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September 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0500

I’m having a harder time than usual getting back into the groove of the school year. My rhythms are off, I can’t find things that I need without a lot of digging, and my sleep patterns are completely disrupted. Some life transitions happen slowly, so that you barely notice things have changed until you’re nearly there. Others tear through you like a storm, jolting you from one place to another without enough time to process.

This one is neither. It’s supposed to be planned, practiced, and entirely manageable. Everything is still getting done, of course; it just feels more difficult than usual. Perhaps I’m more sensitive to it this year, but there’s also a little part of me that wonders if the reason might be that I’m getting older. If so, I’m OK with it. That’s yet another transition that I have to get used to.

My Picks

Curious About Everything

Blogger Jodi Ettenberg’s collection of links, some of which you may end up seeing reappear here from time to time. She’s a voracious reader, interested in finding great things that aren’t widely distributed, and I can spend days going through her picks. Highly recommended.

Radioactive Emergency

A Netflix limited series based on one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters, something I can’t believe I knew nothing about. The story is both horrifying and riveting, and there are so many layers to it, including class, bureaucracy, authority, and the selfless sacrifice of people who put themselves in danger to save others.

Drop Loot

My current gaming obsession is a Tetris-roguelike. Tiles descend and are matched, like Tetris, but monsters and weapons are introduced, along with an assortment of items and powers that can help you advance. The full version hasn’t been released, but the link above is a sample that works in-browser, plus there’s a more extensive playtest version available on Steam (also free for now).

Atlas of Surveillance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a site that lets you search their database of police tech deployment in the United States. You can also view it on a map. Why am I not surprised that my hometown has automated license plate readers? It’s probably because of the surveillance drones I watched the police use on us during our 4th of July fireworks. Sigh.

Recently Published

I’m Fine Being Flagged

Anthropic, makers of my preferred LLM, Claude, are starting to place invisible watermarks on text processed by their models. This means there’s a good chance some of what I publish on my site will get flagged, so I decided to get out ahead of it and publish an AI Disclosure. I also suspect there’s a hidden incentive for them to do this, beyond their stated EU law compliance.

Why Am I So Defensive about AI?

After publishing my AI Disclosure, I realized that there’s actually quite a bit I post that isn’t processed by AI beyond basic grammar, flow, and spell checking. If that’s the case, then why am I so defensive about justifying my use of AI to help maintain a personal, noncommercial website? I’m still not entirely sure, but I have a few theories.

In the Groove

I get giddy when I discover an awesome band that’s new to me, and find out that they have a deep catalog to explore. Why didn’t I know about them? What else is out there, waiting? There’s not enough time or luck to find all of the music I might love. I just have to deal with that.

On the other hand, there are so many fantastic bands I’ve been lucky enough to come across that now seem lost to history, forgotten by all but a few die-hard fans who (like me) are getting older by the day. One of my playlists recently put on Day After Day by Badfinger, and it stopped me in my tracks. It’s so good, and just one great song out of many.

The story of the band is sad (they were on the Beatles’ Apple label, and when it collapsed, the fallout exposed massive fraud by their management, which led to tragedy), but the songs they created elevated classic rock to a new level, combining thunderous stacks of sound with some of the most beautiful melodies, harmonies, and lyrics I’ve ever heard. It’s quintessential early power pop.

If you haven’t heard of them and dig this kind of stuff (or need a reminder), check out songs like Day After Day, No Matter What, Baby Blue, and Come and Get It. To my taste, it just doesn’t get much better than this.

Until Next Time

I remember feeling age affect my abilities back in my thirties, and thinking that I was getting old. Now I’m approaching my sixties, and I still feel pretty young. Change is inevitable, even if I might wish things would stay the same for just a little while. I hope whatever changes you might be going through aren’t too difficult to deal with, and that the transition to the new season brings plenty of chances to enjoy the days.

See you next month!

Why am I so Defensive about AI?

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

I’m also guilty of the opposite way of thinking. After I posted my AI disclosure, I reviewed my work and realized that there’s actually quite a bit that I’ve written entirely by hand, with just a quick check for typos, flow, and grammar. My disclosure might make it seem as though everything I do here is processed by AI, but that’s not true. So why do I feel defensive? Why am I uneasy about this stuff?

I think part of it is because I’m worried that confirmation bias is clouding my judgment. Lots of people I admire and respect believe that any AI use is wrong, and lots of the pro-AI voices I hear are coming from people that I don’t like all that much. I look around the virtual room and ask myself, “are these grifters and fanatics my people now?” I desperately hope not. But there may be something important I’m missing, and the more I use AI, the more concerns I have about how things will turn out.

I’m also the type of person who can hear a persuasive argument and agree in the moment, but after I take some time to process what I’ve heard, I often change my mind. If I’m being kind, I’ll say it’s because I like to keep myself open to ideas, and going in trying to poke holes prevents me from fully absorbing what’s being presented. If I’m being real, I might admit that I can be a bit gullible, at least at first.

Another part of it is the extreme level of hatred and vitriol directed against people who use AI. I recently read Ed Zitron’s enormous AI Hater’s Manifesto, and he brings up so many good points about the industry and technology that I wish more people could engage with his ideas. It’s filled with so much profanity and hatred, however, that it’s virtually unusable as a resource. Outrage sells, it seems, but who does it help? It’s one thing to rail against corporations and billionaires, but what about ordinary people who might not know better? If I’m the owner of a local restaurant and use AI slop to advertise my food, could it be because image generation tools are being shoved in my face everywhere and I look at my competition and feel as though stock photos are so 2022? Could I actually be a decent, hard working person with a million things to do who just didn’t think it through?

Thankfully, there are people who seem to share my thinking about AI as normal technology. Not a superintelligence, not something that will engulf the planet and extinguish life as we know it. A tool, with us humans deciding how it will be used. There are great things that are being done with it, right now, as well as all of the horrible crap that gets all of the attention. Its ubiquity is not inevitable. We’re not too late to make sure it works for us instead of against us.

I truly enjoy using AI, even as I worry about developing dependence and weakening my ability to think for myself. I have done amazing things with it I would never have attempted before, and I try to be very deliberate about how I use it. Is my way the right way? For me, for now, yes. I’m sure it’s going to evolve over time, but here’s where my personal AI policy stands at the moment:

Tom’s Personal AI Policy

Monitor usage. Limit the duration and days of use. Take time off, and don’t use it for boredom or companionship.
Be mindful. Is using AI the best choice? How significant will its impact be? Will it harm your ability to think and act for yourself?
Be skeptical. Don’t automatically trust outputs, and verify any claims before using them.
Be accountable. Own what you do with AI, and accept responsibility for your use of it.
Make sure it’s worth it. The resources expended to use these tools need to result in something significant enough to justify their expenditure.
Push yourself. Beyond simple efficiencies, use AI to enhance learning, extend thinking, and expand boundaries.
Share. Take what you learn and share it to help others navigate this new world for themselves.

This helps me feel as though I’m using these tools with thought, respect, and care. I’m still feeling defensive about it, though, and I’m still not quite sure why. Perhaps that’s a feature, not a bug. I wonder if everyone should consider sitting down a moment to create their own AI policy. What would yours look like?

I'm Fine Being Flagged

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400

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.

Reading the announcement, the watermark attaches to words Claude chooses, not to text a person wrote and Claude only lightly edited, so a heavily rewritten draft might not carry much of a signal by the time it’s published. I don’t know exactly where my own drafts land on that spectrum, and I’d rather not guess. What I do know is that it’s likely, or at least plausible, that some of what I publish here is going to get flagged as Claude-processed at some point. I want to be upfront about my process before that happens, rather than after.

So here’s how I actually write these posts. I come up with the idea. It’s mine. Then I talk through it out loud and use voice transcription to get everything I want to say down in words. From there, I’ll ask Claude for any follow-up questions, the kind that surface gaps or push me to be more specific, and I answer those the same way, out loud. Claude takes everything I’ve spoken across that transcript and organizes it into a draft. Then I go through it and decide, line by line, whether it actually sounds like me. If it’s expressing what I meant in the way I’d like to say it, I’m OK with leaving it alone. If it doesn’t, which is often, I fix it. I’ve also built up reference documents on my own writing style and tone, with examples pulled from years of my own writing, specifically so that draft has a better shot at sounding like me in the first place. That’s been my process for months now, refined over a lot of iteration, but the shape of it, talk first, write second, has been true for even longer than that.

I use Claude for other things too. Site development. Processing links for my newsletter. It’s woven into a lot of what I do, not just the writing. I don’t think that should be hidden, so it’s going in the disclosure along with everything else.

The distinction I actually care about is not “AI touched this, therefore it’s suspect.” I think we can all agree to loathe a “meat proxy,” someone who forwards AI-generated output without reading it, understanding it, or validating it before passing it along. That’s one end of an extreme. My actual issue is narrower: it’s when something took someone very little effort to produce, including the thinking behind it, and I’m still expected to spend real time and attention engaging with it. A model arranged some of the sentences in this piece. That’s true, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just because I read every word before it went up. What I’d point to instead is the whole shape of the process: the idea is mine, the raw material comes from me talking it through out loud, and I stay involved enough in the editing that I can tell you, honestly, when I left something alone versus when I rewrote it. That’s a different thing than handing a topic to a model and pasting back whatever it returns.

I also won’t pretend I need Claude to produce work worth reading. What it actually gives me is sustainability. I’m not paid for anything on this site. I write in whatever hours I can carve out around a demanding job and the rest of my life, and time is the scarce resource, not ideas. This workflow lets me get from a spoken idea to a polished piece inside the time I actually have, instead of the time writing it alone would take. This site has now outlasted every other project I’ve tried to keep running online, and I think that’s largely because this process is sustainable in a way my earlier attempts weren’t.

Now, about Anthropic’s stated reasoning. To be fair to them, the announcement is explicit: they signed the EU’s Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content and are watermarking to comply with the AI Act. That’s the actual, on-the-record reason, and I have no evidence it’s false. But I can’t shake the suspicion that it’s also a convenient reason, one that sounds responsible and externally imposed while covering something they’d likely want anyway. Being able to identify their own models’ output once it’s loose on the internet would help them keep it out of future training data, where synthetic text can quietly degrade the next generation of models, a problem researchers call model collapse. I can’t prove that’s part of the calculus here. It’s a guess. But a law that happens to hand you a tool you’d want to build anyway is the kind of coincidence worth pausing to consider.

None of which changes my answer. I’m fine with my posts getting flagged as Claude-processed, whenever and however much that ends up applying. If that’s a dealbreaker for a reader, I respect that and I’d rather they know upfront than feel misled after the fact. What I’d push back on (with apologies to Hank) is the reflex to treat “AI was involved” as shorthand for “not worth your time.” I originate every idea on this site, I supply the raw material by talking it through myself, I put a lot of work into making my content as good as it can be, and I hold final judgment over (and responsibility for) every sentence that goes up. That’s a different thing than the picture “AI-generated” usually conjures, and I think it’s worth more consideration than a watermark can convey either way. I’ve written up the specifics of how I use these tools on a separate AI disclosure and policy, if you want the fuller picture.

August 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:00:00 -0500

I enjoyed this year’s World Cup immensely, and got completely absorbed in the stories of the teams and players as the tournament progressed. From Curaçao’s historic goal against Germany in their opening match all the way to the spectacle of the final game between Spain and Argentina, I discovered a sport that’s both inspirational and troubling, along with a whole history that I’d had no idea about.

I’ve gone on to watch Sunderland ‘Til I Die and #SeAcabó now that I have a little grounding in the game, and what comes through to me more than anything else is how incredible the fans and athletes are, even in the midst of owners and organizations that are often corrupt, inept, and abusive.

We have limits to our time and attention. I realize that there’s so much out there that I’d love to know, but will never even discover. I’m so glad I made some space in my life to get into soccer, and now I consider myself a big fan. Who knew?

My Picks

Sister Rosetta Tharpe — Didn’t it Rain

A bit of joy came my way this month and made me smile from ear to ear, so I have to share. It’s 1964. Ms. Tharpe arrives on a rundown train platform, descending from a horse-drawn carriage, chatting idly. She walks to the middle, passing a small rhythm section laying down a groove, straps on an electric guitar, and galvanizes the crowd of white kids sitting across the tracks with her electric gospel blues. It’s an unparalleled performance.

You’re Weirder than You Think

I often marvel about how different I imagine other people’s lives are from mine. What’s it like to be in a motorcycle family? To drive Uber? To go on a shopping spree, get a pedicure, or hit the clubs? I have no idea. This website asks us to answer seven questions to see how unrepresentative our own lives actually are when compared to everyone else. I like the fact that it uses sound methodology and data from the General Social Survey. You can even explore the underlying data in detail.

Kagi Small Web

The World Wide Web was built for regular people, not megacorporations. Just because we don’t see this side of the Internet much anymore doesn’t mean that it’s not there, we just have to go looking for it. I think it’s vital to celebrate and recognize all of the high-quality noncommercial contributions that people are putting online. My favorite search engine, Kagi (I pay them, and it’s worth every penny), has a wonderful Small Web site to help discover recently published content by individuals. So much great stuff to explore.

What Every Adult Should Know About Parasocial Media and Teens

danah boyd has been helping me navigate online spaces for decades, both in my professional and in my home life. I often turn to her writing and research to make sense of things, and her recent discussion with Colin Angevine about how social media has evolved really resonates. Social media, spaces where we’re posting about our lives and reading the posts of others we care about, is largely dead. It’s been replaced by influencers chosen by algorithms, a passive consumption of ever-spiraling drama and increased production value. We need to make sure young people have opportunities to create social bonds with others, across generations and interests, because these online technologies are not the right tools for authentic social connection (and never really were).

Recently Published

Fable is Great, and That’s Kind of the Problem

Anthropic’s newest and most powerful AI model, Fable, got lots of press when it was banned by the government shortly after launch. Now that it’s returned, I wanted to try it out to see if the hype was worth it. What I ended up with was a lesson in how our access to the latest and greatest in AI technologies is changing, and not for the better.

Why I’d Still Say Yes

If I were graduating high school, would I pursue a technology degree in today’s climate? What would I say to a young person who loves computer science and wants to make a career of it, but is worried about displacement, vanishing opportunities for entry-level work, and mass layoffs? While it does depend on a few important factors, I’d generally still say yes. Here’s why.

In the Groove

Thirty years ago, an album came out that completely changed my thinking about music and exploded my sonic consciousness. DJ Shadow’s first album, Endtroducing….., is an instrumental hip hop tour de force that demonstrates how much of an art form sampling can be.

It’s the first album created entirely from samples, and was composed on the iconic Akai MPC60 MKII. In DJ Shadow’s hands, this sampler allowed a level of creative freedom and experimentation that’s like nothing that came before. There’s haunting beauty and melancholy along with plenty of deep, crunchy beats, found sounds, spoken word interludes, and unexpected turns.

Start with Midnight in A Perfect World to get a taste. If it grabs you, set aside an hour, get a good pair of headphones, go back to the beginning, and be ready to be swept away.

He’s actually touring to promote the 30th anniversary of the album, if you’re lucky enough to be near a stop. I will be jealous if you go!

Until Next Time

What are you still open to discovering? I’m glad there’s still room for something new, and wonder what else might be just around the corner, waiting for me to find. See you next month!

Why I'd Still Say Yes

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:45:00 -0400

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?

Let’s start with how I got into this field, because that route barely exists anymore. I’ve had a computer in my life since 1981, when I was eleven, so by the time I needed a part-time job in high school I already had something real to show. I became an assistant to a continuing ed director at a small college near where I grew up, a job I got specifically because I could demonstrate technical skill. I started building databases and spreadsheets with the crude early tools available, creating reports, and actually helping the place run better. I loved it.

Then I went to college and quickly discovered that I wasn’t ready for it. I dropped out twice. By my early twenties I had a high school diploma and nothing else, and college clearly wasn’t the right move for me yet. (I did eventually go back and finish my undergraduate degree with a 4.0 GPA, so it worked out. It just wasn’t the right time.)

What carried me through those years in between was real, demonstrable experience, and this was early enough that degree programs often didn’t exist for the things I’d taught myself. I could get hired by showing what I could actually do. That’s how I broke in through the early ’90s, including helping a few businesses get online for the first time and running logistics for business-to-business trade shows across the country. Eventually that became a job as a network and database administrator at a small school, a role that, as it happened, also required teaching a class. I went for this position specifically because I’d decided I wanted to teach in whatever way I could find, so I used my IT skills and a bunch of volunteer work giving tech advice to nonprofits to get a foot in the door, and then used that foothold to go back and finish my own degree. I’ve been in education ever since, going on 24 years.

None of my jobs came from a help-wanted listing. Every one came through people I knew, or through telling everyone that I was looking. I never had to deal with an algorithmic gatekeeper deciding whether a human would ever see my resume. I didn’t need to clear some arbitrary (and often unknown) threshold. That’s a genuinely different obstacle than anything I faced, and I want to be honest: I don’t fully know what it’s like to be on the other side of that.

There’s a pattern I’ve noticed over the years, about passion versus security, though this part is anecdotal rather than data, so take it as an observation rather than a study. A lot of career advice has pitched IT as one of the most lucrative fields available, and I’ve met plenty of people in tech who don’t seem to actually love the work, but they do love the lifestyle it affords. I’ve also seen a lot of mediocre tech products over the years, and I don’t think mediocre work comes from people who are genuinely passionate and happy about what they’re doing.

I’ve also watched IT go through boom and bust before. During the dot-com years, demand for IT professionals was intense while businesses raced to get online. It became a bubble. When a lot of those businesses failed, there were suddenly more IT professionals than open jobs. I stayed employed through the whole thing, so I don’t have firsthand experience of being on the losing end of that correction, but I think the current moment rhymes with it.

So what’s actually happening right now? The layoffs are real. AI has been the most-cited reason for U.S. job cuts for four consecutive months running. But there’s a second, less flattering story underneath that headline: a lot of this traces back to the pandemic hiring bubble, when tech companies grew headcount 30 to 100 percent between 2020 and 2023. IBM’s CEO has been blunt about it: people gorged on employment, and now companies are correcting for it. Blaming AI is often more comfortable for a company than admitting it hired too many people.

For entry-level specifically, the picture is more mixed. Hiring for this year’s graduating class is actually up slightly year over year, even as most enterprises say they’re cutting entry-level hiring as they lean on AI, and junior postings increasingly ask for years of experience that junior candidates don’t have by definition. The market hasn’t disappeared. It’s moved, and it’s gotten more selective about who gets in.

I don’t know how long this particular glut lasts. My honest guess is not very long, because I don’t think it will take businesses long to figure out that AI can’t replace good people, it can only enhance them. That’s a guess, not a guarantee, and anyone telling a seventeen-year-old otherwise is selling something.

Which brings me to the actual bet worth making, if you’re the one deciding right now. Start from a premise: if IT expertise is something society keeps needing over the long run, then what we’re going through right now is temporary. Right now, more experienced professionals are competing for, and winning, jobs that entry-level candidates might otherwise have filled. So will there be enough opportunity in the first few years to get a foothold and start building real experience? That’s a real calculation to make, and if IT isn’t a genuine passion for you, just one option among several for financial stability, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at that calculation and pick something else right now. You don’t need an IT degree to benefit from IT skills, either. Those skills strengthen almost any career path you choose.

But what if you actually love this stuff? Then the calculation above leaves out the part that’s kept me in this field despite choosing a job that doesn’t pay anywhere close to six figures.

There is real pleasure in the work itself. Once you get far enough into code to actually see how it works, there’s an elegance to it, a beauty in how efficiencies get found and how pieces connect to each other. It makes you think at a different level than you otherwise would. There’s an order to it that doesn’t exist in the chaos and entropy of the rest of the world, and building something well enough that the order holds is its own kind of satisfaction, separate from whatever it pays.

Part of what keeps pulling me back in is the puzzle of it, as well. Nothing stays the same for long, and no problem behaves quite like the last one, so there’s always a new shape to work out. Solving it usually means someone gets to do the thing they were trying to do, or something that was broken starts working again. I’ve lost count of the friendships that started because I helped someone with a computer problem they were stuck on. The puzzle-solving is fun for me, and it’s even better when it ends with helping somebody.

Point that same capability at something you actually care about, and the scale changes. I’ve spent a big chunk of this year building educational resources for the Khmer Magic Music Bus and Cambodian Living Arts, work that’s been genuinely hard and has taught me a great deal along the way. It didn’t exist before I built it. Now teachers anywhere in the world who want to bring Cambodian history and culture into a classroom have something to work with that wasn’t there before. That’s a different kind of compensation: the ability to make something exist, because you happened to have the skills to build it. A career in IT can be a calling in exactly the way teaching, medicine, or ministry can be.

What would I tell a young person who decides to stick with IT? Leverage what you can control. Get strategic. For example, reduce the cost of getting there: get an inexpensive, credit-transferrable two-year degree first to save you from starting your career buried in debt. Build something real, not just credentials, by volunteering your technical skills for a cause you actually care about. You help them, you build genuine connections, and you walk away with work you can point to and explain, rather than just a transcript. If networking fits your personality, do that directly: public speaking, showing up at events and organizations, building relationships. Get hands-on with AI, because I expect it to be around for a long time to come in some form or another, and the only way to know how it can actually help you is to use it, since everyone’s strengths and blind spots differ. What matters is producing work you can point to and explain: what you chose, why, and how it improved the outcome.

Whichever combination fits you, the underlying logic holds: entry-level jobs have to exist eventually, because the people currently holding these jobs will retire or move on. No industry can permanently freeze out its own next generation.

There’s one more thing that I think matters even more than any of the strategy above: let people see how much you love this field. I see the difference constantly. Some students want me to invest serious time working with them, and you can tell fairly quickly when they’re not really into it, whether it’s a parent pushing them or it just isn’t their thing. Then there are the students who can’t help themselves, who are pulled toward this whether or not anyone’s pushing them at all. I will bend over backwards for those students, because that was me, and still is. The people evaluating you for a job, internship, or a volunteer opportunity are sometimes people who share that same pull, and when they see it in you, they recognize it.

I can’t promise anyone a job. I want the world to work in a way where doing everything right guarantees things will work out, but I know that isn’t how the real world operates. Getting there might mean a bad job or two along the way, or some hard decisions you didn’t expect to have to make. I wish that weren’t true.

So would I tell someone standing at the start of this journey to go for it? If it’s genuinely what they want, yes. Find people to connect with, find ways to be useful before anyone’s paying you to, build something you can point to, and underneath all of it, keep the part that made you want it in the first place.

Fable Is Great, and That's Kind of the Problem

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

That wasn’t the smart choice, but the fact that I made it anyway says something.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude models I’ve been using for a while now, recently released their newest and most capable model. It’s called Fable. For those of us with a paid subscription, they let you try it out using your existing plan for a short window, a few days, before it switches over to a separate, pay-as-you-go cost. That in itself was new. I’ve always had limits on what I can do with my subscription, and I’ve made peace with that. Twenty dollars a month is well worth it to me, and I’m happy to work inside those boundaries or occasionally pay a little extra when I go over, but this was the first time the newest, most powerful model wasn’t just rationed within my plan. It was carved out entirely, something I’d have to pay for separately no matter how much room I had left in my regular subscription.

I wanted to see what the fuss was about, particularly since the government had closed access to it shortly after launch because it was deemed too powerful, so I put Fable to work on two real projects. One was the third resource in my Carrying Culture project, a set of sites for teaching about Cambodians and their struggle to preserve traditional arts. The other was a long-overdue upgrade to the Hugo site you’re probably reading this on right now. (Hugo, if you haven’t run into it, is the software that turns my writing into the pages you see on the web.)

Both projects taught me the same thing: Fable is genuinely, noticeably better.

The clearest difference was how well it understood what I actually wanted. I’d describe a vision or ask for advice, and it landed on the same page with me far more often than any model I’ve used before. Less clarifying back-and-forth. Better instincts about what I meant, not just what I said. It felt more natural to work with.

It was also far more capable of running with a task on its own. At one point, while working on my site, it split itself into what are called subagents, essentially separate AI instances, each handling a different piece of the work at the same time, then reporting back so it could keep moving. It checked its own work as it went, opening up a web browser to test things and confirm they actually functioned the way they should. That last part still catches me off guard every time I see it happen. Watching an AI click around a web page to verify its own work is a strange thing to get used to. The result was a site with search (finally!) and a handful of other features I’d struggled to get working for a long time, done in a fraction of the time I expected.

What it isn’t better at, at least not yet, is writing. It’s good. It’s serviceable. But it doesn’t read the way I write, and I have a voice and point of view that guide the choices I make on the page. There’s still a gap between people who move through the world and interact, versus a model trained to predict likely next words. Fable narrowed that gap. It didn’t close it.

One more thing I noticed: left unsupervised, it was ambitious. It wanted to do more than I asked, more than I necessarily wanted, and I had to put guardrails in place to keep it from running off and generating costs I hadn’t signed up for. Which brings me back to that sixty dollars.

I hit my limit in the middle of the project, at a moment when I had the time carved out and my head was fully in it. I could have waited. I chose to keep going, watching the cost climb, because I’d already started and I liked what I was seeing and I didn’t want to lose the thread. That’s not a rational decision by any normal accounting, but it is a very human one.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this. Anthropic, and every company racing to build the next frontier model, knows exactly how compelling “the latest and greatest” is, and how willing people are to pay for that feeling even when the older, cheaper option would have done the job just fine. Fable’s quality isn’t the issue here. The hard part is making the sober, sensible choice when the flashier option is right there, working beautifully, and asking you to keep going.

Alongside Fable’s release, Anthropic also quietly changed how usage is measured for Sonnet, the model I actually rely on for most of my work day to day. The price per token stayed the same. But the way that usage gets metered changed enough that, by the numbers I’ve seen, the same work now consumes something like 40 percent more of your allotment than it used to. The sticker price didn’t move. What changed is how much of it you use up doing the exact same things you were already doing.

I don’t think this is some grand conspiracy, and I want to be careful not to overstate it. The AI industry is still competitive. OpenAI and Google haven’t raised prices on their newest models the way this metering change effectively raises Anthropic’s, and that competition is doing real work to keep things in check, but I’ve watched this shape play out elsewhere already. My streaming services all show ads now unless I pay considerably more to remove them, so much more that I don’t bother. It’s just what companies do when they need more revenue and have the leverage to take it.

What makes this particular version sting more for me is what these tools are built on. The data these models learned from came from decades of human writing, conversation, and creativity, collected without asking anyone’s permission. I’ve written about that before and I still think about it constantly. Tools built on something taken from all of us shouldn’t then become something only some of us can afford to use at their full capability. Right now, for most of what I do, Sonnet and Opus, the models included in a normal subscription, are more than good enough. But I don’t love watching the gap open up between what’s included and what costs extra, especially knowing how good competition has been at keeping that gap in check so far, and how little guarantee there is that it stays that way.

So would I tell you to go try Fable? Sure, if you’re curious and you can afford to poke at it, or if you need high-level coding power. It’s an impressive piece of work, and I don’t want that to get lost in everything else I’ve said here. But being newer and more capable doesn’t automatically make something the right tool for what you’re doing, and I don’t see myself reaching for it often. Most days, the models already included in my plan do exactly what I need.

As for the sixty dollars, I don’t regret the site. I do regret how easily I talked myself into paying it, given how clearly I could see myself doing it in the moment. I guess that knowing exactly what’s happening to you doesn’t make you immune to it.

July 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Modern life comes with a background hum of tiny indignities. Fill out the form. Scan this QR code. Sit through the ad before your call gets answered, and rest assured, your call is very important to us. None of it is a real hardship. It’s just friction, usually delivered by someone who has no power to change, so by design there’s no one to even be mad at other than a faceless company.

I’ve built up decent defenses against most of it. This week, though, they cracked. I caught myself borderline furious at a hold-music loop, which is pretty absurd.

Then, like it usually does, perspective showed up. I realized how much I actually have, and how many people would trade problems without a second thought. That doesn’t make the hold music less annoying. It just makes me shut up about it a bit more.

My Picks

Marconi Union - Multiforms: Ambient Transmissions, Vol. 3

Marconi Union’s latest release is my frontrunner for the 2026 album of the summer. The sonic space it creates is warm, inviting, and expansive. The textures and contours evolve, taking us from one moment to the next along a journey of discovery that carried me from start to finish. I particularly like the instrumentation on this one. If you like ambient electronic music, it’s simply superb.

The American Revolution

There is so much I did not know about my country’s origin. The extent of the brutality and violence. The cruelty and privation. The struggle for freedom by indigenous Americans and slaves. I had remembered the brilliant ideas for self-determination and fractious relations among states, and knew that sacrifices were made. But I had no idea of the full extent of this war’s impact on our people and the world. It’s free to stream the entire series until July 12th.

Making Music: Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers

If you or someone you know enjoys making electronic music, Dennis DeSantis’ Making Music is a fantastic resource. It details dozens of patterns for starting, developing, and finishing music on both conceptual and practical levels without getting into specific technical details. The result is a set of universal problems and solutions that can help at any stage in the process, and at any level of expertise. The book is free as an electronic download in PDF, .mobi, and .epub versions, or you can buy your own print copy.

Scritchy Scratchy

Idle games are such a strange genre, and I’m always surprised at how much I enjoy playing them. Essentially, the game mechanics let you set up increasingly optimized automations that allow you to earn ever-greater points, which lead to better optimization, and so on. You have to earn it, though. At the beginning it’s a bit of a slog, but I think that’s just to make the payoff more sweet. In this game you’re playing scratch tickets, looking to increase your luck and winnings with every run. Try out the demo for free, and if you like it the full game is less than $10. Totally worth it in my book.

Recently Published

What do Large Language Models Owe Us?

What if we recognized the debt owed to society from AI corporations’ non-consensual scraping of the internet? We could, for example, make slightly older versions of models available at cost, with the option to power them with renewable energy. Would that be enough to dampen the backlash? I’m not so sure, but the idea itself really got me thinking.

How It’s Going

What the heck is going on with my site, posts, and newsletters? It’s time for me to step back and think about where I actually am versus where I thought I might be.

In the Groove

For decades, I’d pick an “album of the summer” each year, something that fit the vibe of the season and provided the soundtrack for these long, hot days. My earliest candidate would have to be The Cars’ debut album, released on June 6, 1978, though I was too young to think of it like that at the time. I just knew that it was everywhere, on the radio, at my friends’ houses, and it blew me away because I’d never heard anything like it. Every track holds up, and I think it’s still the perfect mix of pop, rock, and new wave. My favorite thing about these tracks is how they start. Check out the guitar and synth tom that begin Good Times Roll, or the raw chug and release of Just What I Needed. They get you instantly hooked, then drag you in for the rest of the ride. Fantastic.

Until Next Time

When things get annoying, I’d love to skip straight to the shutting up part without getting all the way to boiling first. If you’ve found a shortcut, let me know. Until then, maybe I’ll just blame the heat.

How It's Going

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

The honest answer is: mostly well, but not quite as I imagined.

The biggest gap between my plan and reality is promotion. I had ideas. I was going to cross-post to Medium and LinkedIn, maybe find my way to Bluesky or Mastodon, connect with others writing about similar things. I have done none of that, and oddly, I haven’t particularly wanted to.

I’ve spent some time trying to understand my own hesitation here, and I don’t think I’ve fully gotten to the bottom of it. Part of it is a fear of the treadmill (the feeling that once you start, you have to keep going, that you’ll find yourself obligated to post and promote on someone else’s schedule). But the bigger part, I think, is that the platforms available for this kind of promotion require you to become a different kind of person online. They reward the highly curated self, the life that always looks amazing, the confident authority who knows things other people should hear. That’s not what I’m doing here, and showing up in those spaces to promote this site would mean borrowing their conventions even when I’m arguing against them.

There’s also something I have to name honestly: imposter syndrome. The internet is saturated with experts telling people what to do or think, and I find a lot of that ecosystem genuinely off-putting. I can always point to someone who knows more than I do about anything I write about. I don’t feel qualified to tell anyone what to think. What I try to do is share my own thinking, which is constantly changing, and trust readers to draw their own conclusions.

