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One of the worst things about AI is how it validates my intelligence in plausible ways. I’ll reject an idea it comes up with and offer one of my own, and it tells me “your idea is much better, here’s why,” with specific details about my brilliance. Who wouldn’t want to believe it? The fact that the compliment isn’t coming from a being with any experience in the real world, and is actually from a computer that’s tuned toward sycophancy can easily slip my mind.

Anthropic recently announced that Claude models are going to start watermarking the text they generate, with older models getting the feature added over the coming months. The stated reason is compliance with the EU AI Act, which requires AI-generated content to carry some kind of disclosure marker, and it’s a poorly written law, in my opinion, vague enough that I’m not entirely sure how it’s supposed to apply to something like my own workflow.

I keep reading about how difficult the landscape looks right now for people trying to build a career in information technology, and it leaves me sitting with two feelings at once: grateful for the path I got to walk, and a little heartsick for the people just starting theirs, because that path isn’t available anymore. It’s left me with a question: if someone stood at the very beginning of this journey, still deciding whether IT was worth pursuing, would I actually tell them to go for it?

I was about an hour from finishing my website redesign (hope you like it!) when I hit my subscription limit. I could have stopped there, waited for it to reset, and picked back up later. Instead, I kept going, knowing full well that everything from that point on was going to cost me actual money on top of what I already pay every month. By the time I was done, it had cost me sixty dollars.

When I launched this site, I had a whole theory about what it would be. I’d write about what actually interests me rather than chasing fads, skip the tracking, and see where it goes. No growth hacking, no algorithm chasing. Just a homestead on the open internet.

A year and a half later, I’ve published more than thirty articles and a full run of monthly newsletters. It’s a real body of work now, and somewhere in the accumulation it stopped feeling like an experiment and started feeling like a practice. So this seems like a good moment to look up from the work and ask myself how it’s going.

I’ve been workshopping spoken word pieces, almost like poetry, to weave into my music. Monologues, textures, things I want to find my own voice for. So I asked ChatGPT for some feedback on my early ideas.

Something shifted for me recently. This week, for the first time, I could actually see myself walking away from the flagship corporate AI products. Not from AI itself — from the companies.

This week I did a talk and published a companion website for nonprofit fundraisers on how to get started with AI, including tips, pitfalls, and some of the tools I recommend. It went well, and sitting with all of it afterward, I realized I’d never written a general version of that advice for this site. Most of what I write here assumes you’re already using these tools and looking to go deeper. This post is for those who might be a bit earlier in the journey.

A few weeks ago, Robin Sloan published a newsletter asking a fascinating question: what is it like to be a language model? His answer — that “the model” is the forward pass, a flash of computation lasting milliseconds before dissolving into nothing — sent me sideways into a different question entirely.

Anthropic (the company behind Claude, the AI assistant I use daily) recently released a new model called Claude Mythos Preview. If you’ve heard of it, you’ve probably noticed that it’s not available to us. That’s intentional, and the reason why has me all fired up.

I didn’t decide to take a break from AI. It just kind of happened.

We’ve had a rough winter. Penetrating cold that clings to your bones. Ice dams, pipe freeze protocols, shutting down the upstairs bathroom. The kind of winter where the days blur together and you realize somewhere along the way that you’ve been going through motions rather than actually living inside them. You suspect you need something. You’re just not sure what, or how much.