's loads of arsenic in rice

The famously poisonous element gets into your Uncle Ben's because of how rice grows in water. And it's getting worse as global temperatures rise. It's not that the rice in your meal can kill you like you're some spy discovered behind enemy lines, but rather that over many years of exposure it can take a noticeable toll on your body.

The long and the short grain of it (sorry) is that you should rinse rice before cooking, probably hot rinse it afterwards, and stick to basmati if you want the least arsenic-filled variety ('healthy' brown rice actually has the highest levels of the poison). Aren't facts fun?

You can find more precise rice cooking tips here.

3. Gen X is having a career crisis

Gen X is typically defined as people born between 1965 and 1980. By some estimates, this is nearly a quarter of the people alive today. But the career crisis isn’t necessarily affecting all 1.8 billion of them.

The NY Times piece about this explains that it’s more about the higher-level skilled creative jobs, where people are often very well paid and in senior roles. Yes, it is in large part due to AI, as you had probably assumed.

If you don’t have access to the NYT, you can just watch a PBS interview with the article’s author:

The article set off a lot of reverberations around the Internet, especially on LinkedIn, predictably, it being the home of talking about work. Here was one positive rebuttal to keep your spirits up.

Meanwhile, I’m reading all this and thinking, well, I'm not Gen X, but I’m not far off as an old millennial, and I’m in the creative sector too - so I'm surely next on the chopping block. Hurray! 🫠

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip to live by

Make good new things.

That is how investor Paul Graham sums up his many years of thinking about how to live your life. Simple as that, though not necessarily easy.

What's a good new thing you've created in your life recently? 🧘

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading. Here’s a photo of a Przewalski’s horse in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff

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