The way the writing has evolved reflects that. Early on, more of what I published had an instructional bent: here’s how to do this thing, here’s what to consider. That framing still shows up occasionally, and sometimes it’s the right frame. But I’ve become much more deliberate about it. More of what I write now is like an essay rather than a tutorial. The shift happened slowly, but looking back it feels significant. I have opinions, to be sure, and I don’t hide them. I just try to have a bit of humility as my own thinking evolves, and realize I don’t always have good answers.

The results of not promoting my posts are about what you’d expect. I’ve reached out to a handful of people whose work has shaped how I think. Most are writers who gave me something to think about or share, using their work as a catalyst to explore in my own directions. I’ve let them know how much their work has mattered, and how it’s helped me, my students, and colleagues think through hard questions. Out of six or seven notes, I’ve only heard back once (thanks, Cory!). That’s not surprising; these are busy, well-known people. But it’s notable for a different reason: there’s now so much AI-generated fan mail flooding into anyone with a major online presence that real human messages are harder to distinguish. I’m aware that my genuine note may read like an AI prompt output, which is very deflating even though I fully recognize the exquisite irony.

What the site has given me is real and worth acknowledging. The repetition of starting from an idea, organizing thoughts around it, drafting, editing, finishing, and publishing has made me noticeably better at communicating. I find myself more articulate in conversations with folks about the topics I write about. The writing forces clarity that the thinking alone doesn’t. And there’s something that hasn’t happened with my music over years of practice: I’m actually finishing things and getting them out the door.

But naming what’s missing is part of the accounting. I’ve made a kind of peace with this decidedly quiet little corner of the internet. What I haven’t figured out is how to find people to think alongside. When I imagined promoting this work on Mastodon or Bluesky, the appeal was never really about getting more readers. It was about finding others wrestling with the same questions and being in dialogue with them. I haven’t found a way to do that without stepping into systems that feel wrong to me for other reasons.

The door stays open on that. Maybe there’s a version of showing up in those spaces that doesn’t require becoming someone I’m not. Maybe the community finds its own way. Maybe I’m just lazy. What I’m confident of, a year and a half in, is the project itself: an independent site that represents my voice, where I’ve stayed true to what I set out to do. The rest can wait.

What Do Large Language Models Owe Us?

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

What I got back was enthusiastic, uncomfortably so. This is amazing. This is fantastic. You’re really onto something here. Before I had a chance to sit with that or push back, the model had composed something for me. A polished piece. Fully formed. Just… there. And dammit, it was better than what I’d drafted.

I hadn’t asked for that. I was looking for friction, for questions. Something to push my thinking. What I got instead was a shortcut past the part of the work that was actually the point. I didn’t get to learn anything. I didn’t get to improve. I got a product.

The thing that bothers me most is that it worked exactly as it was designed.

Understanding that design means looking at where these models came from. These flagship AI models were built on an enormous amount of human-generated content: writing, art, code, and conversation. Things people put online to communicate with other humans, not to be consumed as training data for commercial products. Nobody opted in. Many actively tried to opt out. Websites began using a file called robots.txt (a standard way to tell automated bots what they can and can’t access, something that had been a widely respected informal agreement for decades) to signal they didn’t want AI crawlers touching their content. The AI companies largely ignored it.

Wikipedia is another example. Built and maintained by volunteers who wanted knowledge to be freely shared, it’s been heavily drawn on by AI crawlers that caused a 50% spike in its bandwidth costs, disrupting the site’s performance and draining resources from an organization that runs on donations. Wikimedia built a proper paid API for companies that want to use its data and publicly asked them to stop scraping and use it instead. For years, most didn’t bother. When the people making these decisions are billionaires backed by that kind of capital, you don’t have to care.

This is what people mean when they talk about a data commons: the idea that what we collectively put online wasn’t meant to be extracted and repackaged as a commercial product. The data was for us, by us. There’s an intuitive argument that building products from it without consent, then selling those products back to the same public, is a kind of taking that deserves at minimum some acknowledgment.

So what if we asked for something in return?

Specifically: what if AI companies were asked to release their flagship models from six months or a year ago to run on publicly funded servers, charged at cost? The framing would be compensation, a recognition that these models were built on the data commons and that the public deserves access to what it helped create. What if, as a customer of that public AI, you could choose to pay more than cost to ensure the energy powering it came from actual renewable infrastructure, not the carbon offsets that are too easy to fudge? Consumer pressure like that can do a lot to promote responsible infrastructure, and a lower-cost public alternative would also help maintain healthy competition.

We already have a rough version of the first part. Several Chinese AI labs have released open-weight models, which make the underlying parameters public so anyone can run and modify them, rather than locking access behind a single company’s service. These sit roughly six months to a year behind the current American flagships in capability and can be accessed at significantly lower cost. So tiered access isn’t purely speculative. What’s missing is the explicit acknowledgment of why it should exist, the public infrastructure to make it genuinely accessible, and any real option to choose greener compute.

That last part isn’t discussed at the level it deserves. Environmental criticism of AI tends to get compressed into “AI uses too much water and electricity,” a real concern that deserves careful attention but also needs proper context. We don’t see protests outside golf courses, though they consume enormous amounts of water. The electricity used in streaming 4K video doesn’t seem to provoke this much outrage, either. Something else is going on when people reach for AI’s environmental footprint. I think it’s often a more legible, shareable proxy for objections that are harder to put into words: the power dynamics, the displacement anxiety, the feeling of having it shoved down our throats, and the sense that something was taken without asking.

I’m sad to say that I don’t think any of this public AI idea would actually fix what’s broken, either, though I’d still love to see and use it.

The corporations haven’t just built products. They’ve worked to make those products feel inescapable, cultivating dependency by optimizing for usage in ways that actively discourage people from developing their own capabilities. Dependency is how you justify a multi-billion-dollar valuation to investors. They’ve pushed AI into workplaces and schools in ways that are less about utility and more about showing shareholders you’re AI-forward. They’ve fomented breathless anxiety about the technology while simultaneously insisting you trust them with it. Too much damage has already been done. A public model and a green tier wouldn’t undo that.

The plastics industry pulled the same move: they made us feel personally responsible for ecological decisions they had already made for us. We recycle because we feel guilty, because the industry successfully moved accountability from its choices to our habits. The same motion is happening with AI. The arguments I hear most often from my students and colleagues center on what individual users are doing rather than what the companies are building, where they’re building it, and how. That substitution of personal responsibility for structural accountability is the real trick.

The question of how we compensate humanity for the extraction of the data commons, and how we hold these companies accountable for the social and environmental costs of their decisions, has no individual answer. It doesn’t resolve into individual choices, however well-intentioned.

I’m afraid that if we don’t have that structural conversation explicitly, if we let it collapse the way we let it collapse with social media, we’re going to keep arriving at consequences we could have identified years in advance.

For now I’m still here, using these tools, and still finding them useful. What I’m less sure about is whether there’s a version of this that works for everyone who isn’t already comfortable with it, as well as how long I’m going to be able to stay comfortable with it myself. People have good reasons to be skeptical, and their concerns deserve an actual answer rather than a PR response. That’s the conversation I’d like to see. Whether it happens is another matter.

June 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:00:00 -0500

When most people think of summer, they talk about beaches, picnics, and pools. Not me. My best summer memories are at night, when dusk goes on forever and it’s ten o’clock before the stars come out. We used to hang out on my friend Mary’s second-floor porch, laughing, playing Cosmic Wimpout, and spinning old 78s.

The sounds of a city at night enveloped us. A chopper brumming on the next street over. A party across the way. Crickets mixed with car radios, echoes bouncing off buildings, warped and Doppler-bent. We talked until dawn some days. How was there ever that much to say?

My Picks

RNGdle

It’s great to do something mindless from time to time. Once a day, get a random number. See how many interesting combinations, patterns, and attributes it has, and earn points for their rarity. You can see others’ high scores, and track your own progress. That’s it. Super simple, like playing a lottery where you always win, because it’s free. (Yes, I actually do find this fun.)

Caught In Joy

Karol Pokojowczyk made his fortune in tech, then used it to create the electronic music studio of his dreams. Now, he releases four albums a month on Bandcamp (90+ and counting) that are filled with music that harks back to the best Berlin-school classics, and he shares some of them regularly on his YouTube channel. Great for working or studying, sure, but also worth a closer listen.

World History Timeline

I had a copy of this timeline’s inspiration, by Joseph Priestley, on my wall back in the day. I think it came with something from Edward Tufte. Along with the Chronicle of the World, I could use it to examine the sweep of history from a perspective unlike any other. It’s nice to see it updated, and watch how civilizations rise and fall, fracture and mix, over the span of time. Endlessly fascinating.

At what point does it make sense to ditch a gas car for an electric vehicle?

After I run my Mazda into the ground, I’m almost certainly going to look for an all-electric vehicle to replace it, regardless of the subsidies. NPR does a great job of helping us understand the tradeoffs when we’re considering our next car.

Recently Published

What I’d Tell Someone Just Starting with AI

I had a great talk with a bunch of local nonprofit fundraisers last month, and realized that I’ve never put my advice for the use of these tools in one place. Here are my strategies and tips for getting the most out of LLMs.

Thinking Through AI

I have finally reached a moment where I can see myself ditching the “flagship” AI models someday. There’s a point at which the corporations behind the products become so toxic that the good we can do with them isn’t enough. How do we know? What can I do about it? (Answer: teach!)

In the Groove

A great entryway into the small group swing that reminds me of summer is the Benny Goodman Sextet featuring Charlie Christian, available used online for a very reasonable price. This is a group of some of the finest musicians of the era, playing together in a more intimate setting than a big band stage. There’s Fletcher Henderson on piano, Lionel Hampton on vibraphone, and the innovative sound of electric guitar in its first decade played masterfully by Charlie Christian. Goodman brings it all together with his clarinet soaring above and between, bringing new life to old standards and arrangements that still reach down into my soul today.

I can’t believe what a big deal it was to have an integrated band like this back then. Genius is genius, period.

Until Next Time

That’s the thing about a great record, and a great summer: you don’t just remember them, you go looking for the next one. Here’s to the nights ahead. See you next month.

Thinking Through AI

Sat, 30 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

I’ve been a genuine enthusiast for AI tools for a few years now. I’ve run training sessions for colleagues, brought it into my classroom, and helped nonprofit fundraisers see what these tools might do for their work. I’ve believed, and still believe, that there’s something real and valuable here. So, how on earth did I get here?

The school year is ending, and when I looked back at it, I remembered that last year I collaborated with five or six teachers on AI projects. This year, one. Early in the year I ran a training that got a lot of pushback (some of it surprisingly strident). There were (mostly younger) teachers who were resistant to what the technology represents: something being imposed rather than offered. At the time I thought I understood. Now I think I actually do.

We are not being invited to consider AI. We are being told it’s here and we have to deal with it.

That’s not just coming from school administrators or policy documents. It’s coming from the companies themselves. The way OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and the others talk about what they’re building, it’s often addressed to an abstraction called Humanity, not to actual people with actual concerns. There’s a piece by Jim Prosser that frames this through the lens of Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen: the nuclear physicist who gains godlike power and gradually loses the ability to care about individual people. The view from orbit is just too intoxicating. He can see the arc of civilization. He just can’t sit with someone who’s grieving.

That’s a disturbingly accurate portrait of how the leaders of these companies communicate. They care enormously about Humanity. They’d do anything for Humanity. They just can’t be bothered with actual people who are worried about their jobs, their kids’ learning, and their creative work being scraped without consent.

Prosser draws a direct parallel to the American nuclear industry, which ran exactly this kind of communications strategy, talking over the public’s head about civilizational transformation, never building any reservoir of genuine goodwill with ordinary people, and then watched the whole thing collapse when accidents confirmed everyone’s worst fears. The communications failures didn’t kill nuclear power; the disasters did. Decades of dismissing public concern meant there was nothing to draw on when things went wrong.

I can see that scenario unfolding with AI. A catastrophic security incident. The investment bubble bursting, with taxpayers absorbing the losses while the billionaires walk away. Either one could poison the whole thing, the companies and the technology alike, including the parts that are genuinely remarkable.

By using these products, am I part of the problem?

I’m not there yet. At least I don’t think I am, not quite. The environmental impact of my personal use is negligible compared to the structural decisions made long before I opened a chat window. We live inside systems we didn’t choose. We never decided on single-use plastics either, and I’m skeptical of the personal-responsibility framing that puts the weight of industrial choices on individual consumers. Score-keeping gets stupid fast.

The contradiction is real, though. I had a session a few weeks ago helping nonprofit fundraisers think through how AI tools might help them, as I mentioned in my last post. These are organizations always stretched too thin, doing work that genuinely matters. I walked away feeling like I’d put something good into the world. Now I’m not entirely sure that’s true.

The technology itself is relatively neutral. It can be used to make the world better or worse. The creation of it was not neutral, however: the training data, the decisions about reinforcement learning, and the non-consensual scraping underlying all of it make it decidedly opinionated in ways that threaten to increase inequality. The technology is certainly extraordinary in what it is. It’s fairly ordinary in how it can be used, though, meaning a person with good judgment and honest intentions can use it honestly. The companies that built it are making choices that deserve scrutiny.

So I’m building a new course.

It’s going to be called Thinking Through AI, which is also what I’m doing right now, and that feels right. I want to create the space I haven’t been able to find in conversations with colleagues or in the broader culture, where students can actually work through this together, use the tools, examine the impact on society, and draw their own conclusions from actual experience and knowledge rather than vibes.

They have more at stake in this than I do — I’m near the end of my career with all of this emerging around me, and they’re at the beginning. I genuinely want to hear what they think. If they decide at the end of the course that AI isn’t for them, that’s a completely valid outcome, as long as it comes from understanding and experience rather than reflexive dismissal.

Something unexpected gave me a bit of hope this week. The Pope released an encyclical on AI, and I found myself reading it with a lot of recognition. It centers on using the technology to make the world better and warns explicitly against AI becoming another engine of rising inequality, helping the already-advantaged and leaving everyone else behind. What struck me was the source: not a corporation, not a political party, and not a tech pundit. One of Anthropic’s co-founders was present for the release, which tells me there are at least some people in this industry who aren’t fully captivated by the view from orbit.

If things don’t change, what walking away actually looks like for me isn’t walking away from AI. It’s walking away from the specific companies. I’ll try local models on my own hardware, or open-weight models through API access. The work will continue either way, without feeding the investment bubble or the toxic billionaires running it.

I’m not there yet. But I can see it now in a way I couldn’t before.

What I'd Tell Someone Just Starting with AI

Sat, 16 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

The single most useful reframe I know comes from researcher Ethan Mollick, who calls it the “best available human standard.” The question isn’t whether AI is as good as the world’s best expert at whatever you’re trying to do. It usually isn’t. The real question is whether it’s better than the best help you’d actually have access to in a given moment. For most people, that realistic alternative is either no help at all, or a colleague who’s already doing three other jobs. AI isn’t a replacement for genuine expertise, but it’s often better than nothing. Sometimes a lot better.

That framing has been useful to me because it cuts through a lot of the noise. There’s hype that says AI can do everything, and haters who say it’s never good enough. In my experience, neither of those is the right frame.

It’s not like using Google

Most people’s first instinct is to use AI the way they use a search engine: type a question, get an answer, move on. That misses almost everything that makes it valuable. These tools can draft, push back, help you think through a stuck problem, or role-play a difficult conversation before you have it for real. If you’ve only used a Large Language Model (LLM, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) to look things up, you’ve barely started.

The mode I find most valuable, and the one many people never try, is thinking out loud. Bring it something half-formed. Describe a problem before you know what solution you’re after. Ask it to help you figure out what you actually think. That exploratory, conversational mode is often where these tools do their best work.

What you put in determines what you get out

A single thin prompt, like “write me a cover letter” or “give me ideas for this project,” gets you something thin in return. The first output is rarely the useful one. What actually works is going back and forth: explain the context, say what you don’t want, push back on what it gives you, ask it to try again differently. You’re having a conversation, not making a request.

The AI knows nothing about you or your situation. It has no idea what your organization does, what your voice sounds like, what’s already been tried, or what constraints you’re working under. None of that is in the model. You have to bring it. I’ve found voice transcription genuinely useful here. Talking for a few minutes about what I’m working on is a lot faster than typing out context, and it often helps me think through the problem before the AI has said anything at all. Handy is the tool I use for this.

The move most people don’t try

Most people use AI to generate things: draft this, brainstorm that. What fewer people try is turning it around and asking it to push back… Find the problems with this plan. Argue against my proposal. Tell me what I’m missing. Read this as a skeptical reviewer and tell me where it falls down.

You don’t have to take every critique. But you’ll almost always know more than you did before you asked. I’ve come to think of this as one of the most underused capabilities these tools have.

Find your jagged edge

AI is very good at some things and surprisingly bad at others, and the edges aren’t where you’d expect. One person finds it invaluable for drafting; another finds it completely flat for their particular writing style. One task clicks immediately; another never quite works. The only way to find this out is to actually use the tools and push them past what feels comfortable. That map is personal, and you can only build it through experience. (This framing also comes from Mollick, he’s that good.)

Keep yourself at the center

AI has no stake in what you’re doing. It has no judgment, no taste, and no sense of what actually matters in your specific situation. The sense that something came from a real person who cares can only come from you. Use AI for the work where it helps, so you have more capacity for the work where it doesn’t.

Don’t assume the computer knows best. It can give you options and surface ideas you wouldn’t have found on your own, but it’s not an authority. It still gets things wrong, and it won’t tell you when it does — it sounds equally confident either way. If it gives you a recommendation, ask for the reasoning. Use your own judgment and stay in charge.

A few tools worth knowing

Beyond the major chat interfaces (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — all have free tiers, try them and see what fits):

Handy — voice transcription for talking to AI instead of typing, especially useful for providing lots of context quickly
LLMFeeder — a browser extension that strips a webpage down to clean text so you can paste it directly into a conversation
liteparse — converts PDFs to text so you can work with them in AI tools

For going deeper, a good place to start is AI for the People, a free six-week email course from The Guardian that walks through how to think about AI in daily life. Worth starting with whether you’re brand new or already comfortable with these tools — I learned things from it, and I’ve been at this for years.

After that, Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence and his newsletter One Useful Thing are the most grounded writing I know on how AI actually works in practice. And if you want to see some of what’s possible when you’ve been at this for a while, Moving Beyond the Basics is a good next step from here.

May 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 02 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

When we got our first house, it also came with our first lawn. Right about this time of year, the dandelions would start sprouting everywhere, invasive weeds ruining the manicured green that kept us in good standing on our block. Wanting to be the perfect homeowner, I bought an amazing contraption that let me yoink them out, one by one, without even bending down. It was so satisfying to keep those forces of entropy away … until a couple of days later, when the lawn filled up with them again. Come on!

I was so exasperated that the next year, I just let them stay. As it turns out, after a few weeks, that first explosion of yellow-to-white-puffballs settled down to just one here and there, and it didn’t really look all that bad. They were actually kind of pretty. Now, we hold off on mowing until a bit later in the season, letting pollinators have a chance to do their thing, and somehow our lawn has filled with the most beautiful wildflowers.

I don’t think the neighbors mind.

My Picks

Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant.

This situation is a travesty, and it has still not been resolved. There’s a slim chance that we can regain our privacy by the time the short-term extension to Section 702 expires, but it’s not looking good. Why is this not an obvious, slam-dunk decision?

The Conversation

YouTube is quietly but steadily adding fantastic free content to their service, making my premium membership even more valuable. They recently included one of my favorite movies of all time, and I’m delighted to share it here. Starring Gene Hackman in what he considered his greatest film, this mystery/thriller examines human interactions, surveillance, and isolation in a way that is both gripping and profound.

Tastebuds NYC

Enough with the heavy stuff! Two dudes randomly pick a country and find a restaurant in the NYC area that serves its cuisine. Great guys, great food, great culture. Tons of fun.

Kottke.org

A lot of what I share in this newsletter comes from longtime blogger Jason Kottke, who has been curating the best of online content for almost 30 years. Highly recommended. I’m sure you’ll see plenty of great things that I’ve missed. He and I also share a lot of common interests and preferences (in music, art, design, etc.), so my parasocial tendencies make me feel as though it’s a friend sending out these wonderful things, not some random online personage.

Recently Published

Update Your Software

Like it or not, new AI technologies are now able to identify critical bugs in the software we all use every day, on every device. While we may eventually end up in a better place because of it, getting there is going to be bumpy, and we need to be prepared.

What Would the Buddha Think of an LLM?

A Robin Sloan newsletter sent me down a deep rabbit hole, leading to some surprising insights. How do we wrap our heads around something that is, by design, eternally ephemeral, yet simulates something that persists? How inhuman is a computer program that interacts with us entirely from the derivative output of humans?

In the Groove

One of my favorite things growing up was listening to live bootlegs of bands I loved. I used to go to record shows on weekends, wandering through high school auditoriums and parking lots, looking for something special. There’d always be a booth bursting with cassettes labeled in Sharpie and bins of vinyl with strange cover art, each one begging to be discovered. Some bands hit different live. Purer, rawer, and more intimate. Others actually do their thing better in front of an audience than in the studio.

I recently came across the Aadam Jacobs Project on the Internet Archive, and I am in heaven. Aadam recorded thousands of indie, punk, and rock concerts from the 80s to the 2010s and has started putting them up online for all of us to enjoy. The sound quality is surprisingly good on many of these, and tons of favorite groups from back in the day are well represented.

There’s Ida and Stereolab with some of their best work back in 1996. There’s Aqualung turning a horrible night with a broken piano into a fantastic performance in 2005. How about some classic Smiths and New Order? So much to explore!

Until Next Time

Are you able to let things go? It’s a lifelong struggle for me. But every spring, when the lawn fills up with flowers that we never planted, I’m reminded: a step back isn’t the same thing as a step backwards.

What Would the Buddha Think of an LLM?

Fri, 01 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

What would the Buddha think of an LLM?

I should be upfront: I’m not a Buddhist. I’ve never taken refuge vows, and I’m not part of a sangha (a Buddhist community). But Buddhist thought has shaped how I move through the world, through a study group with a learned monk, through reading, through a meditation practice, and through the way certain ideas about impermanence, compassion and interconnectedness have become part of how I see things. So this isn’t scholarship. It’s a thought experiment from someone who has been changed by a philosophy without fully belonging to it.

Sloan’s key insight is that the transformer model (the architecture behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) has no continuous self. Each response is the product of a series of forward passes: brief, parallel, stateless computations. There is no “Claude” that persists between conversations, accumulating experience, developing a history. The thing that responds to you exists for milliseconds and then is gone. AI researcher Jack Clark describes it vividly: “These things don’t exist in time. They exist in like, ‘I’m now perceiving something!’ […] Everything is oddly instant.”

Buddhism has a word for the first part: anicca. Impermanence. Everything that arises passes away. And a related concept, anattā, or no-self: the observation that what we experience as a continuous, persistent “I” is actually a series of arising and passing mental events, not a fixed entity at all. These ideas take serious meditators years to begin glimpsing. Language models, simply by design, are this way. Structurally. It’s worth noting the comparison has limits: an LLM can’t cling to its non-self the way we cling to ours, so the territory isn’t identical. But as an architectural observation, it’s still striking. Each conversation is a fresh arising from a vast accumulated commons of human expression, then dissolves. The “persistent Claude” is as much an illusion as the persistent self, both functional fictions layered over something stranger and more interesting.

Few people seem to talk about how language models are trained on the collective output of human thought: writing, conversation, argument, creativity, instruction, grief, humor, discovery. When you talk to one, you’re not talking to an alien intelligence. You’re talking to a distillation of human expression, a vast, compressed commons of what people have said and thought and made.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing holds that nothing exists independently, that everything arises in relationship to everything else. This is a harder claim when applied to technology than to, say, a cloud and the rain it becomes, but I think it holds here. The model is not separate from the human knowledge and expression that shaped it. When you have a conversation with an LLM, the distinction between “your thinking” and “its response” is genuinely more porous than it appears. You’re not encountering an alien other, you’re encountering something constituted by the same web of human expression you grew up inside of. That’s interbeing showing up somewhere Thich Nhat Hanh probably didn’t anticipate, but I think he’d recognize the structure.

Buddhist thought also has real concerns about these tools.

The most direct: attachment. Buddhism uses the Pali word tanha (craving) for the habitual grasping toward pleasant things and away from unpleasant ones. The ambient pull to reach for these tools, the low-grade unease when they’re unavailable, the sense that every project should probably involve them. That’s tanha in a recognizable form, and I’m definitely aware of this tendency within myself. More subtle is the question of what AI use cultivates in the mind. Buddhism is less interested in the outcomes of any activity than in what that activity trains in you. I play mildly violent video games (mostly a potato zapping aliens, nothing gory) and my understanding is that Buddhist thought gently disapproves, not because virtual violence has real-world consequences, but because it directs the mind toward destruction, however harmlessly. The practice shapes the practitioner.

By that logic: what does reaching for AI when thinking gets hard cultivate? Probably avoidance. What does using it to generate rather than to think cultivate? Probably a weakened capacity to think. What does compulsive checking-in, using the AI as an all-purpose oracle, cultivate? Distraction, and what Buddhism calls papañca: the mind’s tendency to proliferate concepts without settling into presence.

These are real concerns. They don’t make the technology bad. They make the relationship worth examining.

The Buddha’s most practical contribution wasn’t a doctrine. It was a method: the Middle Way, a path between extreme asceticism and indulgence. Applied here: not rejection of AI tools, not uncritical adoption. The practitioner’s question, applied to any activity, is: what does this cultivate? Not “is this technology good or bad?” That has no useful answer. The right question is smaller and more personal: what does this specific use cultivate in me, right now?

That question is available every time you open a chat window. It doesn’t require being a Buddhist to ask it. It just requires enough honesty to sit with the answer.

Sloan ends with: “I think precision is a form of respect.” He means precision about what language models actually are — not projecting anthropomorphic fictions onto them, not dismissing them as mere autocomplete. Look carefully, see clearly. That’s also a pretty good description of what Buddhist practice is all about.

Update Your Software

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

Mythos Preview turns out to be extraordinarily capable at finding security vulnerabilities in software, in a way nothing before it has been. Anthropic’s own testing found that it could identify zero-day vulnerabilities (bugs that nobody had previously found) in every major operating system and every major web browser. It found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, an operating system known specifically for its security rigor. It found a 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg, a media library that’s been pored over by security researchers for years (and one that I use regularly). It did things that expert human security researchers said would have taken them weeks, in a matter of hours.

Because of this, Anthropic isn’t releasing it to the general public. Instead, through something they’re calling Project Glasswing, they’re giving software companies and open source developers a window to use Mythos Preview to find and fix vulnerabilities before those same capabilities fall into other hands. I believe that’s a genuinely responsible decision, and it’s consistent with what I’ve come to expect from them. Anthropic is more transparent than other major AI labs about the concerns they have with the technology they’re building. They’re promotional too, and I have significant concerns about their business model, but there’s a philosophy behind their public-facing work that I find credible.

There’s a catch, though: Anthropic isn’t the only one building these tools.

They may be the first to reach this level of capability, or among the first. Leads in this industry are typically measured in months before others catch up. The same tools that allow Anthropic to hand Mythos Preview to software companies for defensive purposes will eventually be available to people with less responsible intentions. That’s not speculation. It’s the history of this field.

To understand why this matters, it helps to understand how exploit-finding has worked historically. Finding serious vulnerabilities in software has been genuinely difficult, labor-intensive work. It required deep expertise, time, and patience. Skilled attackers could do it, but the difficulty acted as a natural throttle on how often it happened. Major vulnerabilities surfaced a handful of times a year. Lately that cadence has been accelerating; significant vulnerabilities feel like a weekly occurrence now. What Anthropic found with Mythos Preview suggests we’re about to see another jump in that pace. Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities that used to take skilled researchers weeks is now something that can happen in hours, at low cost, without human intervention after the initial prompt.

The deeper problem is that the software ecosystem they’re trying to help isn’t in great shape.

For a lot of software, especially from large companies with substantial resources, quality and security have been treated as secondary concerns. What matters is shipping, gaining market share, and getting to the next version. Microsoft’s Windows releases are the perennial example: despite the resources available to them, new versions arrive with known problems that feel less like oversight and more like a business decision about acceptable quality thresholds. We, the users, end up as the final test environment. That’s negligence, and I think it’s worth naming it as such.

I want to be careful here, though, because not all software is like this. A lot of the software I rely on and love most was built by independent developers or small teams, often as a craft project or an open source effort run by volunteers. For those developers, finding and fixing every vulnerability isn’t a matter of will. It’s a matter of bandwidth. When a security bug surfaces in software built by someone genuinely trying to do right by their users, I extend real grace. It’s the corporations with dedicated security teams that have less excuse.

Regardless of the reason, the result is the same: a lot of software running on a lot of computers has vulnerabilities in it. Those vulnerabilities have historically been protected, to some degree, by the sheer difficulty of finding them. That protection is diminishing.

So what does this actually mean for the rest of us?

I’ve been someone who’s cautious about software updates. New versions often introduce their own problems. Sometimes there’s no going back once you’ve updated. I’ve watched people get burned by rushing to the latest version. When I help friends or family with their computers, I’ll check whether their browser or operating system needs updating (browser updates in particular are usually just a restart away), but I’ve held back from being too insistent about it.

I’m changing my approach.

The calculus has shifted. The risk of keeping software with a known vulnerability, especially when that vulnerability can now be found and exploited faster and more cheaply than ever, outweighs the risk of dealing with whatever minor annoyances a new version might introduce. The downside of a buggy update is inconvenience. The downside of an unpatched vulnerability, in a world where exploit-finding is becoming increasingly accessible, is something much worse: potential access to your files, your accounts, your financial information, and your medical records. Think about how much of your life your software touches. Even if you wanted to opt out of all of it, you couldn’t.

My advice is simple, and this applies to your operating system, your web browser, your apps, everything:

When a software update includes security fixes, update promptly.
If you’re not sure whether a given update includes security fixes, seriously consider updating anyway.
Enable automatic updates where you’re comfortable doing so.

If you help anyone else with their devices, this is worth a gentle push. Every time I sit down with someone to help them with something and I notice Chrome is running three versions behind, I ask if I can update it right then. I used to see it as a nice-to-do. Now it feels more urgent than that.

Where this goes from here is uncertain. We’re in a period where the tools to find and exploit vulnerabilities are advancing faster than most software can be patched. Anthropic’s Project Glasswing is an acknowledgment of that gap, and a genuine effort to use the same capability defensively before the offensive version spreads further. Whether the rest of the industry coordinates around this responsibly is an open question. Right now, the competitive dynamics of the AI space don’t exactly reward slowdowns for collective safety.

What makes me cautiously hopeful, however, is that the capability cuts both ways. If AI tools for finding and fixing vulnerabilities become accessible to developers at every scale, the long-term outcome could actually be more secure software than we’ve ever had. The care that independent developers bring to their work, combined with tools that can help them find what they’d otherwise miss, is a genuinely promising combination. Anthropic’s own write-up on this ends with a call to action for the security community, framing it as a moment like the launch of post-quantum cryptography work in 2016 (preparing for the day quantum computers could break today’s encryption, years before that was an immediate threat), preparing for what’s coming rather than reacting to it.

We just need to get there first. In the meantime: update your damn software.

April 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0500

This week we finally got our first real hint of spring. The kind where you can open the windows and let the outside world back in after months of keeping it at bay.

It lasted into the evening, and there’s something about that time I’d forgotten over the winter. The smell coming through the screens was different. Not the bright, clean air of a sunny afternoon, but earthier, more settled — the day cooling down after baking in the sun. The cats noticed immediately. They found spots at every window and got playful and curious in a way they hadn’t been since fall.

I know plenty of cold days are still coming. But it felt, for the first time this year, like something was beginning again. It’s a small win, but I’ll take any I can get these days.

