Sunday Snippets 11/23/25
Greetings!
It's been a while since I've posted, so I thought I would get something out quick on a Sunday night to get back in the groove.
I work as a technology trainer for a medium-biggish law firm, and the move into AI tools has begun for us. The legal profession can be a bit behind the times when it comes to adoption of new technology, so we've begun to dip our toes cautiously into the pool. It's forced me to learn more about AI, which is a positive, but I'm still skeptical of its utility. My firm deals with a lot of sensitive information, so the guardrails on some of the tools are pretty stout. However, we have also opened up limited use of Copilot to firm employees since we use Windows. All this to say, I'm slightly uncomfortable with AI coming into my workplace. Not because I'm worried about losing my job, but more so because of the slow creep of the public-at-large's reliance on LLMs to think for them. I've read too many articles about lawyers having cases thrown out because of hallucinated case law in their AI generated filings, or judges using AI to issue rulings that could set precedent for the future. It's terrifying, to put it mildly. Fortunately, youtuber struthless put out a thoughtful video on AI's creep into our collective consciousness and what we can do to stymie it. I don't feel like I'm at risk of falling victim to the bullshit machine, but I'm going to start doing the things he talks about to steel myself against the rising tide so that I don't get swept out to sea.
Over the past year, I've started to learn quite a bit about open source software and have taken steps to get out of the walled gardens of the Microsofts and Googles of the world. Switching to Linux, getting rid of Google apps and services, rooting my phone to run GrapheneOS, setting up a home media server instead of using Spotify, etc. have all been challenging, yet fun. Currently I'm looking for a replacement for OneNote/Google Keep, and found Trillium. It is an extremely powerful note-taking application that I have only begun to scratch the surface on, but I like what I've seen so far. The only downside is that it does not have a mobile app. For me that's not an issue because I typically save bookmarks on my mobile browser (Vivaldi is my current daily driver) and add them to Trillium to make notes. It's not the fastest way to do things, but it works for me.
Lastly, check out Citation Needed, a newsletter by Molly White that is extremely thoughtful and well-written. The posts are thoroughly researched and Molly's writing style is engrossing. This week's piece on all of Trump and his cronies' crypto entanglements is especially nauseating.
Until next time!