tomgromak.com — Writing and music from Tom Gromak — on technology, creativity, and figuring things out as I go.

I’m having a harder time than usual getting back into the groove of the school year. My rhythms are off, I can’t find things that I need without a lot of digging, and my sleep patterns are completely disrupted. Some life transitions happen slowly, so that you barely notice things have changed until you’re nearly there. Others tear through you like a storm, jolting you from one place to another without enough time to process.

One of the worst things about AI is how it validates my intelligence in plausible ways. I’ll reject an idea it comes up with and offer one of my own, and it tells me “your idea is much better, here’s why,” with specific details about my brilliance. Who wouldn’t want to believe it? The fact that the compliment isn’t coming from a being with any experience in the real world, and is actually from a computer that’s tuned toward sycophancy can easily slip my mind.

Anthropic recently announced that Claude models are going to start watermarking the text they generate, with older models getting the feature added over the coming months. The stated reason is compliance with the EU AI Act, which requires AI-generated content to carry some kind of disclosure marker, and it’s a poorly written law, in my opinion, vague enough that I’m not entirely sure how it’s supposed to apply to something like my own workflow.

I enjoyed this year’s World Cup immensely, and got completely absorbed in the stories of the teams and players as the tournament progressed. From Curaçao’s historic goal against Germany in their opening match all the way to the spectacle of the final game between Spain and Argentina, I discovered a sport that’s both inspirational and troubling, along with a whole history that I’d had no idea about.

I keep reading about how difficult the landscape looks right now for people trying to build a career in information technology, and it leaves me sitting with two feelings at once: grateful for the path I got to walk, and a little heartsick for the people just starting theirs, because that path isn’t available anymore. It’s left me with a question: if someone stood at the very beginning of this journey, still deciding whether IT was worth pursuing, would I actually tell them to go for it?