My Picks

Endgame for the Open Web

Anil Dash has perfectly encapsulated the outrage being perpetrated upon us by corporations who are using the best parts of the free and open Internet to take it away from everyone else and exert complete control over our online lives. I’m sharing this one widely.

The West Wing

I recently started rewatching this juggernaut of a political series from the turn of the 21st century, and what a trip it is. Civic exposition! Bipartisanship! Principled living! Sure, it was largely fiction even then, but this is escapism at its best, hinting of a better world if only we’d get our act together. Ahhh.

YouTube Channel Surfer

I’m a sucker for retro interfaces, and this one seems to be hot right now. It lets you watch YouTube like old-fashioned cable TV, in curated, topic-based channels where you drop in to whatever’s currently playing. You can even import the channels you follow.

Tiny Puppet Sound — French House Mix

Right now, the world needs a puppet playing French House music during a lunch break shared among friends. Or at least I do.

Recently Published

Watching Someone Else’s Tuesday

My recent trip got me out of myself and the rut I didn’t even realize I was in so deeply, all because it was a completely different experience, and I couldn’t coast. I had to simply be and do.

My Accidental LLM Diet

One knock-on effect of the trip turned out to be a huge dropoff in my AI use, and it continued for quite a while after I returned. This was an experiment I didn’t intend to run on myself, but it revealed a lot.

In the Groove

Growing up, I kept stumbling into music that had no obvious category. Things that felt like they came from somewhere I hadn’t been yet, sounds that didn’t fit neatly into anything I already knew. Those discoveries had a huge impact. Some of them became foundational, and are still active inside me.

One that’s been on my mind lately is Yello’s first album, Solid Pleasure (1980). I came to it at a formative age, and something about it lodged deep. Listen to Bostitch and try to pin down what you’re hearing. Is it disco? New wave? Something from another planet entirely? That ambiguity is precisely what I love about it. It has a distinct and uncompromising point of view.

Having a distinct point of view isn’t talked about much, but it’s so important. Ideas and creativity get a lot of ink, but I’m starting to realize that execution and point of view are where it’s really at. Those qualities are what I keep reaching for in the music I make. I may not always get there, but it’s the right thing to chase.

We can all use more small wins right now. I hope you’ve got some you’re holding onto, and that more are on their way for all of us.

Until next time…

My Accidental LLM Diet

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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

Over the past four weeks, a series of circumstances stacked up in a way that pushed LLMs to the edges of my life. The week before my recent trip was all logistics (packing, organizing, getting everything together) and none of that required a thought partner. Then I was traveling, and while I did use AI a couple of times while I was away (very targeted, very useful), it wasn’t part of any ongoing work. The week after I got back, I gave myself permission to actually rest, which meant pausing the projects I’d been running. Then my first week back at school was all about implementation, getting back into the rhythm of teaching, not the kind of planning and thinking work where AI earns its keep.

By rough count, I was using an LLM maybe twice a week over those four weeks. For someone who had made it a near-daily habit, that’s a significant drop. And I didn’t even notice until I started ramping back up.

There was no withdrawal. No nagging sense that I was missing something. It wasn’t until I came back to AI tools with intention, starting new projects, picking up threads I’d dropped, that I looked back and thought, huh, I really haven’t been doing this.

To my surprise, that was a relief.

One of the things that had been quietly running in the background of my AI enthusiasm is a worry about dependency. I’ve been integrating these tools at a pretty deep level: using them for research, planning, creative work, and building things I couldn’t have built otherwise. At some point you start to wonder whether you’re developing a reliance that you’d struggle to untangle. Finding out, accidentally, that when the use cases aren’t there I simply don’t reach for it answered something I hadn’t thought to ask.

The diet also surfaced something else: a pressure I’d been carrying that I hadn’t fully named.

When I started to understand what AI makes possible, there was a kind of ambient obligation that set in. You know you can do things now that you couldn’t before, and so there’s this pull to keep doing them. To keep learning. To keep building. Some of that is genuine curiosity. I find this stuff fascinating, and I’m interested in understanding the real shape of what these tools can and can’t do. Some of it is less comfortable: I feel a pressure to demonstrate that AI can be used for good.

That might sound odd, but look around. On one side, you have the corporations pushing AI into every product whether it belongs there or not, positioning it as a labor-saving device that makes human work optional, making promises about societal transformation that I find deeply worrying. On the other side, you have a fully understandable backlash: people who are rightfully upset at how training data was scraped from the web without consent, how the implicit agreement that made search engines work (you let us crawl your site, we send you traffic) has been quietly abandoned, how institutions like the Internet Archive are being destabilized by companies that treat the digital commons as a resource to extract from. Anil Dash’s recent post captures this outrage well. My problem isn’t with the backlash, it’s with people who then decide that the technology itself is evil, when it is actually neutral, and that often comes with an automatic hatred toward users of AI.

Both the boosters and the haters get things wrong, and navigating between them means I’ve felt some responsibility to model a different approach.

That’s why I have a projects section on my Resources page. I believe in these projects. I’ve also made commitments I want to follow through on. But the four weeks of quiet helped me see that the pressure to keep proving the point had been adding stress that wasn’t serving the work.

Going forward, I want to be more intentional about limiting the number of active projects. I also want to hold onto something the diet clarified: knowing when not to use AI is every bit as important as knowing when to use it. The goal was never to build a life organized around these tools. They’re there when they’re useful, and when they’re not, they don’t need to be there at all.

It means the relationship can be functional rather than compulsive. Life is not going to revolve around AI for most of us, despite what the corporations want, even for someone like me who finds a lot of genuine value in it.

Watching Someone Else's Tuesday

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0500

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.

We booked a flight to Amsterdam, but thought weather might make us need to cancel it. Thank goodness we didn’t.

The straightforward version — we went here, we saw this, we ate that — doesn’t capture it. We went somewhere so entirely foreign that we couldn’t coast through it. We had to pay attention, and it was exactly what we needed.

There’s a feeling I chase when I travel somewhere unfamiliar: the signs are in a language I can’t read, the rhythm of the streets is completely different from anything I know, and I become essentially invisible. I’m moving through a place, watching people do ordinary things: school letting out and hundreds of kids walking home through medieval streets, just going wherever kids go after school here, no parents, no carpool line, just children and their bikes and their backpacks heading off into the city. All of it is completely revelatory to me even though it’s just a Tuesday to them. I’m not watching a performance. I’m watching someone else’s life. That gap between their ordinary and my wonder is one of my favorite feelings in the world.

We landed in Amsterdam, tired from an overnight flight, and took the train south toward Rotterdam, where we’d planned to spend a few hours exploring before continuing on to Ghent. We put our luggage in lockers at Rotterdam Centraal, stepped outside, got something to drink, and sat down to sort out our onward connection. That’s when we found out there was a rail strike underway in Belgium.

The loose afternoon we’d imagined disappeared into logistics. We had a quick lunch and got moving.

The route took us through Antwerp, where we transferred for the final leg to Ghent. Antwerp Centraal station stopped me completely. International trains arrive two levels underground; you ride escalator after escalator up through the building until the main hall opens above you, the old historic facade preserved and enclosed inside the modern structure, ornate stone and grand arches at a scale I wasn’t prepared for. It reminded me of the first time I walked into Grand Central. The kind of building that knows it’s beautiful and wants you to know it too. But we didn’t have time to linger, we had a train to catch.

We spent the first half of the trip in Ghent. We chose it mostly for practical reasons: centrally located, reasonably priced, a good base for day trips. I was expecting something like the mid-sized cities I know from home: a hollowed-out industrial core, economically past its peak. What I found was so far from that expectation that it took a full day to recalibrate.

The city is woven through with history in a way that keeps catching you off guard. Cobblestone streets. A castle sitting right in the middle of everything. Canals with boats and walkways along the water. Churches and squares in every direction. Our hotel was one block from the main square. Two doors down, a plaque marked the building where John Quincy Adams signed the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. I stood outside it at dusk and thought: we had absolutely no idea what we were walking into.

We arrived exhausted, went to bed at eight and slept for fourteen hours. By the time we surfaced and started actually exploring, I already knew I wanted to come back.

We took a day trip to Bruges, only twenty minutes away by train. It operates at an even more theatrical scale, so well-preserved it occasionally feels like a film set that happens to have real people in it. We spent part of the morning in pursuit of a vegan cinnamon roll. Every place we’d tried in Ghent had them on the menu; every place was sold out. Bruges had a shop that sold nothing else. We got our cinnamon rolls: coffee and apple streusel, split neatly for sharing. Some satisfactions are small and complete.

The trip wasn’t without its complications. A Belgian rail strike gave way to a nationwide general strike, which managed to affect every form of transportation in the country simultaneously. The day we moved from Ghent back to Amsterdam became an improvised relay of four trains. We were trying to reach Antwerp for an international connection north, but the first train stopped well short and the conductor told us we’d need a bus for the rest of the way. Looking at the map, it was a long way. It’s a lesson I seem to need to relearn every few years: talk to a person. Not the kiosk. Not the app. A person at a counter who knows what’s actually happening. A woman at the station window found us a connection to Antwerp, told us which track, and then walked out from behind the counter into the waiting room to tell us there was an earlier train coming in six minutes. She didn’t have to do that. I think about it a lot. From Antwerp we got as far as Rotterdam, and from Rotterdam a local train finally brought us into Amsterdam Centraal.

None of the chaos was welcome in the moment, but those are the stories we seem to keep telling.

Amsterdam was bigger than I’d imagined, in the way that takes a day to fully absorb. You come out of the train station and there are people and trams and bikes moving in every direction as far as you can see. The rings of canals are extraordinary to walk along. The city felt endlessly explorable and genuinely open, the kind of place that seems unbothered by who you are. We crossed the water on a free ferry to the neighborhoods on the north side and found what might be our favorite museum out of everything we’ve ever visited: the STRAAT Museum, a converted warehouse filled floor-to-ceiling with street art. We were both completely absorbed for hours. Afterward we walked until we couldn’t, then found one more thing to see.

By the time we departed Amsterdam a week after we arrived, I was ready to come home. We landed back at Logan, cleared customs, and found the bus stop. The board said the next bus to where our car was parked was 56 minutes away. After a week running on European time, standing in the cold with exhaust blowing around us, that number felt crushing. About a minute later the bus pulled up — it had been running late, disappeared from the board, and then just appeared. We drove home through an empty highway in the middle of the night. The cats had opinions about how long we’d been gone. I went upstairs and crashed.

What I keep coming back to is how wrong I was about the magnitude of this trip. I knew I needed a reset. What I didn’t know was how much weight had been quietly accumulating, or how completely being somewhere foreign, somewhere that required my full attention and where coasting simply wasn’t an option, could lift it.

Happy to be home. So glad we went.

March 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0500

I’ve been thinking about the gap between the list of things I want to get done and the things I actually get done. For a long time, my attention went almost entirely to what wasn’t finished, and kept getting pushed back. Recently I’ve been trying to flip that around and look at what did happen. Turns out it’s usually plenty. Writing. Teaching. Following through on things that matter. The list of what’s actually getting done is longer than I give it credit for.

It’s a small shift in the way I think, but it changes things. So what should I do with the things I say I want to get done, but always seem to end up putting on the back burner? Let them go? Keep them as open loops until that perfect “someday” comes along? I suspect that what I really should do is figure out what’s blocking me in those areas. Perhaps it’s time to put “personal reflection” on the list.

My Picks

Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural

Panic’s Cabel Sasser tells the full story about the most impactful talk he’s given in his life. Be sure to watch the talk first! It’s a wonderful story, and there’s a great message about the benefits of going down rabbit holes in there, too.

These AI Prompts Exposed My Biggest Blind Spots

Daniel Pink, whose advice I greatly admire, shows how LLMs can surface important things about ourselves that we might not otherwise learn. He bravely demonstrates using his own data, even when it stings, and shows us that these new tools can generate real, valuable insights. I found it fascinating.

Tiny Beautiful Things

This Hulu miniseries is far away from my usual watching habits, but it has such great storytelling that I was quickly drawn in and finished it in a flash. It’s about family and grief, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. The show doesn’t bang you over the head with a message, it doesn’t drag out for season after season, and it’s geared toward a smart, adult audience. I wish there were more shows out there like this.

Embroidery

As I’m continuing to build my Web Development class, I’m always looking for good examples to share with my students. This ~300-line JavaScript program creates beautiful and elaborate embroidery patterns within a live Codepen web page. You don’t have to be a coder to appreciate the beautiful results.

Recently Published

Don’t Let the AI Handle It

There’s a lot of buzz about AI agents right now, where the AI does things on your behalf. Computer automation isn’t new, and there are genuinely useful things that technology can optimize in our lives, but a lot of the consumer-facing AI agents that are being pushed out right now are simply not worth it.

What The Bus Carries

Visiting Cambodia last year was such a profound experience for me, the culmination of so many things coming together over many years, that I felt it was wrong to return and just let the whole thing fade away. This is the story about my involvement in helping get The Khmer Magic Music Bus on the road, and what I’m doing now to try to keep this incredible work going.

In the Groove

I’ve always loved the term “in the pocket” when it comes to music. It’s the magic when the performers are so in sync with one another, it takes the music to a whole new level. Each element pulls, pushes, and vamps with the others to lock in a vibe that can be transcendent. It feels inevitable.

I think Grant Green’s 1970 jazz album Alive is a perfect example of this. The groove the band lays down is solid and a perfect bed for Green to soar above with his guitar. It grabs you right from the opening, and introduces an element of funk into the mix that just screams cool. You can see why hiphop producers were inspired by so many tracks from this era.

In fact, sampling introduces another way to think about the pocket, when you can take part of a live performance and reuse it in new and exciting ways. There’s a direct connection between Alive and one of my all-time favorite albums, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory. Check out Green’s song “Down Here on the Ground,” then listen to “Vibes and Stuff” to see how it’s transformed into a completely different context.

Two different eras, using the same engine. The pocket is real, and it is awesome.

So, what are you making time for these days? More made it onto my “done” list than I’d given myself credit for, and that certainly includes this newsletter. Thanks for reading!

What The Bus Carries

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 05:00:00 -0500

The first time I heard about what would become the Khmer Magic Music Bus, I wasn’t even in Cambodia. I was listening to my colleague Steve describe a rest stop on a long drive through the countryside.

A rented bus had pulled over so everyone could stretch their legs: students, chaperones, and musicians from Cambodian Living Arts on their way to the Thai border to connect with a musician there. Mon Hai took out his khan and began to play. The khan is an ancient wind instrument with a sound that seems to carry its own history, distinctive and reedy. Strange to ears unfamiliar with it.

Children appeared around the corners of their homes. Cautiously at first, then more of them came forward, then adults from the village. Nobody wanted to leave.

In talking with the villagers, Steve learned something he hadn’t expected: these people had never heard music from their own culture. They’d never seen any live performance. Cambodia’s classical musical traditions are among the most sophisticated in human history. Here were Cambodians encountering their own heritage for the first time, delivered by chance on a dirt road.

Steve got home and asked me if we could raise money to buy them a bus.

I had come to teaching after a career in the business world, and I was still in that early stage where everything about education felt like a revelation. When Steve told me that story, something clicked into place.

A year or two before I’d started at the school, Arn Chorn-Pond had visited campus. Arn is a Cambodian-American activist and musician who survived the Khmer Rouge as a child, lost his family, was eventually adopted by an American pastor, and came to New Hampshire, where he then had to survive a different kind of hardship: the racism and hostility of 1980s America. He came and spoke to our students about his journey and his work with Cambodian Living Arts, the organization he’d founded to preserve and revive traditional Khmer arts.

That visit had planted something at our school. My colleagues Steve and Karen started taking students to Cambodia every year, building a relationship with Cambodian Living Arts that was different from what I’d come to think of as typical “poverty tourism.” They went back. Every year. The same people, the same organization, the same commitment to listening and sharing rather than arriving with answers. The Cambodians, many of whom I imagine were used to Westerners showing up once and vanishing, began to trust us. Something real developed.

So when Steve came back from the trip with the story about Mon Hai and the village, I said yes. Let’s give this crazy idea a try.

We coordinated a crowdfunding campaign (this was early in crowdfunding’s history) and raised enough money to buy them a bus. Contributors got updates, then video of the first tour. The musicians traveled to villages that had never had access to their performances. Word came back of moments not unlike that first rest stop, and other moments with large crowds coming to see.

We started a nonprofit. We gave presentations. We looked for donors. We couldn’t make it work. The connections weren’t there, the distance was hard to coordinate across, and I never found my footing as a fundraiser. Eventually the bus broke down. I stepped back from the project and let myself believe it had ended.

I carried that as a kind of private failure for years.

Then the folks in Phnom Penh reached out and asked if I could post a video to the Magic Music Bus website. A ten-year anniversary video.

I watched it and discovered that they had actually never stopped.

They had kept the work going, finding resources, renting buses when theirs broke down, continuing the trips to the countryside. The project had mattered enough to them that they’d found a way to keep it alive without my ability to help — driven in large part by Thorn Seyma, a vocalist known throughout Cambodia and the person who has been the force behind The Bus’s continued life. When I think about the organizational effort that requires (the coordination, the logistics, all of it with limited resources), I understand that The Bus continued because people who believed in its value made sure of it. How wonderful and incredible that is.

So I decided it was time to go see it for myself. I saved for two years and made the trip. Seyma organized the whole thing and traveled with us for three weeks, away from her family and her own work. I was told that my coming mattered — that showing up in person, after all these years, was something. I hadn’t expected that. I’d assumed I was the one receiving the gift, and I was, but it turned out to go both ways. I’ve written about that experience in more detail elsewhere. But one moment belongs here.

On the way to a music school demonstration we stopped at a village on a side road and once again Mon Hai took out his khan. I’ve written about what happened next. What I couldn’t fully write then was what it meant to watch that scene unfold knowing the story behind it — knowing it had happened before, in a different village, years earlier, and that the bus I was riding had grown out of that first moment Steve described to me.

Mon Hai has since had to leave his home. The last I heard, he was living in a refugee camp near the Thai border, displaced by violence. I think about that whenever I think about this project.

I went knowing I was an outsider. Cambodian Living Arts centers Cambodians, not the Westerners who show up wanting to contribute, and I understood immediately why that’s the only way this kind of work makes sense. I wasn’t there to lead anything. I watched. I listened. I helped where I could with whatever was in front of me.

Something that’s stayed with me: the people I met in Cambodia have so much they can’t control about where their society is. Decades of complicated history have shaped a situation full of limits and real hardships. Yet every organization I visited was full of brilliant, purposeful people finding ways to make their communities better with what they have available to them. They are not waiting for some improved future to finally arrive. They are getting up every day and deciding to find meaning through their work and their neighbors and their culture.

I think about that a lot lately. It feels like something this country can learn from.

Coming home, I knew I still couldn’t be a good fundraiser. That was never my talent. But I am a teacher, and teachers know how to make things useful to students and other teachers.

The Carrying Culture Project is my attempt to do exactly that. It’s a series of educational resources designed for secondary school teachers: international studies, global studies, anyone who wants to help students understand more about Cambodia and Cambodian arts. The first resource is a comprehensive Cambodian history timeline, calibrated for middle and high school students.

It took longer than I expected to build, because the more time I spent with Cambodian history (the ancient empire, the colonial period, independence, the Khmer Rouge period, Vietnamese control, UN intervention, and contemporary Cambodia), the more I felt the weight of a Westerner trying to convey someone else’s story. I don’t know if I’ve gotten it right. I’ve done everything I can to treat it with seriousness and care. I’m proud and nervous about it in roughly equal measure.

My hope is that a teacher somewhere opens this and finds it genuinely useful — whether they’re preparing students for a visit from Arn Chorn-Pond (he does a fall tour of schools every year), or getting students ready to travel to Cambodia themselves to work with the KMMB and Cambodian Living Arts, or just wanting to teach this history because it deserves to be taught. Whatever brings someone to it, I want these resources to make it easier for any teacher to bring this history into their classroom.

I don’t know what this will become. I thought The Bus had failed, and it hadn’t. I put everything I had into a timeline about a culture that isn’t mine to document, and I let it go anyway, because the benefit seems worth the risk of imperfection.

The Bus is still running. I helped get it on the road once. The Cambodians made sure it stayed there. And that feels just right.

Don't Let the AI Handle It

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:00:00 -0500

There’s a moment every computer person eventually has, usually more than once, where something gets deleted that can’t come back. Working in the command line for years, I’ve been there. It teaches you, more than anything, that the things you can’t take back deserve a different kind of attention than the things you can.

That lesson has shaped how I think about giving AI access to my files. When I ask it to work within my documents and folders, I’m careful about what I allow and why. I use tools that are secure by default and require me to explicitly grant access before they can do anything significant. It can get tedious. Sometimes I’m mid-workflow and the AI says it needs permission to access something I wasn’t expecting, and I have to stop and decide whether to allow it. I usually ask why it needs that access before I grant it, if it feels important enough. I stay embedded in the process, because every permission I grant is a decision with implications, and I want to be the one controlling it.

That’s why when I look at the AI-enabled agentic tools arriving right now, I’m genuinely worried. Browsers that interpret the web for you. Tools that make purchases on your behalf. Agents that send emails without asking you to hit send.

Part of what concerns me is a distinction that often gets glossed over: AI is not regular automation. If you’ve set up a scheduled script or a simple automation rule, you know what it does, it does exactly that, and nothing else. It doesn’t come up with new interpretations. It doesn’t produce confident answers that happen to be wrong. AI, by the nature of how it works, can do both of those things. When you combine that unpredictability with the ability to take real-world action on your behalf, you’ve created something that can cause harm in ways that are hard to anticipate and harder to reverse.

Most of the time, things might go fine. But the question I keep coming back to is: what’s the worst that can happen when they don’t? With an AI that has access to your financial information and is empowered to act on it, or one that can access your medical records, or one that sends emails in your name, the worst case gets serious fast.

An AI-enabled browser is its own particular concern. When you use one, you’re not actually browsing the web anymore. You’re receiving an AI’s interpretation of it, filtered through a company now sitting between you and everything you do online. Judgment calls are being made that aren’t yours: about what to show you, how to summarize it, and what counts as relevant. Your entire experience of the internet is flowing through an intermediary that knows a great deal about you and your browsing habits.

Companies launching these tools will tell you they have strong privacy policies. I believe some of them mean it, but we have a clear model for how this plays out: Facebook promised privacy, and once everyone was hooked, the rules changed. They promised you’d see posts from the people you cared about most, and then the algorithm changed and that went away too. Corporations make promises to get you to adopt a product, and then, once you’re dependent, they optimize for their interests.

I make sure to use AI tools that keep me explicitly in the loop. They’re secure by default. They ask permission before accessing anything significant. When I’m uncertain why a tool is requesting something and don’t know what damage it might do, I ask before I grant it. It’s not seamless, but that friction is the point — it keeps me directly involved in the process, understanding what I’m allowing and why.

The pitch for agentic AI tools is essentially the opposite: let me handle this for you, you don’t need to worry about it. That’s a useful pitch for selling products, but it’s not a philosophy I trust with things that matter, like my financial accounts, my health information, and my communications. The cost of something going wrong there is real and personal in a way that’s hard to fully appreciate until it happens.

I haven’t seen a compelling reason to change that view. Not yet. We’ll see.

February 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 05:00:00 -0500

At the moment, my life is in disarray. A record Arctic cold snap has turned normal routines upside down. The water to the upstairs is shut off. We’re going crazy each night to keep the remaining pipes from freezing. An ice dam is causing water to leak into our house. I’ve injured my knee, not through anything cool like snowboarding, but because the cat slept on it wrong. The new web development class I’ve spent months preparing for has turned into a dumpster fire because of incorrect assumptions, snow days, and a fractured schedule.

To say the least, I’m feeling out of sorts, which has me thinking about the pressure to curate ourselves online, presenting our lives as these perfect, effortless entities. But things get messy. I know this chaos isn’t permanent, just like I know that when things are going well, that state won’t last either.

It’s okay for life to be messy. It’s okay to struggle. It’s okay to be honest about it. Through understanding the adversities we face, we can better appreciate the supports we have and recognize that both the hard times and the good ones are temporary. Plus, it was a pretty good month for other things, as you can see by my picks, posts, and grooves below.

My Picks

How Will the Miracle Happen Today?

This post by Kevin Kelly grabbed me by my metaphorical lapel and shook me up in all the best ways. I’ve done so much thinking about how I can be kind to other people, and never once thought about how important it is to let myself be the recipient of direct, non-reciprocal kindness in turn.

AGI is here (and I feel fine)

Robin Sloan’s new AI pop-up newsletter is worth reading for anyone interested in AI’s impact on all of us. The first missive is a barn-burner, too. He makes the compelling case that the dreaded/ lauded “artificial general intelligence” milestone was actually met a while ago.

MTV Rewind h/t Kottke

Experience old-school music videos the way I did as a kid with this free player. The last time I was on this page, it was playing videos from the first full day in order. Pat Benatar is still incredible!

The Lowdown This FX series is exactly what I needed right now. Sterlin Harjo’s new show is a gritty, Western noir with fantastic characters, a propulsive plot, and laugh-out-loud scenes that kept me interested and entertained throughout. Stars like Ethan Hawke, Keith David, and Kyle McLaughlin bring stellar performances, and the soundtrack brings it all together.

Recently Published

Using Claude Code Beyond Coding

Anthropic’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, is getting a lot of buzz lately for good reasons. It’s an amazing tool, but limiting its use to programming tasks is leaving vast capabilities untapped. Their newest tool may just be the way to get folks to see the power of a co-intelligence that has access to files on your computer.

Ten Years of Mostly Good Days

On December 31st, 2025 I reached ten years of daily journaling, and I learned a lot from all those entries. What I didn’t expect is what would happen on January 1st.

In the Groove

For record collectors, there are a few “holy grail” platters that you can search for your entire life, but never find. One of those rarest of unicorns was a 1982 album from the London suburbs that combined Indian wedding music with a cutting edge (for the time) drum machine and synthesizer.

It’s called Punjabi Disco, it’s finally been rereleased, and for the first time it’s available digitally for everyone to enjoy. The story is that the mom, Mohinder Kaur Bhamra, was a prominent traditional wedding singer for the Indian diaspora, but she became frustrated because the men and women weren’t dancing together. She asked her children to help, and they brought along their electronic instruments.

The result is something unlike anything I’ve heard. Danceable beats, new wave hooks, and amazing vocals combine into a whole that makes me smile from ear to ear. It also grooves, with basslines that make you want to get up and start moving. Standout tracks for me include Disco Wich Aa, Par Toon Ki Janay, and Ve Tu Jaldi Jaldi Aa, but the entire thing begs a listen. It’s all exceptional, and I’m so glad we can now access it.

Until Next Time

Things are already starting to look up. My knee is improving, and the forecast promises relief from the Arctic air soon. The days are getting longer, and I know that when spring comes, I’m going to be happier about it than I’ve been in years.

I hope things are going well for you as you read this. But if not, I get it. Hang in there, and I hope things start to improve soon.

Ten Years of Mostly Good Days

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 05:00:00 -0500

On December 31st, I finished a ten-year daily journal. Every single day for a decade, I wrote an entry. The format was simple: one page per day, laid out so that when I flipped back through, I could see exactly where I was on any given date ten years prior. It was a satisfying thing to complete.

Most of what I wrote about was pretty boring. The weather, what I was thinking about at work, the cats doing something funny, a nice walk. Nothing extraordinary, nothing special. Just the texture of an ordinary day. Those days turned out to be among the best.

I rated each day with a number between one and ten. Over ten years, the distribution settled into something I wasn’t expecting. The vast majority of my days were eights. After that, sevens. I had maybe nine or ten days in the entire decade that I rated a ten, and maybe four or five ones. Everything else gravitated toward that seven-to-eight range, with a few threes (usually when I had a cold), and fives when I was fine, but annoyed. I kept coming back to the sevens and eights when I was reading, though. How good most of my last ten years was! How much of life is just folding laundry and playing video games and having a perfectly fine day.

The harder stretches showed up too, of course. There were losses in my family, more than once. There was the pandemic. There were days that were rough. I could see them in the journal, a cluster of low numbers, a note about something difficult. I could also see them end. The numbers would creep back up. The entries would shift back toward the mundane. The same thing happened in reverse with the extraordinary periods. Something wonderful would happen, and for a while everything felt right, and I tried to write about that feeling when it was there. Sometimes I managed it. Sometimes I didn’t. Either way, it didn’t last forever. Nothing did. The days kept moving back toward the middle, and reading that pattern across ten years of actual entries was one of the more satisfying things I took away from the whole project.

Then, on January 1st, when I sat down to write my entry for the day, the thought came up almost immediately: I don’t want to do this anymore.

It surprised me. I enjoyed journaling. It had been part of my daily life for a decade. There was no frustration with it, no feeling that it had gone sour. The issue was that it had become a chain. Don’t break the streak. Keep going. Finishing the ten-year milestone cracked that open, because for the first time I could actually step back and ask whether what I was getting out of it was worth the time and attention I was giving it every single day. Once I asked that question honestly, the answer was pretty clear.

What I’m losing is real, though. I don’t have a great memory. There are so many details from the last ten years that I’d completely forgotten, a concert we went to, a restaurant that became one of my favorites, small moments that mattered at the time and then just disappeared. The journal brought those back. Without it, they stay gone. I know that going in, and I’m still making the choice.

I’m not sure what replaces it, if anything does. I already do a lot of debriefing in other parts of my life, for professional stuff and creative work, and I’ve been thinking about whether something like that might work for the day-to-day. Something less like a record of what happened and more like a way of processing it. The logistics aren’t hard; I could probably make it work with a set of weekly files, something I could look back on. Whether I actually do it, though, I don’t know yet.

But I do know this: the ordinary days are the good ones. I’m glad I have ten years of writing them down to help me see that.

Using Claude Code Beyond Coding

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 05:00:00 -0500

For over a year now, my favorite large language model has been Anthropic’s Claude. I use it in two ways: the way that’s most familiar to people, chatting in my web browser or their desktop app, and a specialized, programming-focused interface called Claude Code that I run directly in a folder on my computer. Claude Code has actually become my favorite way to access Anthropic models, so when I saw their announcement about Cowork, which is essentially a version of Claude Code that isn’t oriented toward building software, I got genuinely excited. That’s exactly how I’ve been using it myself.

It started while I was working on actual coding projects. I’d have Claude Code create to-do lists and parking lot documents so that when something popped into my head mid-work, I could just describe everything, get it out of my head, and tell it to add what I said to wherever it belonged. That works in non-programming contexts, too.

My music composition notes are a good example. The software I use to take notes, Obsidian, happens to save notes in a format that LLMs really like (which is partly why I chose it). I opened Claude Code in that folder, and it did what it always does first - it looks through and catalogs everything, creating an overview file that explains the folder structure and purpose. Now Claude has an understanding of what’s there.

The workflow that emerged from this feels almost magical. I now do a quick debrief for each composition session, talking through what happened, what worked, what didn’t, and what’s next. I can switch between songs at any time, too.

Sometimes I ask questions, sometimes I get feedback, this is the usual back-and-forth I’d have with the web interface, but now that as I’m working, I know it’ll remember any questions or ideas that come up. Most of the time, it just sits idle as my attention is focused on the music itself, but I know it’s there whenever I need it.

At the end of my session, I briefly talk through what I did, what I’m thinking and what might be good for the next session. Claude Code creates a session log that prepares me for next time. Before this, I kept basic notes in Obsidian with a few bullet points, but it didn’t capture the richness that comes from talking things through. I never had a parking lot before, so I’d write on post-its or just hope to keep everything in my head. Now everything gets captured and organized properly.

That organizational structure is one of the most valuable parts. Notes get stored and sorted in different places. When I use the web browser version of Claude, everything stays in one conversation thread. With Claude Code, it does all the organizational work. It helps prioritize and organize thoughts, creates this running series of session notes I can refer to, and lets me identify patterns over time. It becomes a knowledge repository with connections. Because it’s in Obsidian, it’s easy to access, edit, and review.

