Filtering News

Most national and international news isn't actionable by us as individuals, so do we really need to watch it? 

In 2018, I wrote about how to deal with the effects of the continuous flow of bad news.

I have three rules for filtering news:

1. Will it affect my lifestyle?

2. Will it affect my daily activities? 

3. Will it change my mind in the voting booth?

For you and friends/family, if the answer to all three is, "No," then ask yourself why you're continually watching the news? Bored? Looking for excitement? Curious?

Keep in mind what it's doing to your mental health.

 

Many people end up watching the news and then complaining on social media about it which spreads the angst. If you really want to do something, then do something actionable. Instead of going to a protest, contact your member of Congress. Do you even know who your three members of Congress are? Mine are Padilla and Schiff in the Senate and Peters in the House. 

Better yet, watch the local news. Everything actionable will be covered there and your local government officials are easier to access when you want to be heard. 

Having simple rules helps. Here are My Three Daily Life Goals.

AI Agents For Hire

In a very near future, corporations will emerge with cultivated AI agents that a person or company could buy, license, or subscribe to in order to do specific tasks. Instead of hiring employees, especially at the junior level, a company could instead use HR, payroll, or organizational AI agents to do that work while putting a human in the loop to supervise and review the final work product.

AI is coming close to knowing all world knowledge similar to humanity in the TV show, Pluribus. 

Soon, we may see professionals who’ve trained their own AI agents as extensions of themselves. These individuals could be hired alongside their agents, or even operate as solo CEOs with no traditional staff, deploying AI “employees” to execute work for other companies. In some cases, hiring organizations might interview the AI agent themselves, much like they would a human candidate, before hiring someone.

AI Agents Run Amok: Clawdbot –> Moltbot –> OpenClaw

It looks like we've settled on a name...

What was called Clawdbot, and renamed to Moltbot, is finally called OpenClaw; and it's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. 

It's doxed people and scammed them out of money very quickly. This video explains the details that moved markets, today, such as Apple and Cloudflare stock. 

Claude for Coding a Website

I was listening to last Friday's Hard Fork tech podcast where the two hosts were discussing how they're saving $89/year by no longer hosting their personal websites on Squarespace; instead they using Claude Code.

Today, I tried Claude Code out myself to modernize my personal website, joemoreno.com, which I originally made with iWeb nearly 20 years ago. Its design, look, and feel were long in the tooth. iWeb, which was discontinued about five years later, was Apple's answer to Microsoft FrontPage. These two tools allowed consumers to create static webpages with the ease of creating a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation. 

To make this happen, I simply used Claude from a web browser along with this prompt:

Take the content in these files at http://joemoreno.com/index.html and recreate the same website but with a modern look and feel.

Claude then coded for less than five minutes, and boom, it was done. I could render the website both inside the Claude environment and also publish it with a public URL hosted on Claude. 

I then downloaded the index.html, which had the HTML and CSS in a single file, uploaded it to my AWS S3 bucket and I was done.

Now that was quick and easy.