Data Stream: Optimized for Everything Except You
On AI busywork, Apple at 50, building your own tools, and why making friends is broken.
Welcome to Data Stream, a weekly dispatch for people building intentional lives outside the default path. Tools, perspectives, and honest maps through creative, professional, and personal complexity — from someone in the middle of it too.
Desk Memo
Dear Reader,
I am reluctantly on dating apps. If you want to filter people you see by whether they want a long-term relationship or want kids, you have to pay for that. As of writing, Hinge wants almost $50 a month for this feature. You want to connect with people? Pay up, buddy. And it’s not just dating. Want to hang out with people? Cover charges, subscription apps, paid venues everywhere you turn.
There’s a pattern underneath all of it. Everything around us is optimized for something other than what we actually need it for. Apps for connection don’t actually enable connection, healthcare companies don’t actually provide healthcare, social media is built to keep you scrolling, not to make you feel less alone. The question I keep coming back to is simple: are we ok with it? Is this all there is?
Warmly,
Xavi B
Busy Isn’t the Same as Working
It’s no surprise that AI use in the workplace has increased. I can’t say I’m shocked that time spent on focused work has also dropped 9 percent, according to ActivTrak’s 2026 State of the Workplace report, which analyzed 443 million hours of digital work activity. The average focused session now lasts just 13 minutes. And it’s no wonder. If you’re prompting away, it can feel like you’re getting a lot done. But the threat of distraction is always present. Especially with productivity systems, you can spend more time working on the system itself than on the work the system is supposed to help enhance and enable. This is the trap of the tinkerer. We see it, we’re conscious of it, we try not to fall into it (too much).
But I think this also reveals the priorities of the leadership of these companies. AI isn’t built to help humans reduce real pain in their lives (for the most part) yet. It’s built to make a profit, to keep users using their products, and to keep the money rolling in. But the potential is there! Imagine what humans will be free to do when AI can run large-scale technological systems and handle multi-step processes with no human oversight? That would be objectively good for humanity. But getting there requires democratic control over the technology, not just another product optimized for extraction.
What Two Weeks With a Custom AI Actually Looks Like
I’ve been using Claude to create a robot assistant for about two weeks now. It’s been an exciting ride, but as the ActivTrak research points out, while there are a lot of useful ways to use this tool, there’s also a lot of work that can feel like you’re getting things done, but not really.
Over the first two days, I built around sixteen different skills for my workflows. Summarizing podcast transcripts, creating RSS digests, and building a weekly review workflow that connects with my calendar and email. I gathered that starting with common, repeatable tasks is what MacSparky’s course recommends, so that’s what I did. And frankly, it’s amazing. The power this unlocks is kind of mind-blowing. You build workflows together with Claude, and it writes them. When it makes mistakes, you tell it to update the workflow (also called Skills). The system grows over time and does more of what you want it to do as you work with it.
It’s not perfect. It makes mistakes and formatting errors, and especially with Claude, you run into usage limits (but I think I’ve found a clever way around this for some use cases). For example, I told it to create a wiki based on my journal entries. It did an amazing job, but it also had some weird formatting issues here and there, and notes weren’t linked properly. But it improves because you improve the instructions. Want to know more about how this actually works? Let me know, and I might write a full piece on it.
Fifty Years, and the Clock Is Ticking
The workers at Apple, over fifty years of history, have truly created some magnificent things. I fell in love with the Mac when I was about eleven years old, in the G3 era, with its rainbow colors. We had a few at my school. The iPhone and Watch were true technological advancements, and both have been genre-defining in their respective spaces. There’s a lot of untapped potential at Apple.
The leadership has been making blunder after blunder lately. Vision Pro is a bust, iPadOS needs to go away, and time will tell if their AI play works out. Apple missed the boat on the first wave of AI. That seems pretty clear. But the company is reportedly exploring a hybrid approach to rebuilding Siri, using third-party LLMs like Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s models alongside its own on-device foundation models. When the AI bubble pops, Apple could be positioned to pick up IP at a much lower price. Watch this space.
Why Making Friends Feels Broken (And Why That’s Not Your Fault)
There’s a common sentiment I hear out there: “It’s so hard to make friends as an adult.” As important as I think Dr. NerdLove’s advice from last week was, it’s also important to recognize the systemic issues at play. This article by Dave Spenger quotes a report that alarmingly shows that 12% of US adults have no close friends, a figure that has quadrupled since 1990. To put this in perspective, that’s over 30 million people. We didn’t all become antisocial out of nowhere!
Maybe you’ve felt this too. While other people seem to have friends from school, work, and church, you don’t. It can be easy to feel like it’s your fault, or even disoriented about where to make friends. The report makes it clear we’re not alone. And notice the thread: just as the apps that are supposed to connect us and the workplaces that are supposed to be productive are optimized for something other than what we actually need, the systems we live in are optimized for something other than what we actually need. So the next time you’re feeling lonely, like no one out there feels like you do, know that millions feel that too. A better world is possible, but we need to fight for it.
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Farewell
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Thank you for reading. Live long and prosper 🖖