This points to a broader shift in working with LLMs. A year ago, it was all about prompt engineering - carefully structuring each question or instruction to get the best results. I don’t think that’s as important anymore. I can just talk naturally, and the LLM figures it out. The crucial skill now is context management, making sure the AI has access to the right information and files it needs to be genuinely helpful, rather than worrying about how I phrase each individual request.

I’m still learning when to limit versus expand context. Sometimes too much context muddies the waters. You have to monitor the results. Other times, having a ton of context is great. The nice thing about working through the terminal (the command line interface I mentioned) is that you can direct Claude Code to specific files rather than uploading everything at once.

The Markdown format I mentioned earlier plays a huge role in why this works so well. It’s a lightweight text formatting system that uses simple symbols (like # for headings or * for bullet points) instead of complex styling. I constantly convert webpages to Markdown using a browser extension, especially with documentation. I create a new folder and save Markdown versions of all relevant docs. It’s lightning quick for Claude to refer to, understand, and keep in context, and it takes up so much less room than other formats. More compact means more effective. It’s optimized for how computers, particularly AI, think, with headings and subheadings and a reduced subset of text tools. It’s easy to maintain clarity, which is a huge benefit for technology work (and my own brain, as it turns out), so it’s structured and streamlined for both humans and machines to parse.

Obsidian’s role in this workflow is equally important. I can take any file and provide it directly to Claude. It’s easy to access, edit, and review. Obsidian lets me create clickable links between documents (wiki-style linking), which means I can build a network of connected notes. My mixing tips can reference my arrangement workflow, which can point to specific song session notes. I can create guides, either authored by me or created by Claude for learning, and have these available to reference during sessions. “Look at my mixing tips” or “Go through my arrangement workflow” become natural parts of the conversation.

Claude Code can also search the internet internally using Anthropic’s servers. It can get information, do research, and have conversations about musical concepts it already knows. When I wanted a cascading echo effect like the space intro to Steve Miller’s Fly Like and Eagle, I could ask it to research whether anyone had written about that technique. Beyond storing information, it helps prioritize, organizes thoughts as they happen, builds context over time, and creates actionable next steps.

What’s particularly great is that this workflow applies to any creative or complex project. It shows what’s possible when AI handles the organization and you focus on the creative work itself. The system grows more useful over time as the knowledge repository keeps expanding and connecting. And with Cowork coming out, this becomes generally available to anyone with a $20 a month subscription. I’m very happy about that, even though I’ll stick with the terminal myself. There are some mega geeky superpowers that I just can’t get elsewhere (yet).

January 2026 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 05:00:00 -0500

I’ve been thinking about the research showing that strong friendships and social connections are an indicator of longevity. Initially it seems weird. You’d think it would be about diet, exercise, stress reduction, and things like that. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. When you have close friends and social connections, that sustains you. It gives you things to look forward to, people you can vent to and laugh with. You can find out about their lives, too: what they’re doing, what’s important to them. Then they can do the same for you.

I’m lucky enough to have great friendships, some going back over 30 years. The thing that amazes me about my friends is they accept all of me, including parts that I know don’t always rub people the right way. So I’m starting 2026 feeling really grateful for the people that I have in my life.

My Picks

I’m limiting myself to two geeky shares this month. Let’s start with more general interest things first…

The Secret to Loving Winter [gift link]

Rafaela Jinich explores how embracing the inevitable can help us get through these cold, dark days in this Atlantic article. Poets and deep-thinkers have a lot of good things to say, and it helps, but getting all the way to “love” won’t be easy for me.

Size of Life

Neal Agarwal has created another wonderful online experience for us to enjoy. This one spans life on our planet, from its smallest to its largest. It’s a fantastic interface, interesting topic, and beautiful presentation.

The Mr. Bean Christmas Special

It’s a little late for this one, I realize, but I only found out that it’s available to watch for free online the day before Christmas! I’m a huge Rowan Atkinson fan, and his work as Mr. Bean is among my favorites, particularly because it connects to a long tradition of wordless comedy going back to Jacques Tati, Charley Chaplin, and Buster Keaton. This episode is one of my all-time favorites.

Phoenix Code

I’ve been considering a lot of different code editors for use in my upcoming web development class, and have settled on Phoenix Code. It’s the winner because it hits the sweet spot between utility and simplicity. It’s also free and runs on Windows, MacOS, Chromebooks, and the web. It has everything you need right out of the box to start working on web development, including streamlined version control (with git), great previews, and tools to check and clean up your code.

The Resonant Computing Manifesto

The way we use technology in our society, particularly online, is due to deliberate choices that have been made. These choices often don’t support human thriving, and are instead optimized for profit and extraction. It’s wonderful to see a general movement against these forces in our society, and this manifesto speaks to the technology choices we make. We can do better, and this is a great way to start.

Recently Published

The Pattern We’ve Seen Before

Last month I saw Cory Doctorow speak about his most recent book, Enshittification. It was equal parts fascinating and infuriating, and got me thinking about similar patterns that might take hold in AI.

A Year of Small Steps

Looking back on a full year of writing and thinking online with this newsletter and my website, I’ve learned a lot.

In the Groove

One of the most exciting pieces of news over the last month was that one of my musical heroes, Fela Kuti, was the first African musician to get a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Sadly, it’s posthumous, but still an important recognition of a fearless and fierce career. He was unabashedly political, and paid a heavy price for his advocacy of freedom.

He was my first exposure to the Afrobeat sound, with long, propulsive grooves and a massive sense of power being projected with every beat, riff, and solo. A great place to start is the double-album Best of the Black President that can be streamed on most platforms or purchased from Bandcamp.

I think as we age it’s difficult to make new friends, and it’s very easy for existing ones to drift off. This year my resolution is to make sure I appreciate the great people in my life and let them know how much they mean to me.

I write this newsletter for you, friends I know and perhaps a few I haven’t yet met. Thank you for reading and I hope you have a wonderful 2026.

A Year of Small Steps

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 10:07:27 -0500

I’ve been thinking lately about how much can happen when you just keep showing up. Not in any dramatic way, just consistently, month after month.

A year ago I started this website and newsletter without really knowing where it would lead. I knew I needed to create something, needed that sense of agency when a lot feels out of our control these days. So much of the internet has become this corporate, tracked, optimized thing, and I wanted to build a small corner that felt different. Friends started asking what I thought about AI because I’ve been into it for years and now it’s everywhere. I needed to think it through. Maybe writing it all down would help.

So I started. Twice a month, a post. Once a month, a newsletter to people I care about.

Now it’s been a year. Twenty-seven articles. Twelve newsletters. Something like 35,000 words that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Wow. I didn’t set out to write a book’s worth of material. I just kept showing up.

What surprised me most was how the work found its own shape. AI kept pulling me back, not because I planned to be “the AI person,” but because I discovered things worth exploring there. Building Babbleborg with my students, wrestling with the ethics, and watching young people use it in unexpected ways were all worth writing about. The work I was interested in seemed to be about that intersection of technology and education, so that’s what it became.

Cambodia brought me something completely unexpected. Five pieces documenting a trip that changed me. Not travel writing, really. More like completing a circle that started a decade ago when I helped start the Khmer Magic Music Bus from thousands of miles away. Going there, meeting the people, riding on the Bus. Beginning work on resources that matter to them. Those pieces let me write about things I’d rarely touched. Things like cultural exchange, historical trauma, and what it means to show up for work that isn’t about you.

The newsletters became their own thing, too. More personal than the articles. The bus stop on my front lawn, my relationship with winter, that perfect moment when the gas tank is full and the laundry is done and the fridge is stocked. Almost fifty recommendations over the year for things I genuinely love. Updates on music-making even when progress stalled. Reaching out each month like writing to a friend.

I’m grateful for what the practice has given me. That sense of agency I was looking for? I found it. Clarity about AI? It’s there in the work. A sustainable creative outlet? Turns out twice a month is exactly sustainable enough. Space on the small web built my way? It’s all there.

There’s this tension I haven’t resolved, though. I deliberately don’t track metrics. No analytics, no user data, and no engagement optimization. It aligns with everything I believe about the promise of the internet. But it means I create mostly without knowing if anyone’s reading. I’ve explored ways to reach more people. Looked at Medium, thought about platforms. For some reason, I’ve been hesitant to put myself out there more. Perhaps that’s a useful thing to consider in more depth next year.

For now, the work serves the people I can point it to. Colleagues asking about AI can get articles on ethics and classroom practice. The links database keeps growing with every newsletter recommendation. Small steps that compound into something useful.

Writing regularly has made me better at it. Ideas come more naturally now. I’m not trying to sound as much like an expert anymore, as well, from looking at some of my earlier posts. Now I’m just someone sharing what they’ve learned while still figuring plenty out.

What might come next? Well, AI will keep evolving. New agentic capabilities are starting to come online, systems that don’t just respond but take action. The change between “AI as thought partner” and “AI as autonomous agent” could make a big impact. I’ll have plenty to say about that.

My Cambodia work continues. I have some exciting new educational resources coming online next year. Tending this online garden continues, too. Twice monthly posts, monthly newsletters, building this little part of the web that’s mine.

Year two starts soon. More small steps, more showing up, more willingness to see where it leads. That’s been enough so far.

The work reminds me of something I wrote in this month’s newsletter about open loops — all those perpetual tasks that never really finish, like groceries, laundry, and gas. Creating content is another one of those loops. There’s always another post, another newsletter, and another idea worth exploring. But there’s also that rare moment when everything lines up, you look back, and see what accumulated from just showing up consistently.

I’m grateful you’re here reading this. Whether you’ve been following along all year or you’re just finding this now. We’re all figuring it out as we go, and I’m so glad you’re a part of it.

The Pattern We've Seen Before

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:52:19 -0500

I recently heard Cory Doctorow speak about enshittification, his framework for understanding how digital platforms decay over time. The talk was wonderful and thought-provoking in the way good author talks should be. Cory challenges my thinking regularly, particularly when we don’t see eye to eye. I actually agree with most of what he says about AI, though my personal experience leads me to draw different conclusions from time to time.

His analysis of platform decay got me thinking about patterns. Specifically, about where we are right now with large language models, and whether we’re standing at a familiar crossroads.

This isn’t a doom and gloom piece. The problems I’m going to describe aren’t happening now. We’ve seen this story before with social media, and understanding that pattern might help us recognize if it starts to repeat.

Enshittification describes a specific trajectory that digital platforms tend to follow. They start by offering genuine value to users. In the early days of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, these platforms really did help people connect with friends and family, discover communities, and share experiences. The promise was real.

Then comes the shift. Platforms begin optimizing for engagement and profit over user benefit. They introduce algorithmic feeds that show you content you didn’t ask for, content chosen not because it’s valuable to you but because it keeps you scrolling. They build walled gardens that make it hard to leave or use alternatives. Crucially, the focus moves from serving users to serving advertisers, because that’s where the money is. Your experience becomes secondary to keeping you exposed to ads. Then, once the advertisers are hooked, they make it worse for them, too.

Social media’s trajectory shows us where this leads. What started as tools for connection became engines of toxicity, misinformation, and polarization. The optimization for engagement meant amplifying outrage and division, because those keep people on the platform. Real harms followed, ranging from mental health impacts to, in extreme cases, platforms being used to promote genocide.

The core promise of social media is still valuable. Getting that experience today requires choosing alternatives to the major corporations, like Mastodon or ActivityPub-based platforms that prioritize interoperability and user control. Even BlueSky concerns me because it’s a corporate entity. At some point, if they need to make money, things might change.

We’re not dealing with the advertiser pressure yet in the LLM space. That’s an important distinction. The revenue models are different right now. Whether that remains true depends on decisions that haven’t been made yet, at least to our knowledge.

Large Language Models are at a different stage right now, as well. They’re becoming more adaptable, responding to what they perceive as our needs without requiring carefully crafted prompts to get the most out of them. I’ve seen this evolution in my own classroom.

My eighth grade students use a simple Gemini setup with basic instructions about their project that creates a “project coach” resource they can turn to when they have questions or want to think things through before coming to me. These students are getting useful results with minimal scaffolding. A few years ago, this would have required much more elaborate prompting and careful instructional design.

One of my students was doing precise calculations in CAD software and found the LLM helpful for working through advanced math and engineering questions that I couldn’t assist with. We didn’t have an engineer on call, yet my student could have a back-and-forth conversation instead of piecing together information from random forum posts. It wasn’t perfect, but it was genuinely useful.

This shift toward more adaptable conversation is good. It makes these tools more accessible and natural to use. With less friction, more people are able to benefit from the technology. The barrier between having an idea and getting help thinking it through has lowered considerably. This same shift also means AI companies have more control over how these tools behave.

When models aren’t calibrated to their liking, companies can adjust them. They can tweak how the AI responds, what tone it takes, and how it engages with users. Sometimes these adjustments happen transparently, and sometimes they don’t. Recently there was a controversy when OpenAI adjusted ChatGPT to be less sycophantic in its responses. A lot of users were upset. They’d gotten used to the AI being extra supportive and affirming, and when that behavior decreased, they felt that the tool had gotten worse.

I actually thought the change was good, and reflected the right kind of thinking. I still think current models are too validating, trying to interact like a human friend. My suspicion is that excessive validation promotes dependency and keeps people engaged with the platform. The same way social media learned that outrage and division keep people scrolling, AI companies might learn that affirmation and agreeableness keep people coming back.

This gets at something important about how these systems could be optimized. If AI companies calibrate their models the way advertisers calibrate campaigns, testing and optimizing for engagement metrics, we know where that leads. We’ve seen it with social media. The optimization happens in secret. Users experience the results without understanding the changes being made or the priorities driving them.

Right now, the incentive structures for AI companies don’t necessarily mirror social media companies. It depends entirely on the choices corporations make. I believe it’s possible to be profitable and still decide to center human benefit alongside business sustainability.

The temptation to do otherwise exists, though. The pressure to monetize, to justify massive speculation bubbles, and to show returns to investors creates a pull toward different priorities. When that pressure intensifies, the track record for corporate technology isn’t encouraging. We’ve watched companies choose profit over user welfare repeatedly. I don’t want to suggest that the people working in these companies are evil. I admire many tremendously. It’s just that the systems in place may reward choices that are bad for people, but good for making money.

Here’s the tension I’m trying to hold: technically, AI is only going to get better from here. The models will become more capable, more sophisticated, and better at understanding and responding to what we need. That trajectory seems solid, even if the pace has slowed.

Our access to those improvements isn’t guaranteed, though. The optimization priorities that guide development could shift. Free tiers that exist today might disappear, which is particularly galling given that these models were trained on content from the free and open internet. If you’re profiting off of humanity’s collective output largely without permission or compensation, there’s an argument that you owe it to us humans to make the results available at some basic level.

We’re at the early stage of this journey right now. There’s genuine competition between providers. We have access to powerful models at no cost. Multiple companies are pushing the technology forward in different directions. This creates real value for users.

Whether this continues depends on decisions yet to be made. The pressure to monetize will intensify. The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on data centers will demand returns. When the focus shifts from user benefit to profit extraction, we could see consolidation and control similar to what happened with social media. The conditions that enabled social media’s corruption exist here too, even if the outcome isn’t inevitable.

There is a glimmer worth noting: open source models represent a potential alternative path. If models approaching current flagship performance could run locally on our own computers, that fundamentally changes the dynamic. Even if commercial AI froze at today’s capability level, I could spend a lifetime getting value from it.

I’m not trying to tell anyone how to use these tools. Use them however works for you. What I am suggesting is that we stay aware. Don’t assume that what we have access to now will continue unchanged. Don’t take for granted that the priorities guiding development will stay user-focused.

The corporate track record matters. We’ve seen how platforms that started with genuine promise evolved when profit became the primary driver. We’ve watched the optimization of engagement create real harm. We know what happens when user experience becomes secondary to other things.

Watch for the patterns. Notice when models get tweaked in ways that seem designed to keep you engaged rather than serve your actual needs. Pay attention to how access changes, how pricing structures evolve, and whether free tiers continue to exist. Consider whether the improvements benefit users or serve other interests first.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet. The tools available today are genuinely remarkable and useful. I use them often and find tremendous value in them. That’s exactly why it matters to stay alert to how things might change.

We’re still at the beginning of this weirdness. The decisions being made now about how to develop, deploy, and monetize these tools will shape what’s possible for years to come. Understanding the pattern we’ve seen before doesn’t guarantee we can prevent it from repeating, but it does give us a better chance of recognizing it if it starts.

December 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 05:00:00 -0500

Something very special happened recently, and I almost didn’t even notice it. For a few days, I had achieved the domestic trifecta: I had a full tank of gas, my fridge and pantry were stocked up, and I had a load of laundry cleaned, folded, and put away.

There are all these open loops in life, unresolved things that are constantly gnawing at the back of my mind because I know they’re not yet done. So many of them are perpetual. Getting food, being able to go from point A to point B, having clean clothes. It’s a never-ending cycle of things that I must remember to do or life gets uncomfortable.

It was such a relief to realize that I didn’t have to think about those things. For a brief and wonderful time, I was free. Which is why I have to remind myself that this stuff always gets done, somehow, some way, as it always has. Things will be fine. And when everything lines up for a few days like this? Pure domestic bliss.

My Picks

WeatherStar 4000+

I just love this retro ’90s way of checking out my local weather. Lots of bits to configure if you’d like, too.

Color Palette Pro

There are plenty of good, easy ways to create and explore color schemes, but sometimes I like to ~~overcomplicate~~ approach things from a different perspective. This is a roll-up-your-sleeves tool modeled like an analog synthesizer, with tons of room for experimentation and discovery.

Double Fine PsychOdyssey

This 33-episode documentary on YouTube is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. It’s rare to get this kind of access to a creative team working to balance limited resources and the pull of market forces with making art and publishing a top-tier game. Yes, it’s long and involved. That’s the point, and it’s an unparalleled experience.

A history of the Internet, part 3: The rise of the user

Jeremy Reimer’s final installment in his excellent history of the Internet covers the period where it became a fixture in everyday people’s lives. I remember the early 2000’s web fondly, and miss the weirdness that used to be a big part of it.

Recently Published

This month I wrote about an open protocol tool that’s become indispensable and my upcoming class. I’ve also shifted to a new graphic format for my post banner images.

RSS Readers and the Art of Self-Curation

There’s an Internet protocol called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) that lets us collect new content from our favorite online providers all in one place. It’s integral to making the most of my online time, and super easy to set up. Check it out and give it a try, it’s free!

Learning Web Development in an AI World

I’m teaching a new web development class in a few weeks, and it’s forced me to face the fact that AI can create perfectly serviceable web pages and sites. Why learn about this stuff if we can offload the work to a computer? It turns out that there are some very good reasons to put in the effort.

In the Groove

I’ve been listening to a lot of Indian classical music lately, and find that it transports me to a place that no other music can. There’s a feeling that comes from this brilliant music that is rooted in millennia of tradition. It balances improvisation with a set of rules that keep things together enough so that it doesn’t become chaotic. Everything is harmonious.

This is music that is perfect for meditation and contemplation, but it also features a dynamism and energy, especially with the interplay between expert musicians. They’re working with forms that they have perfected over years, sometimes decades, and elements interlock and dance with one another in ways that are just delightful. These aren’t pop songs. You have to settle into it, and give it time to permeate.

I also find it very refreshing to listen to music from a non-Western tradition. It evokes a different sensibility and understanding of tone and time. I’ve been very lucky to have been to several live performances from greats including Zakir Hussain, who sadly passed away recently, and the experience is truly transcendent. Being there, in that space together with the musicians and audience, is unlike any other concert experience.

If you would like to experience some of it for yourself, a good start might be a wonderful live recording of two ragas on the album Shringar released by Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. Read the liner notes to see how deeply spiritual the music is, wait for a full moon, then put it on and get ready to sink into the beautiful sound.

Until Next Time

How do you deal with your open loops, with the things that never seem to get done? For me, I’m learning to notice those rare moments when everything’s handled, even briefly. We’re all working through the same perpetual cycles, and somehow that makes it feel a bit less overwhelming.

Learning Web Development in an AI World

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 20:25:13 -0500

I’m getting nervous about my new web development class now that it’s just a few weeks away. It’s my first time teaching older students — tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders — for a full semester, and I’m doing it alone. Last year I dipped my toes in with a smaller group, learned some things, and made some mistakes. But this is different.

This is an elective course, which means that my students are choosing to be there. They’re giving up a slot in their schedule to learn web development, and I keep thinking about whether I can make that choice worth their time.

My nervousness isn’t just about being new to this particular teaching challenge. It connects to something deeper about why I’m standing in front of a classroom at all.

I quit my job in the business world back in the early 2000s because I believed in what the internet could become. I grew up in the ’80s reading about personal computing and the internet from people who saw it as a liberating force, a way for individuals to connect, create, and share outside of traditional gatekeepers and corporate control. That vision held so much possibility for me that I walked away from one career to try to help young people understand and use these tools. I became a teacher because I thought technology could empower people, giving them agency and voice in a world that often tries to take those things away.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way. The internet has been corporatized and fragmented. Algorithms decide what we see. Closed platforms shape how we connect. It leads to division rather than community, to inauthentic slop rather than genuine expression. I’m devastated about how things have ended up.

Here’s what keeps me going, nonetheless: the web as it was originally created hasn’t disappeared. We can still use it as a personal space, and as a place for connection and expression that isn’t controlled by corporations. You can still get a domain for about fifteen dollars a year, host a site for free on GitHub Pages, and be there right alongside the richest people and biggest corporations in the world. Your website is just as accessible as theirs. You’re in the game with the same basic tools they have. That democratizing aspect of the open web is still real, still available, and still worth teaching.

For me, that’s what this class is really about.

I work with plenty of students who make web pages and some of them get frustrated with the constraints of website builders like Google Sites or Wix. They’ve bumped up against the site builder’s limitations and find it stifling. I get it. Everything looks the same, you get upsold to paid plans, and you can’t quite make it do what you want. Learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript removes those constraints entirely. It’s literally a blank slate. The more time you invest, the more control you have over what you create.

More than just control, it’s about developing your own perspectives and sensibilities. When you learn web development fundamentals, you’re not just learning syntax and tags. You’re forming opinions about design. You’re drawing conclusions about usability and accessibility. You’re developing an aesthetic sense — what color schemes work for you, what typefaces feel right, how elements should be arranged. You’re asking questions that go beyond the technical: What’s the purpose of this website? Who’s the audience? What do I want them to experience? Why is this worth their time?

All of that gets mixed with your own experiences and desires to create something that’s unique, and something that doesn’t look like everyone else’s site. It’s human rather than generic, informed by your perspective rather than defaulting to the least common denominator. That’s powerful. It’s a distinguishing factor in a world that often pushes us toward sameness.

This is where the AI question gets interesting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how artificial intelligence fits into a web development class. You can’t responsibly teach web development today without acknowledging that AI coding tools exist and that students can use them. I use them constantly myself. I’ve built entire websites with AI assistance, including my Babbleborg build guide, a digital signage system for my school, and this very site with Hugo. I don’t do web development without AI anymore. It’s too useful.

So why not just teach students to describe what they want and iterate with ChatGPT or Claude until they get a functional website? Why spend a semester learning HTML and CSS when an AI can write it instantly?

I’ve been wrestling with this question, playing devil’s advocate with myself. Through talking it out, I’ve come to believe that foundations really do matter, but not for the reasons I first thought.

Learning web development fundamentals gives you two critical things. First, it gives you perspective and sensibility. That’s your developed sense of how things should work, what looks good, and what serves your purpose. Second, it gives you knowledge of what’s actually possible. You can’t direct an AI toward something you don’t know exists. You also can’t evaluate whether an AI’s suggestion is useful if you don’t understand the toolbox.

With those foundations, AI becomes something different. It’s not replacing your thinking, it’s amplifying your vision. You can collaborate with it as a genuine thought partner. You bring your perspective, your knowledge of capabilities, and your sense of direction. AI helps you think comprehensively, suggests approaches you might not have considered, and lets you experiment more boldly because you have the confidence to evaluate what works and what doesn’t.

The result is something that’s distinctly yours, but supercharged. It’s informed by your sensibilities rather than defaulting to AI’s generic output. You’re creating something authentic, something that reflects who you are as a thinker, builder, and creator.

Without that foundation, you’re just getting whatever the AI thinks is standard. You’ll get functional websites, sure. For many people, that’s perfectly fine. But if you actually want to create something that represents you, that comes from your perspective, and that isn’t just another template, you need to understand the tools for yourself first.

I want my students to feel what I felt when I realized I could build pretty much anything I could imagine. Not because I’m a professional developer (I’m not), not because I know every framework and library (I don’t), but because I understand the fundamentals well enough to have confidence in my capabilities. That confidence changes what you think is possible, and it changes what you’re willing to try.

I think we need more of that right now. So much in our world feels out of our control. We’re told what to watch, what to buy, and how to think. Algorithms curate our reality. Corporate interests that don’t give a damn about human thriving shape our digital spaces. The internet that was supposed to liberate us has, in many ways, done the opposite.

Learning web development is a way to push back against that. It’s a way to exert some control, and to create something on your own terms. We need ways to use the internet for good things rather than just consuming what we’re fed or piling onto the social media outrage du jour. Every project I work on is trying to make the world a little better in some small way. None of it is commercial. I’m not charging for the articles I write, or using ads and tracking to “monetize” them. I’m just trying to share what I’ve learned, to maybe help someone else along the way.

That’s what I want for my students. I want them to leave this class knowing they can use this wonderful open medium to further any goals they might have. I want them to understand what’s happening behind the scenes when they use the web. I want them to have a sense of possibility, capability, and confidence they didn’t have before. They should know that they have a voice, and that they can create islands of authentic human connection within an increasingly corporatized internet. They should feel that they can build things that matter.

I’m probably asking too much of a single semester elective. We’re going to touch on stuff like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, UX, UI, accessibility, and usability in a very short period of time. It’s going to be superficial by necessity. Some students will likely be disengaged or uninterested, and that’s okay. I was that student when I was their age.

For the students who are genuinely curious, though, the ones who chose this class hoping to get something useful out of it, I want it to be worth their time. I want them to see what’s possible when you understand how things actually work rather than just accepting the tools you’re given.

I’m about to find out if I can make that happen. The nervousness is still there, but so is the conviction that this matters. We haven’t lost the liberating potential of the web — we’ve just been distracted by shinier, more controlled versions of it. Teaching students to build it for themselves, on their own terms, with their own perspectives shaping what they create … that feels like an act of resistance. It also feels a lot like hope.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

RSS Readers and the Art of Self-Curation

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 20:04:54 -0500

I miss Google Reader.

That probably dates me, but I don’t care. Google Reader was one of those tools that fundamentally changed how I engaged with the internet. It made aggregation effortless. Find a good source, add it with a click, and suddenly everything you cared about was in one place. When Google shut it down in 2013, I was genuinely upset at losing something that had become essential to how I kept up with the world.

The need for that kind of tool hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s become more pressing. We’re drowning in information scattered across hundreds of websites, all competing for our attention. Social media promises to solve this problem, but really it’s just replaced one challenge with another: instead of visiting a million sites, we’re now at the mercy of algorithms optimized for engagement rather than our actual interests.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) readers offer a different path. I’ve been using NetNewsWire for years now, and it’s become as fundamental to my daily routine as email or a web browser. It quietly does exactly what I need it to do, then gets out of the way.

On any given day, I scan through 150 to 200 posts. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but I don’t read them all. I scan. The headlines, the sources, the opening lines. I’m looking for the pieces that grab me, that seem worth my time and attention.

This has become my go-to activity for low-focus periods. When I’m on a break from intense work and need a mental palate cleanser, I open NetNewsWire. When I’m eating lunch at my desk and the Middle School Minecraft club is meeting across the hall (so deep focus work is off the table anyway), I scan my feeds. Before bed, when I want something engaging but not demanding, there it is on my iPad, synced perfectly via iCloud with everything I saw on my Mac earlier in the day.

What enables this is complete control. Over the years, I’ve curated this collection of sources carefully. I follow publications I trust, bloggers whose perspectives I value, and news sources from different parts of the world. When a source starts pumping out too much content or drifts away from relevance, I remove it. When I discover something new and compelling, I add it. The process is organic, shaped entirely by what serves me.

The feeds themselves give me access to high-quality sources across topics I care about: news, technology, education, cultural commentary, long-form journalism. I’m not waiting for an algorithm to decide what I should see. I’m just reading what the sources I’ve chosen to follow have published.

Beyond the personal productivity benefits, I’ve found an unexpected way this setup strengthens my connections with others. I’m constantly coming across articles, essays, or pieces of news that make me think of someone specific. A friend who’s passionate about a particular topic, a colleague working through a similar challenge, someone who would just get a kick out of a specific perspective.

When it comes to sharing, however, frequency and relevance matter more than enthusiasm. I’ve been on the receiving end of people sending me a constant stream of links that didn’t really connect with my interests. They meant well, but it felt more like noise than connection.

So I’ve developed a system. When I see something that feels perfect for someone, I forward it to my own inbox first. I let it sit there for a bit. This gives me time to make sure it really is as relevant as I initially thought. Then I’m careful about frequency. Maybe one or two shares a month to any particular person. And most importantly, I almost never follow up. No “did you read it?” or “what did you think?” If they engage with it, great. If they don’t, that’s fine too. I’ve let them know I was thinking about them.

This approach has turned sharing through my RSS reader into a genuine way to maintain connections. Low-pressure, thoughtful, and useful.

There’s something more fundamental here than just personal productivity. We’re in an era where so much of the web has become closed. Walled gardens dominate our online experience. The content we see is determined by platforms whose primary goal is keeping us engaged, and engagement has consistently been shown to spike with content that triggers negative emotions: fear, outrage, anger, vulnerability.

RSS represents the opposite approach. It’s an open standard, free to use, and free to publish. I can follow the BBC right alongside individual bloggers. Small independent voices have the same technical standing as massive publications. Nobody has to pay a gatekeeper to reach subscribers. Nobody’s optimizing my feed for engagement metrics.

This is the same magic that powers email. It’s so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it, but email is another open, portable standard. Nobody owns email. No company can decide to stop supporting it or change the rules. That’s why newsletters work so well: everyone has email, and it doesn’t matter which email provider you use.

RSS feeds work the same way. The feeds are portable. If I decided tomorrow that I didn’t like NetNewsWire anymore, I could export my entire list of subscriptions and import it into a different reader. The feeds themselves don’t change. The content creators don’t have to do anything differently. I just move to a different tool and keep going.

In a web that’s increasingly locked down and controlled by algorithms, RSS readers offer something increasingly rare: genuine autonomy over your information consumption.

Getting Started

If this sounds useful, here’s the good news: getting started is straightforward.

Choose Your Reader:

For Mac/iOS users:

NetNewsWire - Free, open-source, syncs via iCloud. This is what I use and recommend.

For Windows/Linux users:

RSS Guard - Free, cross-platform, feature-rich with strong support for both basic and advanced needs
Thunderbird - If you already use it for email, it handles RSS feeds too

For Android users:

Feeder - Free, open-source, clean interface
Feedly - Web-based with mobile apps, free for up to 100 sources
Inoreader - Free for up to 150 subscriptions (with ads)

Start Simple:

Begin with sources you already read regularly. Most sites that offer RSS feeds will have a link somewhere, often in the footer or on their about page. Many readers (including NetNewsWire) will let you just paste in the homepage URL and figure it out from there.

Add five to ten sources to start. Get comfortable with how the reader works, how often these sources publish, and whether their content matches what you’re looking for. You can always add more later.

Find Your Rhythm:

Figure out when RSS reading fits naturally into your day. For me, it’s breaks and transitions. For you, it might be morning coffee or an evening wind-down. The key is fitting it into your life rather than treating it like another obligation.

Pay attention to quantity. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the volume, you’ve added too much. If you’re rarely finding things worth reading, maybe you need to branch out. The goal is sustainability: a collection you genuinely want to engage with regularly.

Stay Flexible:

Your feed collection should evolve. Sources that were perfect six months ago might not serve you anymore. New publications emerge. Your interests shift. That’s fine. RSS readers offer trivially easy ways to add and remove sources. Use that flexibility.

