Reading source material, taking notes, then transcribing and rearranging those notes, and finding connections between them are all central to thinking, according to Sönke Ahrens. Legendary note-taker Niklas Luhman argued that it was impossible to think without writing. Now of course you could very easily feed a LLM a big stack of research papers and…
Here are two delightful animations that illustrate the idea of structural unfolding popularized by Christopher Alexander. They are fun to watch. And thought-provoking. A Matter of Form by Rene Jodoin A Geometry of Circles by Philip Glass Via Kottke
I once read a story about NASA engineers working on one of the first research satellites. They spent a long time trying to design a motorized system to deploy the solar panels that would power the satellite. Every solution they came up with was too complicated, too big, or required batteries that were too heavy.…
The Center for Humane Technology is working to popularize the term “AI drift,” describing a model’s tendency to degrade in performance over time. I’m not crazy about the term because I don’t think it clearly communicates the dangers that AI presents to people as they go about their daily lives. In my workplace I’m seeing…
I’ve been working for years on “life garden” document, trying to come up with an at-a-glance view of where my life is working and where it isn’t. I’ve been trying to apply Christopher Alexander’s principles of living structure. And I’m stuck. My document has all kinds of structures and centers and boxes and arrows. But…
I just heard that Annie Dillard, a writer who expressed the wonder and wildness of the natural world, has passed away. Reading Dillard I became aware that, far from being conservative…selecting for the least amount of energy consumption…the creative forces that bring us life are wildly playful, exuberant, and wealthy. After the one extravagant gesture…
I just got from the library Kevin Kelly’s book Excellent Advice for Life: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. It’s a pithy little volume, packed with tiny bits of wisdom. It’s like a cross between the best package of fortune cookies you’ll ever find and the Biblical book of Proverbs. Friends are better than money.…
It took about 50 years for the automation of elevators to eliminate the job of elevator operator. Once you can reach your floor with the simple push of a button, why would you pay someone just to push the buttons? The problem is that elevator operators delivered other services besides being sure the lift was…
If we design and construct buildings to suit our purposes, why do some buildings adapt with us as our purposes change, but other buildings refuse to change? That’s the question Stewart Brand asks in this six part series created by the BBC, based on his book How Buildings Learn. Over the course of the series…
Did Jorge Luis Borges foresee a future crafted by Artificial Intelligence? Hear me out. Two weeks ago we had a Google rep come to our workplace to demo some of Gemini’s agentic capabilities. She gave us links to some sales data, inventory stats, a code block, and a prompt. Everything was precooked, and I entered…
You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for. Ted Turner. There’s a problem with “reaching for the stars” that self-help brokers won’t tell you. Beyond the star you’re reaching for, there’s always another star. It’s not that goals are bad. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noted that having a clear goal…
I’ve been using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology almost as long as GTD has been around. But I’ve been struggling with the “Someday/Maybe” portion of the Weekly Review. This week I found something that put it all together for me. Luke, a commenter on the GTD website writes: It’s not a parking lot for…
Correlation is not the same as causation, I get that. But the past week I felt positively wrung out, crumpled up, and stomped upon at the end of every workday. And every day was a full-court press to write four pages of user documentation by EOD, using Anthropic Claude as my research assistant. Are the…
I’m old enough to remember the warning about social media, “if you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product.” In any social club, somebody’s got to pay to keep the lights on. With online platforms there is a process of growing a customer base, locking people in to the platform by making it…
I have to say that “respect” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Slab City, an informal community of faded snowbirds, desert rats, creatives, burnt-out meth heads, and a few others who simply want to drop off the grid. But there it is, emblazoned on the side of a concrete…
