Follow Your Whims
Between the hallucination warnings and the governance panic, it's easy to forget a generative model is also just a fun tool to mess around with. Five vanity websites, built on a whim, and what they actually taught.
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Stories, reflections, and field notes
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Posts (14)
The Secret to Perfect AI Outputs: Name the Canon
Nearly every established discipline has a canonical reference that already settled the argument you're having with a model. Name it, hand it over, and let the model regularize its own work against a standard instead of your improvised feedback.
Most AI Conversations Fail (Here's Why)
Tell the model to close every response with a short list, split by who acts. It turns a wall of prose back into something you can actually run a project on.
Why You Should Always Ask for the File
Stop accepting reports. Ask for the artifact — the actual numbers, the actual error, the actual file — and the confident-sounding failure disappears.
Why Playing the Game Is Slowing You Down
Be the coach, not the player. On taking the seat that directs a team of AI agents — and the practice it takes to get good at it.
The Typing Pool
A finite brain masters only a few skills in a lifetime. Commanding a machine that learned everything is the new skill multiplier.
Things You Want to Do
Now that you don't have to do the thing — what do you actually want to do? The closing post of the What's Left series.
What You Had to Do
A department of a hundred writers documented mainframe billing programs. Every one of them had something else they'd rather be doing. They knew.
The VAX in My Pocket
My first employer ran Florida's telecom on millions of dollars of mainframes and VAX clusters. My phone outclasses all of it. We never stopped to notice.
The Consolation of Difficulty
A late friend had two sayings. The first one gets you started. The second one keeps you going. In the age of AI, the second one has gotten more useful, not less.
Leonard Nimoy's Last Tweet Beats Thomas Sowell's Most Famous Line
Exploring how Leonard Nimoy's garden wisdom transcends Thomas Sowell's "no solutions, only tradeoffs" to find meaning in an indifferent universe.
Digital Sewage Treatment: The Unglamorous Future of AI
As frontier models exhaust clean data sources, learn why digital sewage treatment systems for enterprise data will become the most critical and valuable AI infrastructure.
The Magic of Discovery: Early Computing Memories
A personal reflection on encountering computers for the first time in the 1970s and the lasting impact of those early moments of technological wonder.
The Last Programming Language I'll Ever Learn
After 40 years and dozens of programming languages, I haven't written a single line of code this year. Not because I've retired, but because I've learned my final language: English.