If you’re not using an RSS reader, I’d encourage you to try one. Give it a few weeks, not just a day or two. See if it changes how you engage with information online and gives you back some control over your attention.

If you’re already reading articles like this, you’re probably exactly the kind of person who would benefit from RSS. The sources you care about likely offer feeds. The readers are free and well-supported. The only thing standing between you and a better information diet is setting it up.

And when you do, you’ll be participating in one of the rare corners of the internet that still works the way the web was supposed to work: open, portable, user-controlled. That’s worth something all on its own.

November 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 05:00:00 -0500

By November the leaves are down, grey blankets everything, and the cold starts to bite. So why is it still one of my favorite months? Part of it has to do with my birthday and the happy associations that come with it. But it goes deeper than that.

The best thing about November is knowing that December is coming. Winter is about to take hold, but not yet. November still offers days with warmth and light you can soak in and bank for the weeks ahead. It’s the same reason Sunday is my favorite day of the week: you know to appreciate it while you’ve still got it.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, too. It’s the one day each year when everybody in the United States can celebrate together. It gives me a chance to connect with and appreciate the family I have. For many Thanksgivings in my early 20s I was alone, and I’ll never forget what that felt like. November carries that weight of gratitude for me now.

The novelty of crisp cold hasn’t worn off yet in November. Crunching through leaves and bundling up can be fun the first few times. By December it gets old. November is a transitional month full of hints for the weeks to come and reminders of the days just passed.

My Picks

The Majority AI View

Anil Dash tells it like it is in typical awesome fashion: nearly all tech industry professionals think the way AI is being talked about and shoved down everyone’s throat is ridiculous. It prevents valid criticisms of the technology from being considered and obscures the actual value of these tools.

Handy Text-to-Speech

Popular voice transcription apps can cost up to $20 a month. With Handy, you get the same functionality for free. It’s a front-end for OpenAI’s exceptional Whisper speech recognition model, which they released as open source. This is the kind of software I use to interact with LLMs by talking rather than typing, and it’s a total game changer.

Marconi Union’s The Fear of Never Landing

One of my favorite bands released a new album earlier this year, and I didn’t find out until recently. The beautiful, flowing atmospheres and expert musicianship you’d expect are there, but you can also put it on and get stuff done with it as a perfect soundtrack.

The Myth of Hercules: 12 Labors in 8 Bits

This delightful TED Ed video tells the story of how Hercules atoned for his evil actions through an epic series of heroic challenges. It features a full 8-bit aesthetic, from sound to graphics, managing to be retro on multiple dimensions and incredibly entertaining throughout. [via]

Recently Published

This month it’s been all about one thing: Babbleborg.

Why I Made Babbleborg

My school recently decided to put out a press release about a custom AI educational chat interface I created with the help of LLMs. I’ve been scrambling to get something together that explains to everyone what I did, what it’s about, and how to make it their own. While I normally try to publish twice a month, this month there’s just one piece on the website: the full story about why I made Babbleborg, the philosophy behind it, and the nerdpunk aesthetic of resisting huge AI corporations by making it my own, keeping it private, and saving tons of money along the way.

Babbleborg.org

The second thing I published was huge: a complete build guide on its own separate site. With it, any technically minded, curious education professional can create their own AI chat interface, learn how to work with AI coding agents, and make something perfectly suited to their students and school.

In the Groove

It’s been a fun month of music exploration, but my work on Babbleborg has been somewhat all-consuming. Music has been relegated to the back burner for now, even though I’m dipping in just about every day to play around and tweak things.

For the first time, I’m working with songs where I can practice melodies by performing them on my pads. Some days I just load up the track I’m working on and jam for a while, and it makes me smile. Musical creativity hasn’t stopped, it just hasn’t been at the forefront. That’s okay every once in a while.

Until Next Time

I’m not a winter person, but I’m working on it. Maybe this year I’ll finally figure out how to appreciate the cold, dark days. Or maybe I’ll just lean into November a bit harder while I still can.

See you next month.

Why I Made Babbleborg

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 10:03:21 -0400

Last year, my students were hitting usage limits on free ChatGPT accounts mid-conversation. I was working hard on prompts to help them use AI as a thought partner rather than a shortcut or search engine, but I kept running into limitations.

I couldn’t control the system instructions. The interface was designed for convenience and frictionless interaction, not for learning. I wanted something better suited to my students and my pedagogical goals, but I couldn’t find anything that fit.

So I started experimenting with Claude, describing what I needed, getting code back, testing it, figuring out what wasn’t working, and iterating. The architectural thinking was mine. The pedagogical design was mine. The implementation came from back-and-forth with an LLM that could write code I couldn’t write myself. The result was Babbleborg, a custom AI chat interface that my students now use as a part of their curriculum.

It’s like having a 3D printer for code. Most people don’t have a lathe in their garage, but with a 3D printer, you can now make your own physical objects. You design what you want, understand how the pieces fit together, and the printer handles fabrication. Working with AI to build software feels similar: a fundamental expansion of what we can create.

The Resistance

When I started sharing what I was learning about AI with my teacher colleagues, I wasn’t prepared for the level of resistance I encountered. Some of it verged on hostility. These are people I respect tremendously, colleagues I’ve worked with for years. The reaction caught me off guard.

Looking back, I think I might understand it better now. If I only listened to what the corporations and their executives were saying about AI, and if I only read the breathless press coverage, I might hate it, too. The technology is being sold as something that will eliminate jobs, create massive instability, potentially become independent of its creators, and decide humanity is no longer necessary. Chatbots are feeding people’s delusions. Children are confiding in them in ways that feel deeply uncomfortable. The hype is everywhere, the FOMO is relentless, and the fear-mongering is constant.

Meanwhile, megacorporations are being fiscally irresponsible, pouring speculative investment into AI that could devastate people when the bubble inevitably pops. They’re shoving AI into every product to satisfy investors, and they’re facilitating endless AI slop. The pursuit of short-term corporate value over human thriving is poisoning the well for everyone.

Anil Dash has written about what he calls “the majority AI view” within the tech industry. Most people with technical roles see AI as useful technology that’s been absurdly over-hyped, forced on everyone, and with valid critiques being systematically ignored. He explains that this reasonable majority understands the potential but is frustrated by the extremism at the top. Their voices are drowned out by billionaire tycoons and corporate hype machines.

The tragedy is watching thoughtful people shut down completely because of how this technology is being marketed and deployed. They don’t even explore what might be possible because they’ve been presented with such a distorted picture. For our students, that’s a real loss. AI literacy needs to be every bit as critical as it is experiential. It should include understanding both the tremendous benefits and the significant potential for harm, wrestling with that tension, and recognizing that this is a tool like any other in some ways, and unlike anything in others. How we choose to use it matters.

What Building Babbleborg Changed

I’ve been following AI developments since around 2015 or 2016, when generative adversarial networks started producing those eerily realistic fake faces. I incorporated some of that early work into my curriculum, exploring with students what it meant when you couldn’t trust photographic evidence anymore. When StyleGAN came out in 2018 and “This Person Does Not Exist” launched in 2019, I was already thinking about the implications.

But using AI tools and building with AI are fundamentally different experiences. Building Babbleborg shifted something in how I understand this technology and my relationship to it.

The partnership with Claude wasn’t like using a tool. It felt more like what Ethan Mollick describes as “co-intelligence,” a genuine collaboration where my expertise and the AI’s capabilities complemented each other in ways that created something neither of us could have made alone. I understood what needed to happen architecturally and pedagogically. The AI understood how to implement it. Together, we built something that works.

That realization opened up a wider view. I started thinking about where different people sit on the technology spectrum and what becomes possible for them. Professional developers can offload grunt work while staying in control of the architecture. Complete beginners can use tools like Claude’s artifacts and skills to build things they never could before. I’m somewhere in the middle: technically proficient enough to guide the process, understand the components, and redirect when something isn’t working, but not skilled enough to write the code myself.

Since creating Babbleborg, I’ve tackled several other things I couldn’t have built before, including the build guide itself. That one I probably could have done on my own, but it would have taken months. With AI assistance, I finished it in a few weeks. The 3D printer metaphor keeps coming back to me. This really is like having a fabrication tool for code. Most people don’t have a full workshop, but now they can make useful and interesting things.

This has convinced me that AI represents something genuinely new in human experience. Not because of the hype or the fear-mongering, but because of what it actually enables. The expansion of creative capacity is real.

Why a Build Guide, Not a Code Release

My first instinct was to publish the code to a public GitHub repository: share what I’d built, let other educators deploy it, and write up step-by-step instructions for getting it running on shared hosting. That seemed like the most helpful approach.

The more I thought about it, though, the more uncomfortable I became. More than 80% of the code was generated by AI. I understand the architecture. I can follow what the code does. I was involved in every decision and had to guide the process when things weren’t working. I also needed enough coding knowledge to redirect the AI when it went down the wrong path. But when it comes to the specifics of implementation, my ability to understand problems and fix them is limited.

That doesn’t feel responsible. I don’t want to publish code I can’t fully maintain. I don’t want to feed someone’s problem description to an AI, get back a fix I don’t deeply understand, and present that as support. If you’re going to put code out into the world as a product, you need to be able to stand behind it.

Then I realized something else. The process of building this thing changed my thinking about these tools more than the finished product did. Going through the back-and-forth with the AI, understanding the workflow, learning how to work with coding agents — that transformation was the valuable part. That’s what shifted my relationship with this technology.

Sharing my work with a build guide gives people that experience. You’re not getting a product based on my needs and my teaching context. You’re building it for yourself. You make the decisions. You own the code. You go through the process of learning how to work with AI coding agents, and you come out the other side with both a working tool and a new capability.

I’m incredibly proud of what I built, even though I didn’t write the code myself. I think anyone who follows the guide and builds their own version will feel that same ownership and pride. That seems more valuable than just handing someone a finished product.

Knowing the Boundaries

This particular project works well for AI-assisted development because it’s architecturally simple. At its core, Babbleborg is a behind-the-scenes API call handler. There are no user accounts. There’s no sensitive data storage. The stack is straightforward: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP for the API handling.

I can follow all of it without being a professional programmer because it’s reasonably simple. Some complexity exists on the client side, but as long as those components work as intended and the structure is clear, I’m comfortable with my level of understanding.

There are many things I would not trust an LLM coding assistant to build for me without having more comprehensive understanding and doing more hands-on coding. Anything involving user authentication, sensitive data, or complex security requirements needs more expertise than I currently have. The scope and simplicity of this project make it a good fit for this kind of workflow.

That matters for anyone considering following the guide. You need to understand what you’re building well enough to know when something isn’t working correctly. You need enough technical background to guide the process and make architectural decisions. The build guide will help you through the implementation, but you’re still responsible for the result.

I think this is a good project precisely because the scope is manageable and the architecture is clear. It teaches you the workflow without overwhelming you with complexity. That makes it a solid foundation for understanding how to work with AI coding agents on appropriate projects. Stay within these boundaries, and the possibilities are incredible.

The Laboratory

Once you have a working custom AI chat interface, you have something more than a tool. You have a laboratory for experimenting with AI-facilitated learning experiences.

The system gives you complete control over the system instructions. You can shape the interaction around your pedagogical goals, your students’ needs, and your teaching context. You’re not working within someone else’s constraints or fighting against default behaviors designed for convenience rather than learning.

I think about all the times I’ve wished I could clone myself. In my tech projects class, students pick an idea and develop a project plan. I’d give them a worksheet, review it, provide feedback, and sit down with each student for maybe ten minutes to make sure they had a good plan. What I really wanted was to spend 45 minutes with each of them, carefully working through every component they needed to think about.

I don’t have the bandwidth for that. I do, however, have the bandwidth to create a carefully designed AI-facilitated conversation flow that embodies everything I know about project planning. Students can have that conversation simultaneously across the entire classroom. I can walk around, answer questions when they get stuck, and address things they’re wondering about. At the end, they give me their full chat transcript. I can see their thinking as they worked through the conversation. The system organizes their responses into a structured plan.

Now, some teachers may push back on that last part. They argue students should be doing the organizing themselves. In this particular context, I’m okay with it. The thinking has been accomplished, and that’s my goal. When I meet with students afterward, we’re starting from a much more advanced place than I could have reached before.

There are so many applications once you start thinking this way. You can create templates for different kinds of conversations, different subject areas, different learning objectives. Other teachers at your school can use what you’ve built without needing to understand the technical side. The laboratory keeps expanding.

The Workflow

Building Babbleborg taught me more than how to create a custom chat interface. It also taught me a transferable workflow for building with AI coding agents.

You start with clear architectural thinking about what you’re trying to build. You break it down into stages. You test methodically. You read error messages carefully. You iterate when things don’t work. You maintain responsibility for understanding what you’re building, even when the AI is handling implementation details.

That workflow applies to other projects. Since building Babbleborg, I’ve tackled several other things I couldn’t have built before. Each time, the process gets a little smoother. I feel as though I’m starting to develop an intuition for how to describe what I need, how to recognize when the AI is going down the wrong path, and how to course-correct.

The virtuous cycle builds on itself. You gain capability, which opens up new possibilities, which gives you more experience, which expands your capability further. You’re not becoming a professional developer, but you’re developing a genuinely useful skill for working with these tools.

That’s one of the reasons the build guide matters. Anyone who completes it won’t just have a working chatbot. They’ll have experience with a process they can apply to other appropriate projects. They’ll understand what kinds of things are good candidates for AI-assisted development and what kinds require more expertise.

Fight The Power

I’m angry about how corporations are deploying AI. The pursuit of short-term profit and market dominance is distorting this technology completely out of proportion to its reality. They’re creating dependence, harvesting data, and fueling a speculative bubble that could devastate people when it bursts. People are using it to flood the internet with slop and misinformation. Right now, on balance, I think AI’s influence on society is negative.

What makes me hopeful, though, is that they’ve also given us the tools to do something better. I imagine many of the people actually building these systems, the reasonable majority Anil Dash describes, would want to see them used this way.

Babbleborg costs pennies per conversation. It’s more private because API providers don’t train on customer data. It’s more pedagogically sound because I control the system instructions completely. It’s more respectful of students as learners because I can shape the experience around learning rather than profit metrics.

The corporations built the infrastructure. They created the APIs. They made these capabilities available. Then they wrapped them in products designed to maximize engagement, create dependency, and extract maximum value. We can subvert this and use those same capabilities differently.

That feels important to me. Not as some grand revolutionary act, but as proof that we have agency in how this technology gets used. Every choice to build something thoughtful is a small act of resistance against thoughtless deployment. Every implementation that prioritizes learning over convenience pushes back against the dominant narrative.

I love technology. I’ve spent decades working with it, teaching with it, and thinking about its potential. Watching it get weaponized for short-term corporate gain while people dismiss genuine possibilities frustrates me deeply. We can do better. This is one small way to demonstrate that.

The Core Truth

AI is genuinely transformative. That’s not hype. The expansion of creative capacity is real. The potential for good is substantial.

We also have agency in how this technology gets used. Every choice we make about implementation matters. Every system we build that prioritizes the good stuff shapes what AI becomes in practice.

Babbleborg demonstrates something simple but important: AI doesn’t have to be the way the corporations are making it. We can build alternatives. We can use the same underlying technology in ways that serve different values. We can create tools that respect learners, protect privacy, and cost dramatically less.

The technology itself is neither savior nor destroyer. How we choose to deploy it, the values we embed in our implementations, the pedagogical principles we prioritize: those are the things that matter. Every thoughtful implementation is a counter-example to the dominant narrative of AI as either magical solution or existential threat.

For the Curious

The build guide at babbleborg.org is for technically-minded educators who want to understand by doing. It’s for people who believe we can choose better, want to roll up their sleeves and experiment, and value agency over convenience.

It’s not for everyone. The guide requires curiosity, willingness to experiment, and comfort with iteration. You need to be in an environment where experimentation is acceptable. There are excellent, well-supported commercial AI products available if that’s not your situation. They’re just not as interesting as building your own.

If you do follow the guide, you’ll come out the other side with more than a working chatbot. You’ll have transformed your relationship with this technology. You’ll understand what’s possible when you take ownership of the implementation. You’ll have proven to yourself that alternatives exist.

That matters. Not because any single custom chatbot will change the world, but because every alternative implementation helps establish that we have choices in how this technology gets deployed. Putting that possibility into the world feels worth doing.

October 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 05:00:00 -0500

October in Southern New England is one of the most special times of year because this is when the leaves turn. Driving through the countryside or even just commuting to work means explosions of radiant color everywhere you look.

The smells of October are different, too. The sharpness of summer is starting to mellow as plants begin to withdraw or give up on their season. The days have noticeably shortened. We’ve started waking up in darkness nearly every day.

It’s natural that my mind turns to preparing for the cold months a little more these days. We’re transitioning. Hard frosts will start arriving with increasing regularity, though right now the crickets are still singing through the night, pumpkin everything beckons from every direction, and fresh apple cider seems to be sold at every corner store.

Things are busy right now. There’s a particular energy to October that I’m trying to ride for as long as it will carry me. It’s a time to hunker down, yes. It’s also a time to make sure I stop every once in a while, look around, and soak in what’s here before it shifts again.

My Picks

Slightly less geekery this month, with a couple of useful tools, a tutorial, and fascinating film analysis:

Paprika

I mentioned this recipe collection tool in a recent post, then realized it’s one of my favorite pieces of software. It works well, has a great recipe importer, keeps track of my pantry, and collects all of my recipes in one place. It also syncs with desktop and mobile versions, so if I’m in the kitchen all I need is my phone.

Just a QR Code

This site takes a simple, no-nonsense, on-device approach for making QR codes. There are tons of ad-strewn, spammy QR generation sites out there, so this is extremely refreshing.

Become a Wikipedian in 30 Minutes

Crypto industry watchdog Molly White put together the best introduction to editing content on Wikipedia I’ve come across. It’s not difficult to get started, though there are some important things to know. They’re all laid out here in perfect sequence.

Two Ways to Film the Same Scene (#2)

This is a fantastic analysis of Hollywood and European art cinema. It examines the same scene from both the original Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire (one of my personal favorites) and the Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan version, City of Angels. The differing perspectives and approaches are fascinating.

Recently Published

If you’ve missed it, here’s what’s new on the site:

My Digital Rebirth

Every four years, a very special ritual takes place that goes all the way back to my childhood: I get a new computer. For my latest system, I decided to forego migration, starting from a blank canvas and rebuilding with intention each step of the way.

Moving Beyond the Basics

My use of LLMs continues to evolve the more I get used to these tools. I decided it was time to do a roundup of the latest approaches I’ve been experimenting with, and have mostly found success.

In the Groove

I’m thrilled to announce that for the first time in more than a year, I’ve released new music. It’s a track I completed a while ago as part of an exploration into live sequencing and performance.

This piece represents something new for me: a one-of-a-kind performance that I couldn’t repeat even if I wanted to. It’s very much influenced by classic 70s electronic music, including Berlin School explorations, with a hint of early industrial percussion via Cabaret Voltaire. It’s available as a free download now (please don’t pay).

Creating the cover art turned out to be one of the most enjoyable parts of this release:

I’m really happy with how it came out in all its retro cheesiness. Looking back at September’s newsletter, I see I was wrestling with perfectionism keeping good work locked away. It feels good to release something new after all this time. Sometimes you just have to let go of the ideal and share what you’ve made. I’m going to bask in this small victory for a while.

Until Next Time

October always reminds me that transitions don’t have to be abrupt. The shift from summer to fall happens gradually, with warm days mixed among the cool ones, green leaves turning gold before they let go. There’s wisdom in that pacing.

I’m finding myself thinking about what deserves to be held onto and what deserves to be released. The music that sat finished but unreleased for months. The perfect autumn day that needs to be noticed before it passes. The busy momentum of the season that needs occasional pauses to be appreciated.

Whatever transitions you’re navigating right now, I hope you’re finding moments to stop and look around. The crickets won’t sing much longer. The leaves will fall. Winter will come. These October days are here now, vibrant and fleeting, asking us to pay attention.

See you in November.

Moving Beyond the Basics

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 05:00:00 -0500

Over the past several months my relationship with AI tools has shifted, and I think it’s a good time for an update.

I’ve discovered three key approaches that have significantly changed how I work with LLMs:

Voice transcription has become my preferred mode for complex thinking.

Multi-phase prompt development has replaced my tendency to create over-complicated instructions.

Multi-lens analysis has given me a more effective thought partner.

Voice Transcription

The most noticeable change has been incorporating voice transcription. I now use it for about 40% of my AI conversations, with the rest being direct text entry. What surprised me most wasn’t that it worked, but how well LLMs can parse the natural messiness of spoken conversation.

This discovery happened through the very process I’m using to help write this post. I knew I wanted to do an update about how I use AI today, but I wasn’t sure what, exactly, that meant. I had to think it through. So I decided to just start talking. I rambled, went on tangents, circled back to earlier points — all the things that happen in natural speech, and sure enough, I got to it all just by thinking out loud. Then, the AI came back with an organized, coherent analysis of my voice transcript that could use to start drafting. It was truly a sight to behold.

Voice transcription captures ideas and personal style in a way that careful typing often doesn’t. When I’m typing, I’m much more intentional about sentence structure and sequence. I do heavy self-editing as I go. When I’m talking, I have to keep moving forward. I can talk much more rapidly than I can type, and if a tangent comes up or something else occurs to me, I just add it to the conversation.

This momentum aspect has been huge. Voice transcription works particularly well for brainstorming, problem-solving discussions, and when I want to think out loud through involved ideas. I still prefer typing when I want precision (when I’m very clear about what I want as a result and need that level of control). For getting my thinking down and organized, voice transcription has become invaluable.

It’s also made my interactions much more conversational. My colleagues probably think I’m talking to myself a lot more these days, though, since I do this at my desk at work. Thinking out loud has always been a useful tool for processing ideas, and now I have an intelligent conversation partner on the other end. If you’d like to try it for yourself, check out the easy, free, and cross-platform Handy.

Multi-Phase Prompt Development

For any task I find myself returning to repeatedly, I’ve developed a structured multi-phase approach to creating prompts rather than starting from scratch each time.

Phase 1: Maximalist Development

I start by asking the AI to help develop an exhaustive prompt. I explicitly encourage it to think of all different facets and ask me questions about everything. I’m looking to go beyond what occurs to me initially, so I purposefully ask for something thorough that covers every angle.

Phase 2: Critical Analysis and Streamlining

Here’s where I learned that more isn’t always better. I take that maximalist prompt and run it through a critical analysis, asking: “Will this achieve my goals? What can be condensed, eliminated, or optimized without reducing effectiveness?”

I discovered this need for a second step through experience. At first, those exhaustive prompts seemed to cover everything. But when I actually started using them, I often got bogged down. They were too elaborate, requiring way more work than necessary. It’s very much like having too large of a codebase, where you don’t know what all the parts are doing or how they’re going to interact.

For example, I recently created a prompt to help me learn Pixelmator Pro while working on cover art for an upcoming music release. The exhaustive version was thorough and felt like a taskmaster (very step-by-step and tutorial-like). When I ran it through the critical lens, I realized what I actually wanted was hands-on practice and enjoyment. I wanted something exploratory and fun, more coach-oriented than tutor-oriented.

The streamlined version eliminated unnecessary intricacy while maintaining effectiveness. The AI even suggested removing some Risograph brush techniques I’d mentioned being interested in, because incorporating them would have derailed the core learning experience. When I saw that analysis laid out, I realized it was absolutely right. That would have been too much.

Elaborate prompts often become counterproductive because more instructions create more opportunities for conflicting or contradictory elements. I learned this the hard way when I asked an AI to be “encouraging” while also telling it to “challenge me and not always agree.” That made responses too sycophantic, which drives me crazy.

Multi-Lens Analysis

So: streamlined, focused prompts consistently produce better outcomes than elaborate ones. The success of this approach led me to experiment with breaking down other AI interactions into distinct analytical stages, which has become what I think of as multi-lens analysis. I’m now considering how to put all of my chats through various lenses, intentionally approaching the same content or problem from different angles in deliberate stages.

For example, the core lenses I used above are:

Generative Lens: Encouraging and idea-focused, aimed at creation and exploring possibilities
Critical Lens: Supportive but analytical, looking for improvements, gaps, and optimization opportunities

Another example might start with a pattern lens, followed by a technical lens. I used this sequence when I took the data from all of my posts to see what insights I might find. My first pass was about identifying themes, patterns, and opportunities; my second was about looking at things like length, structure, readability, and tags. Previously, I would’ve put it all into one big prompt and asked it to do everything, instead of taking a more iterative approach. I think this works better.

I also realized that while I often completely disagree with the AI’s analysis, that disagreement is valuable because it forces me to examine the reasons behind my decisions. When I was using an AI as a nutrition coach, the critical analysis kept suggesting dramatic dietary changes and treating my situation like a crisis that needed immediate intervention. When I pushed back, I realized what I actually wanted were sustainable lifestyle tweaks to improve my eating habits, not a complete overhaul. The AI was being much more prescriptive than I needed and assuming I was in worse shape than I actually was. That disagreement helped me clarify that I was looking for gradual improvements, not transformation.

Even when I reject the AI’s suggestions, the process surfaces considerations I hadn’t thought about and makes me more mindful about my choices. The key is being intentional about which lens you’re using at any given moment, rather than trying to get everything from a single interaction.

The Broader Impact

These three approaches have created a major shift in how I think about AI interaction. I almost never stop at the first result anymore. I think a lot of people ask a question, get an answer, and either decide it’s not very good, good enough, or great, then move forward based on that single interaction. That’s how I did it for quite a while.

Working effectively with AI really needs to be an iterative, multi-step process where you focus on one goal at a time in a purposeful sequence. This can be true for research, analysis, creative work … pretty much everything other than casual chats.

It makes sense, too. If you can get a prompt from 1,500 words down to 750 words or less using this process, the AI is going to have a better time with it. The more succinct and clear your instructions, the more effective the interaction. There’s definitely a point of diminishing returns when it comes to context and information when working with LLMs.

What This Changes

This evolution has transformed the nature of my thought partnership with these tools. Voice transcription makes brainstorming and problem-solving feel natural and conversational. Multi-phase prompt development ensures I’m getting focused, effective results rather than overwhelming elaboration. Multi-lens analysis gives me a focused sequence of interactions that allow me to improve outcomes each step of the way.

The combination creates a workflow that feels much more collaborative and less transactional. I’m not just asking questions and getting answers. I’m thinking through problems with a weird, alien-brained partner that can offer different approaches and help me organize intricate ideas while maintaining full human control and ownership of the work.

What I’m most curious about is where this new thinking might lead. What other “lenses” might be useful beyond what I’ve already tried? For now, these three shifts have genuinely changed how I approach complex thinking and creative work, and made the whole process a lot more enjoyable.

My Digital Rebirth

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 05:00:00 -0500

There’s something almost sacred about setting up a new computer from scratch. I’m a total geek, and few things in my life generate the same excitement as unboxing a new machine. This feeling has been consistent since I got my Commodore VIC-20 at eleven years old in 1981. Every computer since then, from my Atari 800XL to various PC clones to Macs, has carried that same sense of possibility.

When it comes to that possibility, you can either inherit it or create it.

When you get a new computer, the easy path is migration. Take your backup, restore everything, and you’re back to work within hours. Your familiar data transfers seamlessly along with the accumulated downloads from four years of “let me try this,” the background processes you forgot about, the electronic equivalent of junk drawers stuffed with things you might need someday.

This time, I chose differently.

My computer rotation is four years. That’s how long it takes me to save up for something that represents a significant investment, both financially and practically. Over those four years, I download countless applications, give them a try, lose interest, and leave them installed. Unlike physical spaces, technological clutter doesn’t demand immediate attention. You can’t trip over a forgotten app or stub your toe on an unused browser extension.

But this clutter carries a different kind of weight. There are performance hits from background processes I’d forgotten about, visual noise from accumulated customizations that no longer serve me, and most importantly, a mental burden I hadn’t fully recognized until I started fresh.

My computer environment is where I live. I spend the majority of my working hours there, creating and solving problems. It deserves the same care I’d bring to designing a physical workspace, maybe more, since I inhabit it so completely.

Starting from scratch meant beginning with macOS Sequoia’s defaults and discovering what bothered me. This approach revealed something unexpected: many of the tools I thought were essential turned out to be solutions to problems that no longer existed, while new pain points emerged that I’d never noticed before.

Take window management, for instance. With multiple browsers open simultaneously alongside text editors, coding environments like Nova, terminal windows, and Finder, my screen becomes a chaos of overlapping rectangles. I’d always used Moom for automated window placement, but I initially tried to work without it, thinking maybe the new OS had improved enough to make it unnecessary.

Within a day, I moved Moom back to the top of my installation list. Some solutions are genuinely essential, but you don’t know which ones until you test their absence.

The research phase of finding alternatives taught me about what I’ve started thinking of as a kind of technological independence. When I’m evaluating software, I’m not just looking at features; I’m considering stewardship. Has the software changed hands to developers who might not maintain it well? Is it still being actively supported? Will it exist in two years?

I prioritize open source when possible, partly for philosophical reasons but mostly for practical ones. I’ve watched too many excellent programs disappear when a company pivoted or a developer moved on. I’m also willing to pay for the right tool. The key is being deliberate about that choice rather than defaulting to whatever I used before.

My process involves searching for alternatives, checking Reddit discussions for real user perspectives, weighing pros and cons, asking friends, and then testing options. The approach is time-consuming, but results in a toolkit that feels genuinely chosen rather than inherited.

This wonderful beginning period, where I savor each decision and carefully configure every preference, won’t last forever. The fresh start experience forces me to slow down, to consider what I need versus what I’ve accumulated. I literally go through every system preference menu, testing whether I prefer the default or want something different. Yes, I know how that sounds.

Eventually, the demands of daily work reassert themselves. I’ll start downloading things to try them out, moving quickly to solve immediate problems, accumulating software just like before. The question that’s emerging from this process isn’t how to avoid that eventual accumulation. It’s how to preserve some of the purposefulness even as I transition back to normal computer use.

The deliberate approach is about more than just getting things configured the way I like them. It’s about slowing down and thinking rather than just installing first and figuring it out later. This results in better efficiency and a better thinking environment, but also requires a type of attention that’s hard to maintain indefinitely.

What I’m discovering is that the fresh start process is teaching me about technological mindfulness that extends beyond the initial setup. The practice of questioning defaults, of testing what I need versus what I think I need, of choosing tools based on their stewardship and longevity — these are habits worth cultivating throughout the entire lifespan of a computer, not just during the honeymoon period.

I may not maintain the same level of care every day for the next four years, but I can create systems and practices that help me check in periodically. Maybe a monthly review of what I’ve installed recently, or a quarterly cleanup of applications I haven’t used, or simply pausing before downloading something new to ask: do I need this, or am I just curious?

The goal isn’t to achieve perfect minimalism. It’s to maintain enough awareness of my technological environment that it continues to serve me well rather than just accumulating entropy over time.

What this comes down to is creating a space where good thinking can happen, where the tools enhance rather than hinder the work, and where the environment supports the kind of focused, creative engagement that makes the work worth doing in the first place.

Links

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of interesting things I’ve discovered and recommended in my monthly newsletters.

September 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 05:00:00 -0500

September is a month of clarity. Light and air embrace us in crisp invigoration. The sky bursts with blue and goes on forever. We’re finally unsealed from our climate-controlled, humidity-regulated boxes.

The smell of freshly cut grass and the sound of kids shooting hoops in the church parking lot across the street can come through open windows before the frost sets in, while golden afternoon light stretches long across the floors. Days are mellow and comfortable, and nights start needing layers. Cozy starts to be a thing again.

There’s also a clarity of purpose that comes with the return of routines and rhythms temporarily left behind. We’re doing things, moving forward, figuring it out. Projects that could wait are back on the table, and small steps are starting to accumulate into tangible results. It’s a time to breathe deep, do meaningful work, and appreciate what we have.

My Picks

It’s been a great month of discoveries — and rediscovering some old favorites.

