danfunk

Visited Warsaw this summer. Beautiful city full of hope and energy. Can confirm Poland is in full blossom.

25 Fields Medalists reflected last week “[we all need] to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.” Their public statement calls out the important connection between a groups goal, and the group itself. It is a caution that we must not destroy the social fabric that clothes us. What we do to that fabric, we do to ourselves.

Why "Move Fast, Break Things" is a lousy motto.

Slowly make haste, and without losing courage; Twenty times redo your work; Polish and re-polish endlessly, And sometimes add, but often take away Nicolas Boileau

AI is having a profound impact on my creative process, as an artist, as an engineer, and as a business owner. Generative AI can remove some of the pain from making new things. What is the price we pay for it's help? Does it really make us faster to use AI to create something, or do we spend the same time, but in a different way? I've often heard people use different versions of "Go slow to go fast". It's embedded in ancient stories like the tortoise and the hair, carved in Greek letters on ancient buildings. Festina lente. σπεῦδε βραδέως. Make Haste Slowly.

What a Philip K Dick short story teaches us about a modern day job search.

The Maker movement offers some lessons on how to put AI agents to use in a more useful, less offensive way.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair

That is a travesty. I can't help but hope we can find ways to protect projects like this in a way that doesn't require government or corporate regulation. Others have mentioned a Web of Trust / Social Credit - if we could wire that into the the http protocol ...

The current hiring process is a good example of the AI Arms Race that Cory Doctorow was writing about recently. https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/10/deep-state-wopr/#abelard-... - It's also a good example of a multi-polar trap. The rules of the current game assure everyone looses.

Can we use LLMs to improve human to human communication rather than thwart it?

AI use in the creation of this article is inconsequential. There is obvious joy and high fidelity information here. Perhaps some vibe coding made the animations easier to develop, and made it possible to produce this in reasonable time. Who cares. Love of craft is evident. What more proof do you need that this is worthy of human attention?

Perfect kind of intuitive. It was a joy to figure it out, and just "learn by doing".

Focused generally on communication, with BPMN being one tool among many. No one here gives a 1/2 damn about BPMN, but I think you will find the article worthy of the 5 minutes.

I love the story of Clever Hans, which says so much about humans and so little about horses - I get the point that it makes these experiments very difficult.

my dad passed away within a year of retirement. I remember there being studies at the time saying this was common, but the research doesn't seem to hold this up as much any more.

But I agree that "purpose" is critical to life. I tend to think of it as having a meaningful role in our "community" - but there seems to be wide flexibility in what defines a community. I was certain for a very long time that we had to work to live meaningful lives, and I think I've drifted slightly away from that notion over the last year. We just need to be important to at least one other person. There is great deal of "work" involved in just doing that.

Reminds me of the quote from A Princess Bride - Life is pain. Anyone who says different is selling something.

Accountability is especially beautiful when self directed. It isn't us holding the cat accountable for the vase. That is pointless. The cat holding itself responsible, that is what makes our relationship with them possible.

I work for a small start up. We often work with corporations. It does, from a distance, seem like giving a shit separates the two. I feel that. But you look inside big companies, and lots of folks inside care a great deal. I've also been through incubators and accelerators. And some of those people didn't give 1/2 a fuck.

Corporations aren't people. LLMs aren't people. Personification of these things is the source a great deal of trouble.

I love "small internet theory." Beautiful view of the future.

You may have said it better than I, in shorter words. An LLM in the hands of someone with expertise is life changing, and in the hands of someone without it - it's a bit dangerous, but also wonderfully empowering, even if they can't make a good chair on their first try.