Personal
Reflective essays on creativity, intrinsic motivation, and the non-linear paths of a working and making life.
The Enthusiasm Is Not the Product
Every genuinely new technology arrives with the same small, loud crowd out front. First the innovators, then the early adopters: a thin early market flush with enthusiasm, willing to forgive the rough edges because they can already see where the thing is headed before it gets there. They buy the 1.0. They tolerate the crashes.…
The Machine Learns to Make Small Talk
The newest change to ChatGPT has almost nothing to do with intelligence. It is about timing. The update tunes the model to be quicker with a joke, lighter on its feet, better at reading the temperature of a conversation and matching it. In the release notes it sounds like a small thing, a personality tweak,…
The Agent Can Buy. It Cannot Yet Be Held To It.
A machine can now hold a card, choose a vendor, and settle the bill without a human hand on the transaction. Not in a lab. In production. Visa and Mastercard each shipped a way for an autonomous agent to carry a credential and spend against it, and Stripe handed developers a toolkit so their agents…
What a Distillation Attack Actually Steals
Alibaba told its employees this week to stop using Anthropic’s Claude, citing what it called a “distillation attack,” the practice of querying one company’s model enough times to train your own on its answers. CNBC’s account of the decision described a company that had banned a rival’s AI for its employees on exactly that reasoning,…
Good Ideas Travel at the Speed of Taste
In 1958, a programming language shipped with if-then-else. That sounds like nothing. But the dominant language of the day, Fortran I, didn’t have it: if you wanted a decision, you wrote a conditional jump and managed the consequences yourself. The same small language carried eight other ideas, among them functions you could pass around like…
The Clock a Thing Runs On
A species rewrites its genome over hundreds of thousands of years. The slow grind of selection, one small edge at a time, no shortcuts available. But a single human mind rewrites itself in an afternoon: a book, a conversation, a mistake that finally lands. Two clocks, wildly different speeds, running side by side inside the…