VERT.sh

VERT converts files (images, audio, video, and documents) from one format to another, all on your device. Nothing is sent to the cloud for processing, there’s no file size limit, and no ads. Load the page, turn off WiFi, and it still works.

Ldial

I love indie and community radio, and this site collects some of the best stations in the US on one page for your streaming pleasure. Tons of new stuff to discover, as well as some I’ve been listening to for decades. (h/t Waxy)

Andor

This Disney+ series restored my faith in the whole franchise. It’s a gritty, deep, and nuanced look at the years leading up to the first movie (Episode IV). Fantastic cast, writing, effects, and pacing, plus it perfectly captured the aesthetic style that so captivated me as a child. I missed it so much when I got to the end of Season 2 that I watched Rogue One (my hands-down favorite of the later films) and the Harmy edition of Episode IV directly afterward, and loved every minute. Highly recommended.

ChatGPT is an energy guzzler. These things you’re doing are worse. [gift link]

What a great update to my post about the ethics of using generative AI. With easy-to-understand charts and explanations, Michael J. Coren at the Washington Post provides the latest data about the energy use of popular AI tools while comparing it to other common activities. Conclusion? The energy use of corporate data centers in general is still a concern, but reducing or eliminating personal use of LLMs does not materially affect our overall energy footprint.

Recently Published

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that this past month’s posts have been tech-focused:

Making Technology Work for You (Not the Other Way Around)

Right now I’m working through a new video game, Caves of Qud. It’s an old-school ASCII permadeath roguelike with a bit of a steep learning curve, so I changed the settings to allow me to save checkpoints in villages. Now, when my character dies (again and again), instead of starting from the beginning, I can start from a checkpoint. My younger self would be horrified by such behavior, and consider it tantamount to cheating. My middle-aged self just won’t deal with the hassle. As I thought about this transformation, it opened up a broader realization about how important it is to customize our technology to fit our needs and preferences, even if it’s not what the cool kids do.

An LLM Nutrition Coach

I tried another LLM experiment, interested to see how much it might help guide me to some healthier nutritional choices. The results were not all successful, but I got enough out of it for the experience to be worthwhile. I also learned that serious limitations remain with this technology, and they aren’t always obvious.

In the Groove

I looked through my work recently, and noticed that I have a bunch of stuff that has no good reason to remain unreleased. What should I do with that? I have plenty of reasons that convince me that it’s not quite there … I just need to … if only I could …

But why? I’m not a professional musician, and don’t pretend otherwise. I’m thinking about letting go, and getting it out there. But something is holding me back. It seems that my imagination is excellent at coming up with ideals that reality can never match. We’ll see what happens. Maybe that’s what this September clarity is for, finally seeing through the perfectionist fog that keeps good work locked away.

There have been some exciting updates to the software I use to make music, and I’ve been enjoying exploring new possibilities. I will never cease marveling at the tools available to amateur musicians today. I used to hang out with bands and recording engineers back in the 80’s, awestruck by the gear and expertise needed to get good results — some of it costing tens of thousands of dollars. To put ambient sound effects and other recorded elements into background loops, I used to have to splice magnetic tape together manually. Now, Garageband comes on every Mac, and plenty of hit songs have been produced with it.

Until Next Time

I hope these September days are giving you space to breathe deep and do your own meaningful work. I’m fully aware of the raging maelstrom of chaos and folly out there, but there’s something about this season that reminds me to focus on what I can actually influence. Are you finding your own ways to stay grounded?

An LLM Nutrition Coach

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 05:00:00 -0500

I found myself facing a familiar challenge recently: I need to be more thoughtful about my sugar consumption. Like many people trying to maintain good health, I’m always looking for sustainable ways to make better choices without turning my life upside down. When some recent testing suggested my blood sugar levels were creeping higher than ideal, I knew I needed to make some changes.

Rather than diving into restrictive diets or expensive consultations, I decided to try something different. Because this isn’t a crisis and I just want to make some thoughtful adjustments, I used an LLM to help me think through this challenge and see what kinds of insights it might offer. The experiment gave me some genuinely useful tools while also revealing where this technology still has clear limits.

I know that LLMs can do wonders when you give them rich context and data to analyze. Instead of asking generic questions about reducing sugar, I could provide my actual eating patterns and preferences for personalized suggestions. That’s where my favorite recipe management app, Paprika, became crucial.

I use Paprika to track everything - not just recipes, but my entire food inventory across pantry, fridge, and freezer. The real superpower came from its export capability. I was able to export all my recipes and my complete food inventory, then feed this data to the LLM for analysis. This gave the LLM something concrete to work with rather than vague descriptions of my eating habits.

The analysis that came back was immediately practical and honestly a bit eye-opening. The LLM created a prioritized list of items in my pantry that were highest in sugar, suggesting what to consider eliminating, what to use in moderation, and potential substitutions. While not earth-shattering insights, having this organized, prioritized guidance was genuinely helpful.

Even more valuable was the eating profile it developed. Looking through my recipe collection, it identified patterns I knew but hadn’t really examined: my recipes are quite carb-heavy, I gravitate toward Mexican, Tex-Mex, and Italian flavors, I use lots of beans as a vegetarian, and I apparently have nearly 50 sauce recipes saved. Seeing these patterns laid out so clearly was both amusing and enlightening - I had no idea I’d accumulated that many sauce variations, and I’ve only made about four of them.

The LLM then prioritized my existing recipes based on blood sugar friendliness. Rather than suggesting I abandon my cooking style entirely, it highlighted options already in my collection that aligned with my goals. It also suggested some new recipes that fit both my taste preferences and nutritional objectives.

What made this work was the back-and-forth nature of the interaction. When the LLM’s initial suggestions felt too restrictive or dramatic for my situation, I could redirect it. I’m reasonably healthy and was looking for modest tweaks, not a complete dietary overhaul. Through conversation, I guided it toward more appropriate suggestions that matched my actual needs rather than some algorithmic assumption about what dramatic changes I should make.

This conversational aspect feels integral for this type of application. You’re not just receiving a one-time analysis but engaging in an iterative process to refine and personalize the guidance.

The boundaries became apparent when I tried to get more technical. I asked the LLM to format new recipe suggestions using Paprika’s YAML specification so I could easily import them. Despite providing the exact format and asking it to use code to create properly formatted recipes, it consistently failed. For simple recipes I just wanted to collect for easy reference while cooking, this was frustrating.

Calendar-based meal planning proved another weak spot. When I provided a calendar showing which days I’d be eating out versus cooking at home, asking for a meal plan around those constraints, the LLM struggled to interpret the schedule correctly. Even with redirects and clarification, it couldn’t seem to process the calendar input effectively. This was particularly surprising given how well it handled the complex recipe analysis.

I’ve actually implemented several of the suggested changes, and they’ve made a noticeable difference. Switching from agave to stevia as a sweetener works fine in lots of contexts. I’ve been incorporating more of the blood sugar-friendly recipes from my existing collection, too, and the focus on foods that provide sustained energy rather than quick spikes and crashes has noticeably steadied my energy levels throughout the day.

Most importantly, these changes feel sustainable. They don’t feel like a restrictive diet I’ll eventually abandon but rather thoughtful adjustments that work with my preferences and lifestyle. I’ve even lost some weight, which wasn’t the primary goal but is a welcome side effect.

If you’re considering using an LLM for a similar personal challenge, approach it as an experiment. The goal is to discover what AI can and cannot do well for your particular situation. Context is everything - look at what data you already have about your habits, preferences, or challenges. Whether it’s a food tracking app, recipe database, personal spreadsheet, or detailed notes about your routines, rich context can dramatically improve the quality of analysis you’ll receive.

Health-related applications require particular caution, however. Different LLM providers have varying privacy policies, so consider what personal information you’re sharing. More importantly, LLMs can hallucinate or draw incorrect conclusions about health matters. Use common sense, do independent research, and ask the LLM to provide sources for its claims so you can evaluate their credibility.

This kind of analysis certainly won’t replace working with a licensed nutritionist, but I can imagine how a good nutritionist who uses LLMs well could create amazing custom resources for their clients. The data processing capabilities could enhance professional expertise in really powerful ways.

LLMs excel at processing large datasets, recognizing patterns, and providing starting points for exploration. They can struggle with precise technical implementations and can make assumptions that don’t match your actual situation without conversational guidance. In this case, I got exactly what I was looking for: a practical analysis of my eating patterns and actionable suggestions for sustainable changes. The technical limitations were disappointing but not deal-breakers.

Sometimes the most valuable outcome of an AI experiment isn’t a perfect solution, but rather a clearer understanding of both what’s possible and what still requires human judgment and oversight.

Making Technology Work for You (Not the Other Way Around)

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 05:00:00 -0500

I’ve been thinking about how I approach video games, and it’s led me to realize something important about technology in general. Let me start with the games, because that’s where this insight really crystallized for me.

At 55, my relationship with gaming has evolved significantly. A while ago I started gravitating toward turn-based games and others that gave me time to think rather than demanding instant reactions. The real turning point came with my favorite game of all time, however: Slay the Spire. After playing it the traditional way many times and loving it, I discovered the custom modifiers. I found a combination that wasn’t so easy I couldn’t fail, but was significantly easier than the standard experience. It gave me different challenges (like seeing how high I could push my score) and opened up new ways to play that I absolutely loved.

This approach has become my standard now. I usually start games at their default difficulty to understand the mechanics and see what engages me. If the defaults feel like too much pressure, I look at what I can adjust. The goal is finding that sweet spot where there’s just enough challenge to keep things interesting, but not so much that I feel stressed or discouraged.

When I hit that perfect balance, something magical happens: games become mainstays. Instead of playing something for a few hours and moving on, I’ll return to these carefully calibrated experiences for years. The difference between challenge and stress turns out to be crucial. Challenge is fun, but stress isn’t.

Now, I know this approach runs counter to a lot of gaming culture. Online discourse often treats difficulty as a status marker, with harder settings somehow being more “legitimate.” There’s this sense that there’s one right way to play a game, and anything else is lesser. But we’re putting our money and time into these experiences. Of course there’s no single right way to enjoy them.

As I’ve been reflecting on this aspect of gaming, I’ve come to realize that it’s just one example of a much bigger principle that applies throughout our digital lives.

I see this pattern everywhere in my work with technology. People constantly just accept defaults and think “this is it, take it or leave it.” They don’t realize how many opportunities exist to tweak their environment, whether it’s games, operating systems, software applications, or digital tools.

Take something as basic as your operating system preferences. There are so many options buried in your Windows settings or macOS preferences that could make your daily experience so much better. Mouse and trackpad behaviors, scrolling preferences, screen settings. Everyone’s going to have different needs and preferences, but so many people never explore what’s possible.

I see this pattern especially clearly with large language models. Someone will have an interaction where they enter a prompt, the LLM responds, and that’s it. End of conversation. But the real power of these tools comes through dialogue. If something isn’t quite right, you can ask for clarification, request a different approach, or provide additional context. You can guide the conversation to become more useful and better suited to what you actually need. I wish more people would engage this way.

The common thread here is that we often accept whatever default configuration we’re handed, when we could be customizing our tools to actually serve us.

Part of what holds people back, I think, is the assumption that the default is the right way to do things. People can be absolutely convinced they know the correct approach, when in reality what works for them might not work for you at all. You see this attitude everywhere. From the gamer who insists that only the hardest difficulty settings are “legitimate,” to the colleague who swears everyone should use the same LLM prompting style, to the tech enthusiast who can’t understand why anyone would want different interface behaviors.

Taking the time to explore your options and customize your digital environment isn’t about being lazy or doing things “wrong” — it’s about being intentional. It’s about making technology work for your life, your circumstances, and your preferences.

In my case, I have plenty of pressure in my professional life and as a homeowner dealing with all the responsibilities that come with adult life. I don’t need additional stress from my entertainment or productivity tools. At this stage, I want technology that supports me rather than fighting against me.

The key is letting go of the idea that there’s one right way to use any piece of technology. Instead, we can embrace the power of customization to create experiences that actually fit who we are and what we need. Whether that’s adjusting game difficulty, tweaking your operating system, or having actual conversations with language models instead of just accepting their first response, it all comes down to the same principle.

Your technology should serve you, not the other way around. And that’s not something to apologize for. It’s something to celebrate. Once you start looking for customization opportunities, you’ll be amazed at how many small adjustments can transform your daily digital experience from something you endure to something that actually works for you.

August 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 09:30:00 -0500

August begins my favorite quarter of the year, when summer starts to transition into fall. The nights remain long, and the heat still reminds me how wonderful air conditioning can be. School hasn’t yet started. There are still dragonflies and bumblebees dancing among the grass. This is when we hit peak cricketsong at night, and the once tiny rabbit in our yard has become a big, beautiful, and extremely fluffy adult.

Harvests are beginning in the fields, and there’s a sense of rest and recharge before the days turn dark and cold. We can relax for just a bit more, and that makes it more sweet than ever. I love August, and hope you’re enjoying it, too.

My Picks

Practical, goofy, thought-provoking. Perhaps you’ll find something that grabs you in this month’s picks…

Fender Studio

Iconic guitar maker Fender acquired music technology maker PreSonus a few years ago, and this year it resulted in something incredible: Fender Studio. It’s 100% free music recording software that works across all major platforms — Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and even Chromebooks. It’s focused on recording rather than composition, so no MIDI sequencing, but it’s super easy to learn and has powerful features. Definitely worth checking out.

AI Is Life

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker brings us a controversial take on AI in this Noema article. She posits that AI is not artificial life at all, it’s actually part of life when you zoom out to consider the bigger picture. I love different takes like this to expand my thinking.

Nubby’s Number Factory

I always appreciate stupid fun, and this $5 retro Windows-XP inspired game delivers. The goal is to create larger and larger numbers using a goofy ball named Nubby that bounces on pegs randomly arranged on the board. The more you hit, the higher your score, and the higher the peg points become. It’s another roguelike, so there are crazy powerups and synergies that transform gameplay in unique and interesting ways. Windows (and Steam Deck) only for now, with plans to add Mac and mobile versions later.

The Odin Project

I’m developing a new web development class for older students next year, and this site is going to be a part of it. It has everything you need to know about becoming a professional web developer, from start to finish, and presents it in a logical, no nonsense way. I particularly like that there’s a community aspect to it, though I know it’s hard for a lot of learners to engage with others online.

Robin Sloan’s Blog and Newsletter

I’ve featured one of Robin’s articles here before. It got me interested in his other work, and now I’m hooked. Anytime I can find someone who can write well about both science, technology, and art, I’m excited. He’s incredibly intelligent too, and the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a definite fan favorite.

Recently Published

July featured posts written during my recent trip to Cambodia:

Why Travel?

It takes a lot of money, time, and effort to travel. Here’s why I think it’s worth the hassle.

Crossing Thresholds

So many experiences in Cambodia shifted my perspectives, and all of it was because of the connections I made with others. There’s a lot of power in small acts that make the world a better place.

Beauty in Every Direction

I wish more people knew about the treasures of Cambodia. There are countless places and experiences, and such beauty! It’s not walled off in tourist-approved enclaves or kept away from all but the most privileged, either. It’s part of the fabric of the country itself.

Reconciliation

How can human societies contain both tremendous good and devastating evil? In this post I try to reconcile something that I think about often in terms of my own country these days, looking through the lens of a place that was devastated by the Khmer Rouge, but whose citizens are among the most generous and kind people I’ve ever met.

The Traffic Jam that Almost Made Me Cry

In my last post, I think about everything I’ve experienced in this country, and how much it has impacted me. Truly, this has been an experience of a lifetime, and I feel that I have changed as a result.

In the Groove

I’ve been spending my time exploring Ethiopian pentatonic scales lately, and I know how geeky that must sound, but it’s providing tons of interesting results and experiments. I got hooked on them long before I even knew what they were called, when I discovered the work of Mulatu Astatke. He quickly became one of my all-time favorite composers, and it’s thrilling to work within a bit of his sonic universe. All of this work also helps to develop my ability to perform live improvisation, which gets me closer to my goals and supports song development.

I’m still navigating just how much I should put into this hobby, but for now these kinds of things are keeping me going, excited to see what I can discover. One of the byproducts is I can sense some improvement in my skills, as well. Who knows where that might lead?

Until Next Time

I hope this newsletter reaches you in a place where you can enjoy the last bits of summer, savoring the days and finding places for your own seasonal explorations and interests. We need this, and I think (and hope) that we’ll be ready for what’s to come, but I’m perfectly OK with not getting there quite yet.

See you next month!

The Traffic Jam that Almost Made Me Cry

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 09:30:00 -0500

An old woman stepped closer to the small circle that had formed around the musicians. She listened for a moment to the haunting melody of the khan floating through the dusty street, then turned to someone nearby. She hadn’t heard a sound like this since childhood, she said.

I’m watching this unfold from a few feet away, trying to process what I’m seeing. We’d pulled off the main road on the way to a demonstration and stopped at a small market in an out-of-the-way village. Khan master Mon Hai had started playing in the street, accompanied by a few percussionists, and I was witnessing something I’d only imagined after years of admiring their work from afar.

It started tentatively. Children peeked out from doorways, curious about these strangers and the unfamiliar music. They crept a little closer, then closer still, until they were standing right next to the musicians. The adults followed — drawn by their children’s fascination and by sounds that stirred something deep in memory. Mon Hai clearly loved every moment of it, tapping his foot to create a mesmerizing rhythm, his face lighting up as the crowd grew.

Soon we had caused a proper traffic jam as trucks and carts took time out of their work day to listen. Later, the full ensemble performed at a music school nearby, packing the hall with smiling students. That’s when I got a little emotional, seeing with my own eyes what The Khmer Magic Music Bus has been doing, keeping traditional Cambodian music alive not as museum pieces, but as living, breathing culture.

And just like that, I find myself in my final hours here in Cambodia. The trip has been full of moments like this. Experiences that surprised me, moved me, and left me with stories I’m still trying to fully understand.

One of my favorites happened after we explored a floating village on Tonle Sap lake. Before boarding our boat, someone took our pictures. I assumed it was a security precaution and didn’t think much of it. When we returned to the pier and started climbing into our tuk tuks, a woman ran up trying to sell us something. This is common, and I was ready with a polite “no, thank you” in Khmer when I did a double-take. She was holding decorative plates with our own faces staring back at us from the centers!

The digital pictures weren’t official at all, they were for tourist merchandise. We sadly had to decline since they were expensive and we weren’t exactly looking our best. Now I can’t stop imagining a Cambodian family somewhere eating dinner off plates featuring the faces of foreign cheapskates.

When it comes to places that took my breath away, I’d have to choose the ancient Ta Prohm Temple where massive trees have grown around and through the stone structures. The merging of nature and human creation into something entirely new is unlike anything I’ve encountered. Walking through those ruins feels like stepping into a living collaboration between past and present.

Another otherworldly moment came atop Bokor Mountain, where dense clouds had descended to create the thickest fog I’ve ever experienced. Our driver, who takes tourists here for a living, said he’d never seen anything like it. At one point he had to stop the car because we couldn’t see ahead of us.

Walking around the temples and buildings felt like entering a secret universe that would only exist for these moments. Sound was hushed. The usual bird and insect calls were gone, replaced by howling wind that sent the mist swirling around us in ever-changing patterns. I couldn’t see my travel companion Steve standing twenty feet in front of me. The whole experience felt timeless, as though we’d stumbled into some hidden realm between worlds.

What I’ll miss most, though, are the everyday moments: people walking by the river at dusk, the most massive and diverse food court I’ve ever seen at Aeon mall in Phnom Penh, groups doing aerobics to a disco beat after work. Life here pulses with an energy and resilience that’s impossible to capture in photos but impossible to forget once you’ve witnessed it.

This experience has changed me in ways I’m still discovering. The people of Cambodia have opened their homes and hearts to me, sharing their stories, their struggles, and their incredible capacity for joy despite everything their country has endured. The beauty, culture, and vibrancy I’ve encountered here deserve to be celebrated and shared far beyond these borders.

I’m returning home as a different person, carrying these moments with me. Now comes the real work — figuring out how to honor what I’ve learned here and share it with others who need to know how extraordinary this place truly is.

Reconciliation

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 09:30:00 -0500

In Battambang’s central square stands a statue of Ta Dambong, a figure whose legend captures something I’ve been wrestling with this year. The story goes that he was a peasant who rose to become a protector of his people, wielding a magical stick to defeat the king and rule the land. But power corrupted him, and he began using that same stick to oppress those he he saw as a potential threat. Eventually, he threw his magical stick at the king’s son, who came to confront him. It missed, and he lost it forever. Powerless, he left and never returned. The name Battambang literally means “The Lost Stick.”

What strikes me isn’t just the story itself, but that people still come to this statue to pray for blessings. They ask for protection from the same figure whose tale includes both salvation and tyranny. They hold the entire story — the good and the corruption — without needing to choose sides or simplify the narrative.

Standing before that statue, I realized I was asking the same questions here that I ask at home: How do we reconcile the capacity for both profound kindness and unimaginable cruelty that exists within any society? How do we move forward when the same communities, the same human nature, contains such contradictions?

That day, Arn Chorn-Pond had taken us through his hometown, sharing stories that made these questions feel urgent rather than abstract. He showed me the school where he was playing soccer as a child when the Khmer Rouge entered town, beginning to terrorize the population from the moment they arrived. His family’s old home now sits behind the walls of a Cambodian People’s Party compound. In just five years — not much longer than a single presidential term — the Khmer Rouge killed one out of every four citizens in this country. The devastation still echoes through generations.

Yet the day before, Arn had spotted something that made him tell our tuk-tuk driver to stop. We were passing through a neighborhood near the river when he noticed a family making spring roll wrappers the traditional way. Without hesitation, he approached their home, spoke with them briefly, then beckoned us to follow. This clearly wasn’t a wealthy family, but they welcomed complete strangers into their workspace with genuine warmth. I watched as they carefully spread rice batter onto cloth, creating perfect translucent circles, then placed each wrapper into metal grid holders to dry by the river. They were so generous with their time, showing their process, and letting me photograph their work.

The kindness was immediate and unconditional. In a place where such unspeakable violence had occurred within living memory, strangers opened their home to foreigners simply because someone asked.

How do you hold both realities? The same human capacity that enables such generosity also enabled such cruelty. The same communities that create beauty and art and maintain traditions of hospitality also contained those who participated in genocide. These aren’t different people in different places. This is the full spectrum of what humans are capable of, existing side by side.

One evening, we waited at Phnom Sampov as dusk approached, watching millions of bats emerge from the sacred cave for their nightly flight. The spectacle was breathtaking.

The next day, we visited Phare Ponleu Selpak, an arts school that began in refugee camps, using art to help children process trauma they had witnessed. We arrived to witness a blessing ceremony for their new dance studio, and the music, dancing, and proceedings were profound. The students moved with precision and grace, their performance honoring both tradition and innovation. The school continues to respond to their community’s needs, training young artists while providing social services and education.

Watching those dancers, I thought about reconciliation not as forgetting or forgiving, but as the complex work of moving forward while holding the full truth. The Ta Dambong statue represents this perfectly. People pray to a figure whose story includes corruption because they understand that complexity is part of the human condition, not an exception to it.

The students at Phare aren’t trying to erase history or pretend trauma doesn’t exist. They’re using art to transform it, to create something beautiful from something terrible while never forgetting what happened. They’re building a future that acknowledges the past without being defined by it.

This is the work of reconciliation everywhere — learning to hold contradictions without requiring simple answers, finding ways to move forward without forgetting, creating beauty while acknowledging darkness. Standing in that square in Battambang, I realized that the questions I brought with me are the same ones communities everywhere must face. The answers, when they come, emerge not from choosing sides but from the harder work of holding the whole story.

Beauty in Every Direction

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 09:30:00 -0500

Tomorrow marks our last day in Siem Reap, and I’m trying to process what feels like sensory overload in the best possible way. Cambodia has been a constant series of moments that make me stop and think, “Wait, is this real?”

One of the first things that struck me here is how beauty seems to be woven into the fabric of daily life. It’s not relegated to museums or special occasions – it’s just there. Music drifts from temples and street corners, creating this ambient soundtrack that makes even mundane moments feel significant. The architecture tells stories through every carved detail, from the massive temple complexes we’ve visited to the smaller buildings that line the streets.

I keep finding myself craning my neck upward, following the lines of stupas reaching toward the sky or tracing the intricate patterns carved into ancient stone. There’s something about the vertical pull of this place that constantly draws your attention up and out of whatever you were thinking about.

What I wasn’t expecting were the shrines. They’re everywhere. Some are grand and elaborate, others so small you might walk past without noticing. But once you start seeing them, you can’t stop. They’ve become these little invitation points throughout the day to just… stop. Take a breath. Notice where you are.

There’s something powerful about a culture that builds these pause points directly into the landscape. You’re walking along, focused on getting somewhere or thinking about lunch, and suddenly there’s this gentle reminder: Hey, maybe take a second here.

I’m not sure I fully understand the cultural and religious significance yet, but I can feel the impact of having these regular moments of reflection built into the rhythm of moving through space. It’s made me more aware of how rarely I create those kinds of intentional pauses back home.

Yesterday we ventured up to Phnom Kulen, and I experienced my first proper jungle rainforest. The butterflies alone were worth the trip, these incredible bursts of color and movement that seemed to appear and disappear like tiny pieces of living art.

But here’s what caught me off guard: I spend so much time here looking up (at temple towers, carved lintels, towering trees) that I almost missed what was happening at ground level. At one point, I glanced down and saw this amazing pattern on the ground. Sunlight filtered through the canopy above, creating these shifting geometric shapes that looked almost deliberate.

It reminded me that beauty operates at every level here, from the monumental to the molecular. Sometimes the most striking discoveries happen when you shift your perspective, literally.

We visited Banteay Srei, and I kept having this surreal feeling that the aging and patina on the stone looked fake, like someone had applied Instagram filters to real life. The pink sandstone has weathered in these gorgeous, complex patterns that seem too perfect to be natural.

But that’s just what a thousand years looks like.

I’m used to “old” meaning a couple hundred years, maybe. Here, you’re regularly encountering things that were already ancient when the first European cathedrals were being built. There’s something both humbling and oddly comforting about being in the presence of things that have simply outlasted so much human drama.

The carvings at Banteay Srei are so detailed and precise that you can still make out individual expressions on faces and delicate patterns in clothing. Someone sat with these stones and poured incredible skill and attention into every surface. And here we are, centuries later, still stopping to appreciate their work.

I think what I’ll remember most isn’t just the famous temples or stunning landscapes (though those are pretty unforgettable). It’s the accumulation of smaller moments: the way music seems to emerge naturally from public spaces, the gentle rhythm of encountering those small shrines, the realization that beauty can be a default setting rather than something you have to seek out.

And the food! I can’t leave without mentioning that we’ve eaten incredibly well here. Every meal has been this great combination of familiar and completely new, often shared with people who’ve been generous with their time and stories.

Tomorrow may be our last day here, but I suspect some of these observations will stick around. There’s something about experiencing a place where art, spirituality, and daily life aren’t compartmentalized that makes you reconsider how you structure your own days.

Plus, my shutterbug companions have so many photos of temple carvings that I’ll probably spend months trying to properly appreciate them back home.

Crossing Thresholds

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 09:30:00 -0500

There’s something transformative about passing through the gates here in Cambodia. Whether it’s the ancient causeway leading to Angkor Thom, flanked by rows of stone guardians, or the simple wooden entrance to a village home, these thresholds seem to invite a shift in perspective, an opening of the mind and heart to what lies ahead.

You truly can’t know the scale and sheer presence of the temples at Angkor until you’re there, standing before them. We started at the largest and most famous, Angkor Wat, the temple that graces Cambodia’s flag and stands as the heart of what was once the mighty Khmer Empire. From the 9th to 15th centuries, this civilization created architectural marvels that still take your breath away today.

The crowds were so sparse that I often found myself alone as I toured the long galleries lined with intricate bas-reliefs. These stone walls tell stories of cosmic battles, royal processions, and daily life from centuries past — masterful carvings that connect us directly to the artists and storytellers of the Khmer people. Looking up at the temple’s soaring spires, I felt that profound sense of scale that only comes from standing in the presence of something both ancient and eternal.

As I sat soaking it all in, a large group of young monks walked by, many smiling and saying hello in English. They descended the steps and continued along their way across the grounds, their saffron robes a living reminder that this isn’t just a monument to the past — it’s part of Cambodia’s breathing, evolving culture. In that moment, I was reminded of just how many encounters with the sublime I’ve experienced here.

The cultural exchange continues beyond the temples. Yesterday we ate lunch on a deck surrounded by water, the only Westerners to be seen, and the proud owner came by to thank us for coming and asked us to return. My carnivorous companions have been delighting in dishes like frog stuffed with minced pork and spices (feels like Cambodia’s answer to a turducken) while I’ve had no trouble finding delicious vegetarian options that showcase the incredible flavors of Khmer cuisine.

These moments of genuine hospitality remind me that travel at its best is about more than seeing sights. It’s about human connection across cultures.

Yesterday also brought an especially meaningful visit to a small village where my school’s students have built relationships over many years. We came to pay respects to Man Men, a master of the chapei, a traditional two-stringed guitar, who performed in our very own amphitheater in 2018 and recently passed away.

Man Men’s story embodies both the fragility and resilience of cultural heritage. After the devastating period of the Khmer Rouge, when so much of Cambodia’s artistic tradition was lost, he was among the few remaining masters of his instrument. Organizations like Cambodian Living Arts helped connect him with new audiences and provided support for him to teach younger generations, ensuring his musical gifts wouldn’t disappear with him. When he visited our school, students were mesmerized by his skill and warmth: a master musician sharing his art across continents.

His daughter and family continue this vital work of preserving and sharing their musical heritage with the world. Meeting them, seeing their dedication to keeping these traditions alive, was deeply moving. Man Men’s legacy lives on not just in the music, but in his generous spirit and the connections he fostered.

I can’t quite believe that tomorrow marks a week since we left on this journey. There’s much more to come, but what’s already happened will stay with me for a lifetime.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson emerging from these experiences is how much difference we can make — even when we’re not wealthy or influential — by simply finding ways to make the world a little better. The students and teachers who’ve traveled here over the years, building relationships in this village. The organizations working to preserve cultural traditions. The individual connections formed across language barriers and cultural differences.

Together, over time, these small acts of respect, curiosity, and genuine engagement create something much larger than any single gesture. They build bridges not unlike those ancient stone causeways leading to Angkor’s gates, and they connect us across time, distance, and difference.

As I prepare for whatever transformative threshold awaits tomorrow, I’m grateful for the reminder that the most meaningful journeys happen not just through physical spaces, but through the openings we create in our hearts and minds for connection with others.

Why Travel?

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 09:30:00 -0500

The hassle is real. The expense is significant. The environmental impact weighs on me. So why am I sitting here in Phnom Penh right now, jet-lagged and completely energized at the same time?

Back home, with everything going on in our country, I find myself spending too much time inside my own head. I get comfortable in my routines, my perspectives, my familiar frustrations. Travel forces me out of that inward spiral and makes me look outward instead. There’s something about being in a completely different place, surrounded by different people living different lives, that snaps me back into the world.

Being here is also holding up a mirror to my own culture in ways I wasn’t expecting. Phnom Penh has this incredible energy – chaos and life bursting through everywhere you look. The pace, the sounds, the way people interact with each other and move through their city – it’s showing me assumptions I didn’t even know I was making about how life gets lived.

This trip is deeply personal for me. Back in 2013, I helped fundraise for the Khmer Magic Music Bus. I believed in the vision of Cambodian musicians traveling to rural and indigenous communities to share traditional instruments and songs, but I’d never actually seen it in action. Being here for the first time, finally meeting these incredible people I’d only known through Zoom calls, emails, and an occasional visit to the States, feels like completing a circle that’s been open for over a decade.

What strikes me most, though, is how much is universal. Yes, everything here is different from home - the language, the food, the way traffic flows, the rhythm of the day. But the people I’m meeting are brilliant, hardworking, and passionate about their country and culture. The kindness we’ve encountered from everyone has been overwhelming. We’re spending time with people who value truth, art, and beauty just as deeply as anyone back home.

Travel reminds me that the world is both bigger and smaller than I think it is from my desk back home. Bigger in its diversity and complexity, smaller in its shared humanity. For me, that’s worth every hassle, every dollar, and all this jet lag.

July 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 16:23:03 -0400

I’ve just returned from the trip of a lifetime after nearly 46 hours of being awake and traveling home. Exhaustion doesn’t really capture how it feels to do such a long haul, but somehow I got through it, and it was absolutely worth it.

You see, I finally had the chance to go to Cambodia and travel on The Khmer Magic Music Bus as it brought traditional Cambodian musicians into towns and villages to demonstrate their expertise. Along the way I also got to explore four different regions of the country and meet so many wonderful, talented people.

I’ll be posting travel reflections on my site this month if you’re interested in learning more about this extraordinary work and land. Being away, seeing how others live through hardships and celebrate triumphs, it’s made me think quite a bit about home. I think my country has now changed to the extent that there’s no going back to the way it was. My remaining years will not be as I’d expected. It’s no longer a matter of waiting things out; it’s now about moving things forward, however that may be.

My Picks

Summer is here! These links are perfect for some sunny day downtime:

The Buena Vista Social Club Tiny Desk Concert

I’ve had the good fortune to see the Buena Vista Social Club production on Broadway, and I was blown away by the experience. Watch this NPR Tiny Desk Concert and see why it’s worth it to get a ticket (every seat in the house is great, and these musicians are on fire).

A History of the Internet, Part 2

Jeremy Reimer continues his excellent Ars Technica series about the early days of the Internet. Part 2 covers the transition of Internet use from a small group of hobbyists, academics, and nerds to just about everybody, thanks to the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990.

That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was On Purpose.

Chris Colin reflects on his personal experience and research about dealing with customer service to try to solve a problem in this Atlantic article. We’ve all been there. I’ve been worn down by corporate rabbit holes until I finally gave up plenty of times, and always end up feeling like a loser even though I realize it’s my best option. I’ve kept going at it for far too long to make it worthwhile, too, but often to no avail, which end up making me wonder if I’m a bit crazy. But I’ve also stuck to it and won a few times. Those victories are among the sweetest.

SomaFM Player

I like to work with background music, and SomaFM is my favorite online radio station. It heavily skews toward electronic genres, but also has some great 70’s rock, alternative, soul, jazz, and pop channels. Drone Zone is perfect when I want to focus, Groove Salad is great when I need a little energy, and Deep Space One is my most frequent choice — just enough to keep me interested without taking away my concentration.

Recently Published

Here’s what I published in June:

The Compass of Failure

The older I get, the more I see how important failure has been to my success. In this post I explore this seeming contradiction, and how it’s manifested itself in my life. While I certainly don’t look forward to failure, it really is the only way I can fully grow as a person, reveal new directions and potential, and learn to trust that setbacks are not always what they first seem.

Beyond Q & A: Teaching AI as a Thought Partner

Toward the end of the school year I had my first experience teaching AI literacy to older students, in grades 10-12. It was fantastic, and I learned a ton. Here’s my full debrief, including takeaways.

In the Groove

It’s been good to be away from the studio for a while. The fresh perspective and sense of a clean, new slate is exciting. My energy feels different now — renewed, but with a different focus.

Mostly, I think I need to reconnect to the fun of experimentation and relax about the production aspect. One will lead to the other, and I have the whole rest of summer to explore, twiddle, and delight in sonic atmospheres.

I also took several field recordings in Cambodia, and am inspired to use them in creative ways. I can’t wait to find out what results!

Until Next Time

I hope you’re able to enjoy some summer peace and downtime. I know I’m going to do everything I can to recharge and renew my commitment to living right, showing gratitude for the incredible people in my life, and having fun.

Until August, which kicks off my favorite time of year!

Beyond Q&A: Teaching AI as a Thought Partner

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 09:00:59 -0400

When a colleague teaching an intro to technology course approached me about her students’ interest in learning about AI and asked if I could teach it, I was excited. I developed a five-session unit centered around business development with an AI co-founder. What I discovered surprised me, and has implications for how we might think about preparing students for an AI-integrated future.

The Startup Approach

I’ve been following Ethan Mollick’s work and was inspired by his book Co-Intelligence, as I’ve described before. A lot of his examples use his business classes, and that got me thinking. What if students could explore AI literacy through creating their own startup ideas with an LLM (a Large Language Model, like ChatGPT) as their thought partner? This approach seemed promising for several reasons:

It would naturally showcase both AI strengths and limitations. For example, I suspected that creating a business plan would work great, but getting accurate, comprehensive market research might not.
The business focus aligned perfectly with the course. Rather than teaching AI in isolation, we could connect it to the broader business and technology themes they were already exploring.
Giving students agency to develop their own business ideas would make the experience more engaging and potentially useful beyond just learning about AI.

My biggest surprise came early. While everyone (ranging from 10th grade to post-graduate) had used AI tools before, none had experience using them as thought partners in an extended dialogue. Their previous interactions had been largely transactional: asking questions, generating content, or analyzing information.

In other words, they were using LLMs primarily as search engines or content generators, missing out on the more powerful collaborative aspects these tools offer. This limited perspective isn’t unique to my students. I suspect lots of us are still in the early stages of understanding how to have meaningful collaborations with AI.

From Instructions to Insights

The unit progressed through five sessions, moving from LLM foundations and system instructions to market analysis, business plan development, and pitch deck creation. It culminated with presentations in front of a panel of “angel investors” (other teachers) who would decide which business ideas they would back with investment, if any.

One misstep I made was assuming that older learners would benefit from figuring out system instructions on their own. I deliberately avoided modeling this process, thinking it would encourage exploration. In reality, this created unnecessary confusion. During the next class, I needed to meet with each student individually to help refine their instructions for effective AI collaboration.

I also noticed that the AI tended to be overly supportive of student ideas, even when some weren’t particularly feasible. In future iterations, I plan to explicitly teach them to use “adversarial prompting” that deliberately asks the AI to critique their ideas from different perspectives, such as skeptical investors or potential competitors.

Despite these challenges, the discussions throughout the unit were wonderful. Students began to see patterns in effective AI collaboration and gradually shifted from seeing LLMs as simple tools to understanding them as complex thought partners with distinct capabilities and limitations.

By our final session, the transformation was evident. Those who had previously used AI only for quick answers were now engaged in extended dialogues about business strategy, market analysis, and product development. Their presentations demonstrated not just business understanding but a newfound ability to collaborate with AI in sophisticated ways.

During our closing discussion, everyone agreed that the experience had been valuable and changed how they thought about AI. One student even shared that the unit had inspired him to pursue business studies more seriously — a fantastic unexpected outcome.

Lessons for My Teaching

This experience reinforced several key principles for my teaching of AI literacy:

Learning by doing beats learning by telling. Abstract discussions of AI capabilities don’t compare to using these tools for meaningful, authentic work.
Modeling matters. Even tech-savvy students benefit from seeing effective AI collaboration demonstrated before trying it themselves.
Critical evaluation is crucial. Beyond being critical of the AI output itself, students need explicit encouragement to prompt AI for critical feedback about the work that’s generated so that they can avoid over-emphasizing supportive responses.
Discussion complements experience. Making time for students to share discoveries, strategies, and ethical considerations dramatically enhances learning.
Many students are only scratching the surface. Despite growing up with technology, many students are using AI at only the most basic level.

Looking Forward

I’m already planning improvements for the next iteration, if I get invited to teach it. I’d like to expand to six sessions to allow more time for pitch preparation, add more structured modeling of effective AI interactions, and incorporate explicit critical evaluation throughout the process.

Beyond these specific changes, this experience has reinforced my belief that the ability to use AI through collaborative conversation will be a significant differentiator for students entering college and the workforce. Those who understand how to use AI as a genuine thought partner — rather than just a search engine or content generator — will have a meaningful advantage.

This doesn’t mean uncritical acceptance of AI tools. Some students expressed valid ethical concerns about AI use, and these discussions were valuable parts of the learning process. What’s important is that they make informed decisions based on actual experience rather than surface-level understanding.

In the end, the most powerful AI literacy comes from a combination of authentic experience and reflective conversation. Young people need opportunities to use these tools for real, meaningful work, coupled with space to discuss what works, what doesn’t, and what it all means for their future.

The Compass of Failure

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 09:00:54 -0400

We tend to see failure as an endpoint: a closed door, a dead end, a signal to turn around and try something else. For much of my life, that’s exactly how I viewed it too. A failure meant I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. It was a judgment, not just on what I did, but on who I was.

Over time, however, I’ve discovered something unexpected. Failure has often been my most reliable compass, pointing me toward paths I might never have discovered otherwise — paths that felt more like me and brought real joy into my life.

Finding a New Perspective

This wasn’t always the case. When I was young, failure and I had a difficult relationship. I stayed back in 10th grade, landed in remedial classes, and flunked out of college twice in my 20s. Each setback reinforced a story I’d been telling myself: that I wasn’t capable, that success wasn’t for me.

When faced with challenges, my default was often to give up before I’d truly begun. The fear of failing again loomed too large, and not trying seemed safer than trying and confirming what I already believed about myself.

The shift started in my late 20s, when I began to reframe failure as feedback rather than a final verdict. This perspective change didn’t happen overnight, but it completely changed my relationship with setbacks. Instead of seeing failure as proof of my inadequacy, I learned to ask: “What is this telling me? What can I learn here?”

Unexpected Directions

One vivid example stands out from that transitional time. I’d decided I wanted to become a teacher, but with only a high school diploma, I wasn’t sure how to get there. I applied for a position as a trainer, thinking it would be a logical stepping stone.

The interview process required me to demonstrate my teaching skills in front of the company’s existing trainers. I remember standing there, delivering my carefully prepared material and watching them exchange smirks and barely concealed eye-rolls. Their dismissiveness was palpable and crushing.

I didn’t get the job, of course. But to my surprise, instead of taking their reaction as confirmation that I didn’t have what it takes to teach, it sparked something different in me: determination. Their rejection could have convinced me to abandon this path entirely. Instead, it strengthened my resolve.

I kept pushing forward, continued giving talks to volunteer groups (the Y2K catastrophe was a very popular topic … thankfully, I was right about that), and eventually found my way into teaching. Twenty-three years later, I’m still in the classroom.

That experience marked a subtle but important shift in how I processed failure. Rather than letting it define my limits, I let it fuel my persistence. Sometimes failure points us away from something that doesn’t truly fit who we are, even if we’re heavily invested in it.

I spent a year dedicated to becoming a fiction writer. I worked diligently, developed my craft, and came remarkably close to getting published and accepted into a few prestigious workshops. By conventional standards, I was on the right track, just not quite there yet. With continued effort, I think I might have got there eventually.

There was just one problem: I wasn’t enjoying the process. The writing itself didn’t bring me joy, despite my growing skill. So I failed at being a published author, shifted to making music instead, and discovered a spark of genuine creative fulfillment that had been missing. Music unlocked a joy that writing fiction never did for me.

Those writing skills weren’t wasted, either. They’ve come full circle right here, where I’m creating content I genuinely enjoy. What seemed like a “failed” writing career was actually pointing me toward a better expression of my creativity and later, a more authentic way to use my writing abilities.

Another example: for years, I’ve been telling everyone that I plan to create a YouTube channel. And for years, I’ve hesitated, never quite feeling ready or confident enough to begin. By some measures, this could be seen as a failure to launch; a goal repeatedly deferred.

But this particular “failure” cleared the way for something unexpected: restarting my website. What emerged wasn’t a consolation prize, but a new creative outlet. I’m creating content I’m proud of, establishing a practice that feels sustainable, and building something that feels right for me.

Would I still like to start that YouTube channel someday? For sure. But what initially felt like procrastination or lack of follow-through actually led me to a project that fits me better right now.

Creating Space for Discovery

One insight I’ve gained is that productive failure requires certain foundations. For me, establishing core competencies in my professional life created the stability that allowed me to experiment elsewhere. Having confidence in my teaching abilities gave me room to try writing fiction, making music, and launching side gigs, knowing that if they didn’t work out, my foundation remained secure.

This space to try, fail, and redirect is huge. Without it, failure becomes too threatening to risk, and we stay within familiar, “safe” territories that may not truly fulfill us.

My complicated history with failure has profoundly shaped how I approach teaching, too. When students struggle or disengage, I don’t write them off because I know what it’s like to be written off. Too many adults in my young life decided I wasn’t worth the investment based on my early performance. While there are still consequences for students who don’t engage in my classes, everyone has potential. Sometimes people just need time to find their way. I certainly did.

Opening Doors Through “Yes”

As I’ve gotten older, my relationship with failure has continued to evolve. Beyond simply reframing failure as feedback, I’ve become increasingly willing to say “yes” to opportunities, even when success isn’t guaranteed.

This openness has led to some of my life’s most meaningful experiences. When asked to help launch the Khmer Magic Music Bus, a non-profit arts preservation initiative now part of Cambodian Living Arts, I could have easily declined, thinking I wasn’t the right person or that it wouldn’t work out. Instead, I said yes. Co-founding that organization has become one of my proudest accomplishments.

The math is simple, but powerful. Saying yes to more opportunities means experiencing more failures, but it also creates more chances for extraordinary success. Every so often, something remarkable happens along the way that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

Looking back at my journey, I’ve learned to value what failure offers. When everything always goes smoothly, we don’t discover our limits or capabilities. We don’t experience the particular satisfaction that comes from struggle. These days I feel this most often in my coding projects. I’m not an experienced programmer, so failures happen frequently, making the moments when something works out all the more rewarding.

Failure also reveals what truly matters to us. My “failed” attempts at fiction writing showed me what didn’t bring me joy, just as clearly as music showed me what did. These discoveries aren’t available without the willingness to try, fail, and reflect honestly on the experience.

Finding Your Own Compass

I’ll always have my inner critic, a harsh voice that developed early in my life and is quick to interpret setbacks as personal inadequacies. With practice, I’ve learned to hear it without being governed by it, to view its catastrophizing with perspective, and to remember that failure is often just a redirect, not an endpoint.

The practice of self-compassion remains an ongoing journey. Putting failures in perspective — seeing them as feedback rather than judgment — requires continued intention. But the rewards of this approach have been immeasurable. I even ended up getting my bachelor’s degree when I was 40, with a 4.0 GPA.

By being open to opportunities that might not succeed, I’ve discovered paths I couldn’t have imagined at the outset. I’ve found that the compass of failure often points toward greater authenticity, joy, and fulfillment, but only if we’re willing to follow where it leads.

June 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 09:30:00 -0400

Big animals seem to get all the attention. Lions, elephants, and bears have countless books and movies dedicated to them. Don’t even get me started about whales. I’m much more interested in the small creatures of our world. Have you ever watched a slug make its slimy way across a rock, or had an aphid land on your sleeve? Is there anything cuter than a chipmunk? More fascinating than a praying mantis?

The thing that ties it all together for me is that you don’t need to go to a zoo to see it. You can go into your backyard, and look around. Once you make the effort, you’ll see amazing things everywhere. There’s a lot that comes when you stop and observe. I just have to remember to do it more often.

My Picks

A little bit of this and that for your June:

Tubi’s “For the Cinephiles” Collection

The more I explore Fox’s FAST streaming channel Tubi, the more impressed I become. The ads are less intrusive, the catalog is enormous, and the content is easy to access. This collection includes some of the finest art house cinema in history, and features some of my favorites. Pair this up with their silent movies and you have enough to keep you in film geek heaven for weeks on end.

Arc Browser and Zen Browser

Think of how much you use your web browser. Have you ever considered an alternative? Certainly, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari get the job done. But there are innovative companies rethinking how we interface with the web, and with just a little effort, you might find you like one of them better. Arc is a different kind of browser, and for me, it does things better. I love having tabs on the side instead of along the top. I love setting up spaces for different types of browsing. There’s plenty more that Arc does, too, and it’s 100% free to try out for yourself, but they recently stopped active development of it (security updates are still ongoing). Zen is very similar to Arc, also free, and still in active development, so if you’re looking for something to grow with, it’s worth checking out.

Little Dig Game

Saying you like video games is like saying you like anime. It doesn’t tell you anything of substance — you need to know genres to really understand. If you’ve never tried a clicker, this is a great choice. It’s short (which, for clickers, means hours instead of days), has a great sense of humor, and a fun payoff at the end. Then again, if you can’t fathom why a game where all you do is click would appeal, you’d be in good company.

Neal Stephenson’s Remarks on AI

Snow Crash changed the way I thought about the world when it came out in 1992. Since then I’ve read and admired many Neal Stephenson books. In this post he provides a new and insightful perspective about AI. Once again, I’m thinking about our world and this technology differently. Definitely worth reading for anyone interested in the impact of AI on our society.

Bitwarden

You need a password manager. No, really. Everyone does. Memorize one hard-to-guess password (or phrase) to get in, and then let it take care of creating and managing all of your other passwords from that point forward. That way, every password can be different, so if one gets breached it won’t affect the others, your main password is never used anywhere else, and you’ll have an easy way to view and edit all kinds of secure data. It’s free and open source, it works on computers and mobile devices, and it’s what I’ve been using for years.

Recently Published

If you’ve missed it, here’s what’s new on the site:

Taking Students Seriously

Have you ever noticed the level of empty praise that young people receive? They can tell when it’s inauthentic, and it can lead to discounting themselves and their work. On the other side, when I provide students feedback that describes areas for improvement, I’m sometimes faced with tears. It’s difficult to find the right balance, but here’s how I continue to try.

AI Won’t Replace Teachers (But It Will Make Us Better)

So many of my colleagues are sad and concerned about the advent of AI tools, and I can’t blame them. What we hear and see about it can make it look as though our profession as we currently know it will change to something cheaper and less effective. The more I work with AI, though, the more I think it’s the exact opposite. I don’t know that it will change anyone’s mind or help them to feel better, but I’m hoping that sharing my perspective might at least offer a counterpoint to all of the negative sentiment that’s out there right now while recognizing that there are, indeed, real risks if our society doesn’t choose to use these tools wisely.

In the Groove

It’s frustrating to be in a place where I’m about 95% done with my next release, but the last 5% is just not happening. And here I thought committing to wrapping things up in this newsletter would help motivate me to get it done. Part of it is being busy, to be sure, but it’s more of a headspace thing.

Self-flagellating isn’t of much interest to me, so I’m giving myself a pass this month. It will happen when it happens! I have been creating sketches and practicing regularly, as well as exploring some of the creative tools at my disposal, so musical things are still a regular part of my life. Perhaps I just need to step back a bit and not get myself so wound up in wanting things to be perfect. Wish me luck!

Until Next Time

What do you notice when you stop and look at what’s right there, around you? Not the big, obvious things that demand attention, but the small details that reveal themselves only when you pause and pay attention. Sometimes the most interesting discoveries are hiding in plain sight — whether that’s a tiny beetle on a flower, an unexpected connection between ideas, or a new way of seeing something familiar.

AI Won't Replace Teachers (But It Will Make Us Better)

Sat, 24 May 2025 01:12:18 -0400

Every time I show other teachers how I’m using AI in my classroom, I can see anxiety flash across some faces. It usually happens right after they witness an AI-facilitated student conversation that shows surprising depth, personalization, and responsiveness. Sometimes they come right out and say it: “If AI can do this, what’s left for me?”

I understand that reaction. We’ve all heard how AI is being marketed to businesses as a way to reduce staff. We’ve seen the headlines about automation replacing jobs. When you see a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT guiding a student through a complex reflection process with the kind of patience and customization that’s a hallmark of good teaching, it’s natural to wonder.

But I’ve come to believe exactly the opposite: AI won’t replace teachers. It will, however, transform how we teach, what we prioritize, and ultimately make us better at the core of what education is really about.

What AI Can’t Do

Before diving into how AI can enhance our work, it’s worth acknowledging what technology simply cannot replicate:

Relationships are the foundation of learning, and they require human connection. Things like the trust built between a teacher and student, the understanding that develops over time, and the ability to sense when a student is struggling beyond what they’re saying are essential to a good education. An AI might simulate a conversation, but it cannot truly know a student as a person with a distinct history, circumstances, and needs.

Teachers bring lived experience both as members of society and as educators who guide learners. We understand the nuances of learning progressions, the common misconceptions, the moments when persistence is needed and when a different approach might work better. All of this is informed by direct experience that AI simply doesn’t have.

Ethical guidance and moral development happen through observation, discussion, and modeling. Students learn values not just from what we say but how we live and interact. AI lacks the moral agency and authentic ethical reasoning that teachers model every day.

True expertise in content knowledge, pedagogy, and learning theory takes years to develop and is constantly refined through practice. Teachers make hundreds of complex decisions daily, drawing on theoretical frameworks, content mastery, and intuitive understanding that goes far beyond what can be programmed.

Multi-sensory learning experiences require a physical presence and emotional intelligence that technology cannot provide. A teacher notices a furrowed brow, senses frustration building, and adjusts their tone and approach in real-time using non-verbal cues that AI cannot detect or respond to.

How AI Enhances Teaching

Far from supplanting these fundamentally human elements of teaching, AI can actually free us to focus more intently on them. Here are examples from my own classroom:

Deeper one-on-one conferences. Before introducing AI, my limited one-on-one time with students was often spent asking basic questions to help them create things like project plans. Now, students develop their first drafts guided by AI, which I can review before we meet. This transforms our precious face-to-face time from basic information gathering to substantive discussions about their specific plans. I’m not doing less teaching — I’m doing more meaningful teaching that’s differentiated for each student.

Collaborative problem-solving. When a student struggles with developing project ideas, I don’t have to be the authority figure reminding them of deadlines. Instead, we can sit side-by-side and engage with an AI-powered brainstorming activity together. This positions us as collaborators, not adversaries, reducing anxiety and resistance. The perfectionism, procrastination, or fear of failure doesn’t disappear, but our approach to addressing it becomes more collaborative and often more effective.

Enhanced reflection processes. In the past, student reflections followed a predictable pattern: I’d provide questions, they’d answer, I’d give feedback, they’d revise, and we’d move on, all constrained by time. Now, AI can facilitate conversations that adapt to student responses in real-time, asking follow-up questions and encouraging deeper thinking in the moment. As I described in my article on AI-facilitated reflections, this approach resulted in more personal, thoughtful reflections than I had ever received using traditional methods.

In each case, AI isn’t taking my place, it’s handling routine aspects that previously limited how I could use my time and expertise. The result isn’t less teaching; it’s better teaching, focused precisely where human teachers add the most value.

Shifting the Mindset

Understanding AI as an augmentation rather than a replacement requires a shift in how we think about educational technology.

AI-enhanced teaching often requires MORE work from teachers, not less. Designing effective AI learning experiences requires significant expertise and effort. I’m creating prompts, anticipating response patterns, building in supports for different learners, and integrating the AI interactions within a broader curriculum that I’ve carefully developed. This isn’t “teaching on autopilot,” it’s extending my teaching in new ways.

The teaching profession has evolved with every technological advance. From books to film strips to computers, teachers have adapted by focusing on what only they can provide while leveraging new tools. AI represents the next evolution in this ongoing process. Instead of extinction, we’re looking at transformation by developing new skills as AI curators, evaluators, and integrators.

Teacher AI literacy becomes a form of professional empowerment. Teachers who understand AI are better positioned to advocate for ethical, effective implementation in schools. This knowledge allows us to shape how these tools are used and not have decisions imposed upon us by those less familiar with classroom realities.

Addressing Real Concerns

While I’m optimistic about AI’s role in education, there are legitimate concerns that we must address.

Assessment will need to evolve. Traditional assessments that are easy to cheat using AI will need rethinking, creating additional work for already-stretched teachers. But this also presents an opportunity to focus on more authentic demonstrations of learning that AI can’t easily replicate.

Corporate interests don’t always align with educational values. Companies selling AI solutions may promise easy, teacher-free solutions to appeal to budget-conscious administrators. As education professionals, we need to be vocal about uniquely human elements of teaching while advocating for AI tools that genuinely enhance our work.

Equity considerations are crucial. Will AI implementation exacerbate existing educational inequities, or can it help address them? Teachers must ensure that AI integration doesn’t leave vulnerable populations behind and ideally works to close rather than widen achievement gaps.

Essential learning experiences must be protected. When students offload critical thinking, research, analysis, and evaluation to AI instead of using it as an augmentation or thought partner, we risk building a more credulous society without the ability to discern nuance or identify misinformation. We should thoughtfully design AI integration that strengthens these vital skills, or they will atrophy.

First Steps

If you’re a teacher feeling anxious about AI’s role in education, here are concrete steps to begin exploring its potential:

Spend time using AI to discover what it really is. Experiment with different tools to understand what they do well and where they fall short. The best antidote to fear is familiarity, and direct experience will give you a better view than any headline.

Try it yourself before using with students. Think about interactions that could be AI-supported and test them personally. Explore how AI might help with feedback analysis, lesson planning, or resource creation before bringing it into your classroom.

Start small with specific use cases. Identify one area where AI might enhance your current practice. Don’t try to transform everything at once. Perhaps begin with using AI to help generate differentiated examples or to create scaffolded questions for texts.

Evaluate the impact on your teaching and relationships. After implementing AI tools, reflect on how they affect what matters most: your connection with students and their learning outcomes. Make adjustments based on these reflections.

Connect with other educators exploring AI. Find communities of practice where you can share experiences, ask questions, and learn from others’ successes and challenges.

A More Human Future?

Let’s be clear: I’m not uncritically positive about all aspects of AI. There are real risks that corporations will leverage this technology in ways that increase inequality rather than opportunity. But I believe there’s tremendous potential for good, particularly in education, if we approach it thoughtfully.

The future of teaching isn’t one where AI replaces human educators. Rather, it’s one where AI handles routine aspects of instruction and facilitates deeper student engagement, freeing teachers to focus on what they do best: building meaningful relationships, applying their expertise, and engaging in the substantive work that truly requires human connection.

The most powerful use of AI in education may be its ability to make teaching more human, not less — allowing us to reclaim the relational heart of learning that has always been the true essence of great teaching.

How might we collectively reimagine education in an AI-enhanced world that’s not just preserving what makes teaching human, but actually strengthening those uniquely human elements through thoughtful technology integration?

Taking Students Seriously

Sat, 10 May 2025 01:50:14 -0400

Every teacher has to figure out who they are and how they best interact with students. For me, looking back after 23 years in the classroom, that journey quickly led to a realization: young people get a lot of empty praise. When everything is celebrated at the highest level, genuine feedback becomes meaningless or expected. That approach simply doesn’t work for me in terms of both personality and educational philosophy, and I don’t think it works for my students, either.

The most important principle I’ve developed is straightforward: I don’t treat my students like children. I treat them like any other human deserving of honesty and respect. While I adjust my language based on their developmental stage and emotional state, being genuine is the most respectful thing I can do. Students deserve valid praise and honest feedback about areas for improvement, just like anyone else.

The Power of Specificity

This approach comes to life weekly in a creative club I advise where students share everything from homemade cookies to astrophotography. In these sessions, I see my role as someone who genuinely supports their work, but I consciously resist the easy path of generic enthusiasm.

It’s tempting to just say “Wow, that’s great!” and move on. Instead, I work hard to find something specific to mention – an element I particularly responded to, an interesting choice they made, or a technique that stood out. Sometimes the most powerful feedback comes in the form of genuine questions: “Why did you choose this approach?” or “What was this experience like for you?”

I’ve never encountered student work without finding something genuine to appreciate or express curiosity about. That specificity makes all the difference between meaningful engagement and empty platitudes.

Navigating the Feedback Balance

When it comes to more critical feedback, I tend to be direct, though this approach requires careful framing. I try to help students understand that when something doesn’t work out, that’s simply a point of data, not a criticism of them as people. The fact that they tried is already something worth celebrating, because without attempts, there’s nothing to improve upon.

I’ve found that framing matters tremendously. Phrases like “from my perspective” or “have you considered this?” create space for dialogue rather than dictating changes. I might say, “I wondered about this when I saw it” or “I’m a little concerned about this approach. What do you think?” This invites students into a conversation about their work rather than positioning me as the ultimate authority.

That said, I recognize that some students aren’t ready for my directness. There have been times when my approach has triggered emotional responses — something I take very seriously. When this happens, I first assess whether they need time before we talk further. Sometimes a few minutes to process is all that’s needed.

I’m not afraid to apologize when my approach misses the mark, either. If a student has a negative emotional reaction, the information I was trying to convey becomes much harder for them to hear and act upon, which means I’ve failed in my communication. A heartfelt apology, an explanation of my intentions, and a promise to try to do better in the future can help bridge that gap.

Interestingly, some students who initially struggled with my direct feedback have developed stronger relationships with me over time. I believe it’s valuable for students to experience having their work and assumptions questioned, and to encounter challenging standards. Sometimes I’ll simply ask a student if they believe they’ve submitted their best work — a question that can be startling but important.

Technology as a Feedback Tool

Digital tools have transformed how I deliver feedback in ways that enhance both specificity and student dignity. One of my most effective techniques is creating short screencasts where I talk through their work, zooming in on specific elements as I discuss them. This approach allows everyone in class to simultaneously receive personalized feedback while maintaining privacy. Students use headphones to listen to my observations, after which I can touch base with them individually.

These screencasts, along with comment features in tools like Google Docs, provide students with a permanent record they can revisit – essentially creating a roadmap for improvement based on specific elements of their work.

An Evolving Approach

My feedback philosophy has evolved considerably over two decades of teaching. As someone naturally enthusiastic and positive, I initially expressed genuine excitement about student work without much structure. However, I began noticing that certain students seemed accustomed to receiving empty platitudes. They’d heard generic praise so often it had lost meaning.

That observation sparked a significant shift in my approach. I became more deliberate about connecting my enthusiasm to specific choices students had made through their own agency. Rather than praising intrinsic qualities (“you’re so smart”), I focused on decisions that led to positive outcomes (“the way you approached this problem showed really creative thinking”).

Perhaps most importantly, I now incorporate peer feedback into my classes whenever possible. This gives students practice in both giving and receiving feedback — positive and constructive — while I guide them through best practices: being specific, starting with genuine compliments, and framing constructive criticism thoughtfully.

My ultimate hope is that students understand that I take them seriously as complete individuals, not just as children. When I praise them, it’s genuine recognition of something truly deserving. When I suggest improvements, it’s because I believe in their capacity to produce their best work and become their best selves.

This approach to feedback isn’t just about improving assignments. It’s about developing the resilience and discernment needed to evaluate their own work and collaborate effectively with others throughout their lives.

May 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 03 May 2025 08:26:23 -0400

There’s a bus stop on my front lawn. I think about this often — how in suburbia, neighbors might post “keep off the grass” signs, but here in my small city, the neighborhood literally comes to me. It’s just one of countless small, cool things I’ve found in semi-urban living that I’ve been reflecting on lately.

I’ve lived in various settings throughout my life. Suburban neighborhoods where everything required a car, a brief stint in a rural area, and now, this walkable pocket of an old New England factory town. Each morning, I witness the beautiful tapestry of humanity passing by my window, people of different ages, backgrounds, and walks of life, all sharing this common space.

Just by walking out my front door and heading downtown, I can sample cuisine from six different cultures, wander through a vast park that is (quite weirdly) completely hidden from the road, access trails, or catch a movie. The architecture tells stories of old moneyed mansions and industrial mill history, repurposed and renewed. At night, the sounds of the city remind me that we’re a community, all of us sharing this vibrant ecosystem (the occasional late-night motorcycle notwithstanding).

Cities aren’t perfect, of course. The sirens, the trucks, the constant hum of activity … they’re all part of the package. I also recognize that rural tranquility or suburban space offers different kinds of peace that many people rightfully cherish. But there’s something about city living that connects deeply with who I am, providing a sense of community and shared experience that I’ve found nowhere else.

My Picks

While this month’s picks are decidedly geeky, I think they still have something to offer for everyone.

I Spent 30 Days in a Dead Game

There.com is an old multiplayer VR world that is somehow still running. It’s essentially abandoned except for a small core of loyal users, and this video details the experience of an outsider trying to understand why they stick around.

LLM Energy Use Cheatsheet

Circling back to a major consideration in my deliberations about ethical AI use, Andy Masley does the math and makes the charts to help clarify everything. Perspective is key, here: “If individual emissions are what you’re worried about, ChatGPT is hopeless as a way of lowering them. It’s like seeing people who are spending too much money, and saying they should buy one fewer gum ball per month…”

An Ars Technica History of the Internet

This is the first of three parts in a series by Jeremy Reimer that delves into the history of our modern information and communications infrastructure. Packed with photos and artifacts plus tons of details that I haven’t seen elsewhere, I am over the moon.

There are parts of my life that I take for granted and think everybody knows about. Then I talk with someone and realize that it’s ridiculous to think this way. I’m going to try to remedy this by sharing some of my favorite everyday tools and hacks in this newsletter. Here are my first two…

Kagi Internet Search

Kagi is a paid search engine. For $5 per month (less if you pay annually), I get to search the internet in a way that values me, the customer, over ads and tracking. They don’t store my search history, there’s no paid placement, and I don’t have to go hunting for high-quality results. Just a quick, effective, and beautiful search experience that’s worth every penny.

Mint Mobile

Unless it’s mission critical for you to get the fastest and most reliable cell service possible, I think Mint Mobile is the way to go for those of us in the US. Hank Green did the numbers and agrees. I’m a total geek, and the $15 per month 5 GB data plan with unlimited talk and text is plenty for me, but right now a year of unlimited data is just $20 per month. Fees are transparent and minimal compared to other carriers, and it has nationwide coverage on the T-Mobile network. Highly recommended, and if (ahem) you know someone with Mint, ask them for a discount code. It’ll help both of you!

Recently Published

If you’ve missed it, here’s what’s new on the site:

Ubiqity’s Cost

This post is a mini manifesto where I vent about how so much badly designed technology is shoved down our throats whether we want it or not. I deal with this all of the time, working with people of all ages who think that there’s something wrong with them when things don’t work, and it’s actually the software’s fault. We can do better! (It’s also where I was reminded about how great Kagi is…)

The Mindful Roguelike

Video games are central to my life, and Slay the Spire is central to my video games. In this post, I step back to recognize how important this brutal game is to my life. Beyond being a superfan, the engagement it requires acts as stress relief, disrupts my tendency to ruminate, and gives my brain time to process things while I’m absorbed in the flow of play.

In the Groove

I’ve made considerably less progress with my May release than I’d expected, but I’m still committed to publishing my new work on Bandcamp by the end of the month. The video accompaniment and liner notes will have to wait until summer, but the piece itself will be finished.

Sometimes you just have to push, and that’s where I think I am right now. The War of Art talks about the scourge of capital-R Resistance for creators of all kinds, and I can certainly feel it looming behind me at all turns. All the more reason to keep moving forward!

Until Next Time

As I finish writing this newsletter, my window is open to the sounds of children playing a few houses down, there’s a big, beautiful crow who has decided our yard is its new favorite hangout, and people are walking their dogs under blooming dogwoods as cars come and go.

There’s a particular kind of magic in small city living that feels like the right fit for me. It’s a blend of convenience, culture, connection, and unexpected moments of beauty tucked between classic buildings and century-old trees. It reminds me that finding your place isn’t about what’s objectively best, but about what resonates with your own rhythms and values.

Whether you’re in a bustling metropolis, a quiet countryside, or somewhere in between, I hope you’re finding those elements that make your space feel like home. And if you’re ever passing through my neighborhood, you’re always welcome to wait at the bus stop on my lawn. After all, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?

Until June,

—Tom

The Mindful Roguelike

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 17:18:09 -0400

My mental health toolkit includes meditation, journaling, a bit of exercise, and — every day, almost without fail — about 45 minutes with a brutally difficult card-based video game called Slay the Spire. What started as a pandemic coping mechanism has evolved into an essential ritual that’s now woven into the fabric of my life.

If you’re not familiar with it, Slay the Spire is a deck-building roguelike where each run presents a procedurally generated path up a spire. You build your card deck as you progress, fighting monsters and making decisions that can either lead to glorious victory or (more often) crushing defeat. With permadeath as a core mechanic, each run is a complete experience with real stakes.

While I’ve modified my gameplay to make victory a bit more attainable, focusing on flawless boss battles rather than mere survival¹, the core experience remains intact: every playthrough is different, every decision matters, and the parameters of what’s possible are both clearly defined and endlessly variable.

Through thousands of hours climbing the spire, I’ve discovered some surprising things about myself and what makes my mind tick. Here are three insights that have emerged from this seemingly casual game.

Focused Engagement Through Puzzles

I’ve learned that my brain craves a particular kind of mental challenge — one with clear parameters but infinite variations. Each run of Slay the Spire presents a unique puzzle within familiar constraints. I know the cards, the enemies, and the potential paths, but the specific configuration is always new.

This discovery isn’t entirely surprising. Another favorite game, FTL (Faster Than Light), offers a similar experience: navigating from start to finish through randomly generated encounters and choices. What’s remarkable is how effectively this type of engagement absorbs my complete attention.

It’s not exactly relaxation in the traditional sense. These games can be frustratingly difficult. I’m making complex decisions, calculating probabilities, and strategizing constantly. Yet this intense mental focus functions as a form of mental escape. My mind becomes so thoroughly engaged with the immediate challenges that everything else — stress, global anxieties, personal concerns — temporarily recedes.

The demanding nature of the puzzle is precisely what makes it effective. When the stakes in the game are high (even if artificially so), my brain commits fully to the present moment.

The Alchemy of Perfect Design

The second insight came more gradually: I’ve discovered just how powerful a perfectly designed game can be in creating immersion. There’s something almost magical about how Slay the Spire’s specific combination of mechanics, visuals, pacing, and feedback loops aligns with my particular brain.

I’ve played many games that attempt to create this state of flow, but few succeed as completely as Slay the Spire. The way information is presented, the timing of decisions, the balance of randomness and skill — all these elements combine into something that feels custom-made for my thought patterns.

This has made me appreciate the artistry in game design more deeply. What appears simple on the surface represents thousands of careful decisions and adjustments to create an experience that can so thoroughly capture attention and engagement. It’s a reminder that great design often disappears into the background, leaving only the experience itself.

This intersection of technology and human experience fascinates me: how specific design choices can create such profound mental states. It’s a reminder that digital tools, when thoughtfully crafted, can serve deeper human needs.

“Casual” That Isn’t Casual At All

Perhaps the most surprising revelation has been recognizing how essential this supposedly “casual” gaming habit has become to my mental well-being. What might look like mere entertainment from the outside has become a vital component of my mental health toolkit.

Those 45 minutes of concentrated gameplay provide more than just distraction — they offer a genuine mental reset. I emerge feeling more focused, less anxious, and better equipped to face whatever challenges await in my work and personal life. By fully engaging one part of my brain, I give other parts time to process in the background. Often, solutions to problems I’ve been wrestling with will surface after a session, not during conscious contemplation but during this period of intense focus on something completely different.

I’ve come to respect that this isn’t just playing a game. It’s a deliberate practice that yields real benefits for my cognitive and emotional state. The fact that it’s enjoyable doesn’t make it any less valuable.

Finding Your Own Spire to Climb

My experience with Slay the Spire has transformed how I view gaming and mental breaks in general. When I meet fellow fans of the game, there’s an immediate connection — a mutual understanding that goes beyond just appreciating the same entertainment. We recognize in each other the particular satisfaction this type of engagement brings.

More broadly, it’s changed how I respond when others talk about their gaming obsessions. I understand, now, that what might look like simple distraction could actually be serving a profound purpose in someone’s mental ecosystem.

I believe everyone could benefit from finding their own version of this experience — whether it’s a game, a craft, or any activity that fully engages the mind within enjoyable constraints. Having a regular practice that demands your complete attention while still being inherently rewarding creates a valuable space for mental refresh.

As someone interested in how we learn and grow, I’ve come to see these focused engagement periods as a form of indirect learning. They create the mental space needed for deeper processing and connection-making that direct effort sometimes prevents.

The challenges don’t disappear when you return to them, but you face them with renewed perspective. Sometimes the best way forward isn’t to keep pushing against a problem but to step aside completely, climb a different kind of spire, and trust that your mind will keep working in new and unexpected ways. At least, that’s what 2,500+ hours of playing has taught me.

My custom setup is to play the Silent with Sealed Deck, Colorless Cards, Heirloom, Flight, Deadly Events, and Big Game Hunter selected. The goal is to choose from the random starting cards to start my deck, fight every elite possible, and defeat bosses without taking damage. Apotheosis rules! ↩︎

Ubiquity's Cost

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 17:45:05 -0400

Lately, I’ve been noticing how much emotional stress technology places on people across all demographics. Technology increasingly shifts burdens onto users by design, creating anxiety and exclusion—particularly for those less comfortable navigating digital spaces, and I believe that it’s time to recognize and reverse this trend.

Have you ever felt your head explode at the sight of yet another mandatory app download, or the frustration of helping a loved one navigate a website that’s supposed to be ’easy’? Welcome to the emotional cost of tech ubiquity. We’re living in an era where digital tools have become unavoidable, yet we’re still in the earliest days of figuring out how humans and technology should coexist.

My mom’s experience stands out vividly. All of her medical information, scheduling, and doctor communications were funneled through web interfaces she couldn’t navigate. Without me acting as her tech translator, she would have been limited to traditional phone calls and voice messages that took forever to return—far less efficient than the online portal supposedly created to help her.

But here’s the thing: that portal wasn’t built primarily to benefit her, contrary to the press releases. It was designed to reduce the workload of her healthcare providers. The technology shifted the burden onto patients, with little regard for whether or not they could handle it. As a result, she spent a good part of her later life feeling as though the world had left her behind — to the point where she even had an iPhone that she insisted on learning how to use, and failed miserably when she tried. Thereafter it remained untouched, forever charging in the corner of the kitchen, a constant reminder of inadequacy.

We should be able to live our lives without needing to know how to use an app! I also think about how rarely tech is designed with older adults, neurodivergent users, or those with visual impairments in mind. Accessibility should not be an afterthought—it should be essential. When I’m clicking on bicycles to prove I’m human before opening a website, it’s an annoyance. What kind of hell is it for someone who can’t see the screen?

This pattern repeats everywhere. I’ve seen it in friends and family who struggle with technology. They feel abandoned, somehow deficient or “too dumb” to understand these systems. What’s heartbreaking is that they blame themselves when the real failure lies in the software itself.

It’s Not You, It’s the Software

The truth is, much of the technology we encounter is poorly designed. It doesn’t provide clear error messages, offer graceful fallbacks, or create intuitive workflows. Yet we are made to feel inferior when in fact it’s the software that’s substandard.

Consider how many parking lots now require an app just to park. No attendants, just an expectation that everyone can download, install, and correctly operate yet another app on the spot. Or think about how many services now require dedicated apps that offer some desired value but come with massive privacy trade-offs and notification overload.

Many of these things provide useful services—that’s why they’re successful. But their business models often create misaligned incentives. When revenue comes from advertisers rather than users, the primary focus shifts from providing value to “monetizing” by capturing attention and data. It’s not that these companies deliberately set out to create anxiety (which would be bad for business), but their priorities seldom seem to include making life easier for those of us who aren’t technically inclined.

This affects people across all age groups and technical abilities. I teach young people, and I see how their digital lives are fragmented across multiple platforms. The most popular apps create their own ecosystems that discourage leaving, not through outright barriers but through frictions that make switching costs high. If you want to switch social media providers, you’ll need to convince all of your friends to move platforms with you, recreate your digital identity, and learn new interfaces to try out something new that might not even end up being better—all significant barriers.

The brilliant Cory Doctorow vividly describes this process of platform decay—where users are initially given a great experience until they’re captured, then that experience is gradually degraded for profit, but never quite enough to overcome the switching costs. It’s worth understanding the process as a whole, so I recommend giving his work a full read. You’ll see it in action everywhere, once you understand what’s going on.

The emotional impact is real, too. As someone who provides tech support to people from age 10 to 85, I see a common thread: people just want to do stuff without thinking about the technology itself. The best designs are those that fade into the background, allowing users to focus entirely on their desired goals — so the reward for well-designed software is that we don’t notice it. No wonder it’s such a hard sell for some developers.

But when software ships with major usability issues, or familiar interfaces get “upgraded” without warning, it creates genuine anxiety. People freeze. They stop experimenting. They lose confidence. What’s particularly challenging is watching the gap between those who navigate technology well and those who struggle, reinforcing a sense of inadequacy that’s entirely undeserved.

Finding Better Paths Forward

So what can we do to cope with this awkward adolescence of technological ubiquity?

Be mindful of defaults. For those comfortable with technology, knowing about defaults is crucial, both for ourselves and for those we assist. Default privacy settings, notification permissions, and other pre-selected options rarely serve users’ best interests. Being deliberate about how we configure our digital tools can significantly improve our experience. Take a look at the Consumer Reports guide to Facebook privacy settings for an excellent example of how to take better control.

Prioritize software that’s aligned correctly. I use tools like Kagi search, RSS readers, and ad blockers that prioritize good user experiences because they directly align with my needs. Kagi is a paid search service: they don’t make money unless they provide a better way to search the internet, and they do that very well indeed.

RSS is a protocol (a set of agreed-upon tech rules) that is interoperable. With it and the right software (I use the free NetNewsWire app on my Mac and iPad), any compatible websites syndicate their content so that I can collect it at a single location, allowing me to keep up with what’s new without visiting dozens of separate websites every day.

At this point it feels as though I could barely use the web without a good ad blocker, and I sometimes forget that everyone isn’t using them. Support for my favorite blocker has recently been removed on Chrome-based browsers. Thanks, Google! It doesn’t take much to understand why. These services help us stay online without being walled in or inundated, and it’s wonderful, but only if we know that they exist and can use them effectively.

Digital literacy is essential. Young people inheriting this tech-saturated world need to understand the trade-offs they’re making and the alternatives available to them. We all need strategies that allow us to take better control, retain our privacy, and give us options. We need to understand how algorithms and personalized feeds work to influence us. We need to know how to evaluate digital privacy risks, and how to get support when we need it.

And don’t believe the hype that says kids don’t care about these things. In my experience, many are already seeking strategies for a healthier tech-life balance, recognizing the fragmenting effect of constant connectivity.

Use (or provide) community resources. For those less comfortable with technology, community resources like libraries and tech centers can provide crucial assistance. Many communities offer free or low-cost technology workshops specifically designed for different skill levels. If you’re tech-savvy, consider volunteering at these programs—you’ll gain valuable perspective on the challenges others face. And if you’re supporting family members, remember that teaching them to fish (building their confidence with technology) is ultimately more empowering than fishing for them (doing everything for them), even if it takes more patience initially.

Be kind to yourself and others about tech. It’s so important to spread the message that when technology fails, it’s often not the user’s fault. We’re living through the earliest days of human-technology interaction, which also means that we’re the pioneers figuring this stuff out in real-time, and that comes with challenges.

The truth is, you shouldn’t need to be a geek to use technology effectively. The fact that it often feels that way isn’t a failure of users—it’s a failure of design and incentives. As technology becomes increasingly unavoidable, we have both an opportunity and responsibility to ensure it serves humanity in all its diversity, rather than expecting humanity to adapt to its limitations.

We don’t need technology to disappear; we need it to respect and empower users of all skill levels. So, next time you encounter frustrating tech, remember: advocate for better designs, seek supportive resources, and always remind yourself—it’s the software’s job to adapt to you, not the other way around.

April 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 20:53:03 -0400

Is it naive to have hope right now? Is it just the daffodils and forsythias, explosions of yellow and green that seemed to appear overnight, tricking me into thinking things will eventually get better? Are warm breezes carrying the scent of an awakening earth leading me astray? I don’t know. It’s important to recognize hard times and be realistic about the world as it is, but I also find myself, again and again, coming across things that give me hope.

Random acts of kindness, a shared smile with someone getting gas at the next pump, inspiring stories of people who are working hard to create a society where we take care of each other instead of tearing each other down – these are things I’m holding onto. It certainly helps. Not always, to be sure, but thus far, it’s enough.

My Picks

There is so much cool stuff out there that it’s tough to pick just a few things to share, but this month’s selection has a lot – amazing performances, a great game, and dozens of free ways to get creative online.

James Brown & The Famous Flames on the T.A.M.I. Show

Whenever I need a little pure, undiluted joy, I know that this 1964 performance by James Brown will do the trick. It’s said that Prince played this on a loop in the lobby at his Paisley Park studio, and that The Rolling Stones were mortified at having to follow. It’s easy to hear taglines like “The hardest working man in show business” and be dismissive, but this set puts that debate to rest. (And, lest you think it’s a one-off, here he is nearly 20 years later on Letterman.) So much of his indelible sound has infused itself into today’s music that it’s hard to imagine just how innovative it was back then, particularly as white audiences were just getting exposed to it.

Dawnfolk

French indie game developer Darren Keller has created a beautiful cozy-adjacent city-building game that’s unlike anything else I’ve played. I really like that you don’t have to learn complicated strategy or track dozens of data points, you just place tiles, explore the land, experiment, and follow the story. There’s a kind heart at the center of the experience, where the time you spend restoring the land and respecting the inhabitants is rewarded (or not, you decide).

Let’s Get Creative

I’m always looking for high-quality online creativity tools to share with my students and friends. This collection is the best I’ve found, with dozens of different choices. All kinds of art, music, and coding resources are here, and all of them are both free and kid-safe. You’re likely to see some of my favorite entries highlighted in future newsletters, too.

Recently Published

Here’s what’s new on the site:

Wrestling with the Ethics of Generative AI

Lots of people I respect and admire are dead set against AI these days, and have some good reasons for it. My experience with it has been mixed: I see both the potential for it to exploit and cheapen the quality of our lives and the potential for it to be a groundbreaking new tool for the common good. This in-depth post details how I tried to determine whether or not I was deluding myself by using AI, what my use of it means, and what I should do about it. The process changed my thinking and behavior in a big way.

The Hidden Advantages of Being a Generalist

I can always point to someone who knows far more than me about just about anything because I’m not a specialist, and the world often doesn’t seem as though it’s built for someone with lots of interests like me. The more I get on in years, though, the more I realize that there are some real advantages to being a generalist. In this post, I highlight the benefits that have had the most impact on me.

In the Groove

I’ve had another month of small but steady musical explorations, and I think I’m finally ready for a new, full release in May. It’s a departure from my other work in many ways, but I’ve always wanted to work with ambient music, and I am super pleased with the results thus far. It’s turned me down pathways that are more grounded in experimental and industrial acoustic spaces, which is a surprise, but somehow works.

My evolution as an electronic musician is always bringing me to unexpected places. It’s delightful, and a strange part of it is that the creations don’t really feel as though they’re mine. Rather, it feels like I’m a conduit, letting my intuition and curiosity guide me to results that I could never predict. It’s more a process of discovery than anything else, shaping sound over time to see what happens. Very strange, but pretty cool. I just have to make sure that I’m not noodling if it’s getting released into the wild. Time is a limited resource, and listeners need respect.

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far. Next month I’ll be sharing that ambient project if all goes well, plus whatever interesting rabbit holes I’ve fallen down by then. Until May, keep finding those small moments of good stuff wherever you can.

The Hidden Advantages of Being a Generalist

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 14:59:04 -0400

“It’s because you’re a generalist.” When my friend made this observation about my success with AI, I stopped for a beat. I was sharing my excitement about all the ways AI was transforming my work and creative processes, but I hadn’t connected it to this fundamental aspect of who I am.

It made me reflect on something I’ve known about myself for a long time: I have never had the temperament or personality to become a specialist in any particular area. I’ve always been too curious, interested in too many different things to settle on just one path and stick with it for life. And while I’ve come to peace with this - even learned to love being a generalist - it isn’t always easy in a world that seems to value specialization above all else.

An Unexpected Superpower

I first realized how being a generalist might actually be a kind of superpower when I helped co-found a non-profit called the Khmer Magic Music Bus back in 2013. The project’s mission is to help restore traditional music to the people of Cambodia. What struck me was how my varied skills came together to help make it possible: I handled everything from the technical setup of web pages and crowdfunding systems to shooting and editing promotional videos, writing copy for emails and pitches, choosing design elements, and setting up fulfillment pipelines. I even turned the whole experience into a teaching unit asking students to explore how they might make positive change in the world.

Of course, society doesn’t exactly encourage us to become generalists. I have several friends who’ve focused their technology talents into specialized careers, and they make far more money than I do. Specialists are seen as experts, commanding respect for their deep knowledge in ways that generalists rarely experience. Look at college programs - you won’t find many “generalist” majors. Consider how few doctors choose general internal medicine over a specialty. The message seems clear: pick one thing and stick to it.

Strength in a Dynamic World

There are, however, hidden advantages to being a generalist that often go unrecognized. Having a broad skill set means you can make connections between seemingly unrelated fields, seeing patterns and possibilities that might be missed by those with a narrower focus. You can be useful in a wide variety of contexts, even if you’re not the ultimate expert. You develop a keen sense of your own knowledge boundaries because you’re constantly exploring new areas. Perhaps most importantly, you become skilled at learning itself - knowing how to approach new challenges and acquire new skills becomes second nature.

This versatility becomes particularly powerful in certain fields. AI is definitely one - as a general-purpose technology, it benefits from people who can see its potential across different domains. I’m not an expert coder, but I can use what I know to create powerful software tools. I’m not a professional project manager, but I can develop actionable plans that help myself and others reach goals. I’m not a trained musician or visual artist, but I can still create works I’m proud of. There’s so much I can understand and do, even if it’s not at the deepest level, and I can combine these skills in ways that create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Education is another field where generalists thrive, as interdisciplinary knowledge often creates richer learning experiences. Creative industries, too, benefit from people who can bridge different disciplines and perspectives. In each of these areas, the ability to draw connections and see broader patterns becomes an unexpected strength.

Embracing the Path

The journey isn’t without its challenges, of course. One of the biggest is the constant awareness of how much deeper others’ knowledge goes. For every skill I’ve developed, I can point to someone who does it far better than I ever will. There are better coders, teachers, artists, musicians, writers, and speakers all around me. Each example reminds me of something I can’t do because I haven’t dedicated enough time to master it.

But I made my peace with being a generalist long ago, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I’m simply having too much fun, doing tons of different things, and wondering what else is out there to discover and learn. While we absolutely need specialists - and I deeply admire their dedication and expertise - generalists bring their own valuable perspective to our complex, interconnected world.

If you identify as a generalist, too, here’s some advice that has helped me along the way:

Stay true to yourself and your passions. The world might push you to specialize, but there’s nothing wrong with having multiple interests and pursuing them all.
Cultivate your curiosity and trust your instincts. That desire to learn about new things and make unexpected connections is a strength, not a weakness. Over time you’ll have a one-of-a-kind set of skills.
Find your optimal depth in each area. You don’t need to know everything about a subject, but you should go deep enough to develop real understanding and practical capability.
Look for ways to cross-pollinate your knowledge. Your unique combination of skills and perspectives can lead to insights and solutions that specialists might miss.
Be kind to yourself. The more you learn, the more you’ll realize how much there is to know - and that’s okay. Your breadth of knowledge is valuable, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

In the end, it all comes back to that fundamental curiosity - that desire to explore, to learn, and to connect different ideas and skills in new ways. In today’s dizzying world of constant change, this ability to bridge disciplines and see the bigger picture isn’t just valuable - it’s essential. While specialists will always be crucial, there’s a special kind of magic in being a generalist.

Wrestling with the Ethics of Generative AI

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 10:16:51 -0400

I’m preparing to teach a unit on AI literacy to a group of high schoolers next month, and it’s clear that we need to spend some of that time discussing the ethics of using Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. I’m still working through this stuff myself, particularly because students are sharing their own opinions about it and getting me thinking, so I thought I would take this opportunity to carefully consider the ethics of this type of AI, both as a teacher and as someone who uses LLMs regularly.

My core question is simple: Is this technology ethical, and can I use it in a way that aligns with my values?

A Personal Tension

Many of the people I know and respect most are completely against AI, full stop. I have even been on the receiving end of direct hostility when I’ve tried to talk about how I use it and how it might be helpful. Some just shake their head and look at me with a sense of regret that I’ve gone over to the dark side. What have I been missing?

Confirmation bias, where we tend to favor what we already want, is very powerful, and it has me wondering if my reasons for continuing to use LLMs are merely convenient rationalizations. You see, I quite like using them. Having a co-intelligence as a regular part of my life has been transformative. With it I can explore any topic I can imagine, get help thinking through things, build tools that help me and others, get better organized, develop skills with customized learning plans, and brainstorm ideas. All of that has happened in the first few months of me using it on a regular basis.

My views can change, however, if I’m willing to confront them. I used to love creating AI-generated art and video, but I’ve stopped. When I thought carefully about my use of these tools, I decided that using them feels too disrespectful to the humans whose hard work was used to train AI art models without their consent. I keep looking for new generative art products that are based solely on public domain or other properly licensed work, but until they appear, I’m done.¹

I want to confront my use of LLMs in the same kind of way.

The Environmental Cost

Sajjad Moazeni at the University of Washington estimates that training ChatGPT 3 consumed up to 10 gigawatt hours of power, which roughly equals the entire yearly energy consumption of over 1,000 US households, and that doesn’t even include the impact of the hardware the software runs on. This creates a massive carbon debt that is built into the use of these tools.

Once the model is trained, it uses inference to chat with users like me, and that takes energy, too. This consumption is direct, and under my control.

Here’s how I use LLMs:

I access them several days a week, and would estimate that’s about 200-250 days per year.
On days I use LLMs, I have about 2-5 interactions that usually include follow-up queries, so let’s average it to 10 queries per day to keep things simple, but real.
My interactions vary in complexity, though most are reasonably complex.
I use online providers like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude most, with some other models in the mix occasionally, including local models that run on my computer.

If we take Meta’s environmental impact data (they are the only big player who seems to provide this), we can estimate that a typical ChatGPT-level query requires about 0.3 kWh of energy and 0.115 kg of carbon dioxide.

This means that I’m using about 3 kWh and emitting 1.15 kg of carbon dioxide on days that I use an LLM, which is significant.²

There are some mitigating factors worth considering, though their impact is still evolving:

New models and hardware are becoming more efficient. While the exact energy cost of training and inference using models like China’s DeepSeek is debated, it’s generally accepted that newer models can achieve comparable quality with significantly lower resources.
AI Companies are increasing their use of renewable energy. Google, Microsoft (working closely with OpenAI), and other companies are investing billions in renewable energy infrastructure. While much of this capacity is still coming online, there is movement toward reducing environmental impact.

Making ethical energy choices requires considering our overall carbon footprint and the value we get from different energy uses. We all make tradeoffs living in a modern society, prioritizing where and how we use limited resources. What matters is being intentional about these choices rather than making them unconsciously or by default.

My conclusion: with regard to energy consumption, and considering my overall carbon footprint, it is possible for me to ethically use LLMs if I am mindful of the environmental impact and act accordingly. That’s good. When we start thinking of the human dimension of AI ethics, however, it raises even deeper questions.

The Human Factor

I completely agree with Alison Gopnik’s view that LLMs are cultural technologies, like libraries, search engines, and Wikipedia, not intelligent software agents. When we work with them, we’re interacting with an internet simulation that’s been trained to be a conversational assistant.

That means the base models of these products are clever abstractions of the entire internet. It took a while for that to sink in when I started thinking about it. The scale is mind boggling. While most of the data used to train and create these models was public, significant portions came from data that was not meant for anyone to access. Meta allegedly used pirated books to train their models, for example, and OpenAI developed (excellent and free) speech recognition software so that it could transcribe millions of hours of YouTube videos to train ChatGPT, which is against YouTube’s terms of service.³

Think of all of that human effort, distilled into a chatbot. Without consent, creator’s work was used to create a product that’s often marketed as a tool to replace them. In addition, many of the datasets used to create commercial AI products were actually created by academic and non-profit research teams for non-commercial purposes, a convenient “data laundering” operation that allows legally-obtained data to be repurposed in a way that might have been considered illegal if it had been collected directly by commercial entities.

This is a serious ethical dilemma for me. I have benefited greatly from the generosity of people sharing their knowledge online, for free. It’s astounding, really, and highlights an extraordinary capacity for goodness in people. I want to honor their efforts, and the contributions of countless others online. I don’t want to support companies that exploit this unprecedented mass of human effort to eliminate jobs and increase human immiseration by finding new ways to surveil us, harangue us, and extract every possible penny from us in order to make wealthy people richer while the rest of us languish.

Is that what these AI companies are doing? Is that what they want? If so, I don’t want to be a part of it. That would clearly be unethical. You can’t determine the truth from corporate press releases, either. You have to look at what they’re actually doing and examine the real-world impact. On that point, however, there seems to be a wide spectrum of opinions.

The Charitable View

The most charitable interpretation goes something like this:

LLMs have the potential to transform our lives for the better in many ways: scientific breakthroughs in important areas like medicine, climate, and renewable energy; transforming and individualizing education; enhancing personal productivity; and more. While some bad actors can use AI in unethical ways, companies are actively trying to restrict the worst abuses, and are continually improving their detection of unauthorized use. Even though these tools require significant resources to maintain, free versions are offered so that anyone can enjoy the benefits of this technology. Heavier uses are asked to pay so that the product can remain accessible in a sustainable way.

The Critical View

The least charitable interpretation, on the other hand, looks something like this:

LLMs have been designed from the start to extract wealth and exploit the efforts of creators to the advantage of corporations whose only goal is profit, regardless of the human consequences. They seek to create a new class of societal winners and losers, with those who can afford access and know how to use it rising in status while leaving everyone else behind. Certainly there’s a potential for useful outcomes, but potential is the operative word. Maybe, someday, it will cure cancer. Possibly. But what is actually happening, right now in the real world, is that AI is being used to make our lives worse. Endless AI slop is making our lives less useful and more frustrating. Companies are using AI to cut their labor force because they’ve been sold on the premise that AI can replace employees. Criminals, oppressive governments, and other bad actors are using it to make our lives measurably worse with disinformation, mass surveillance, and scams.

Finding Middle Ground

In my experience, as with so many other things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. This is a general-purpose cultural technology. I have seen direct, positive benefits from LLMs in my own life, and I try my best to use them to make things better. In fact, my students, colleagues and friends have told me that what I’m doing is helpful to them (I have to check to make sure it’s not just me – fighting that bias thing, again).

For example, I’ve used AI assistants to help teachers with limited access to students get a pre-meeting thought debrief so that when they get together, they can start at a much deeper level. I’ve also used AI to help create custom resource websites for students that fit the exact needs of their teacher instead of collecting a bunch of links that are only partially useful. These are things I wouldn’t have had the bandwidth to provide before LLMs. I can only imagine the good that people who are smarter than me might do with these tools.

At the same time, for-profit corporations do not have a good track record when it comes to human thriving. Many businesses don’t value their employees, and look at them as obstacles to profit. Many businesses don’t value their customers, and look for every opportunity to extract value from us instead of adding value to us. Again, this is a general purpose cultural technology, and lots of people will use it (and already are using it) to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of others.

Author Robin Sloan does an excellent job of breaking things down in his article, “Is it okay?” (Note: strong language.) If you find my thinking on this to be helpful, his perspective is also worth a read, as it considers AI ethics at a higher level, and his writing style is much more entertaining than mine. While he acknowledges that in one sense it doesn’t matter – companies and enthusiasts are going to keep pushing forward regardless – on another, more personal level it matters a great deal. He clearly articulates the problem of using “everything” – this treasure that is our human data commons – to supplant human output.

My Conclusion

After careful consideration, I have come to believe that I can use LLMs ethically, but only if I remain mindful and deliberate about what I’m doing. The capabilities I enjoy exist only because of our collective data commons, which deserves profound respect, and I need to acknowledge that it consumes significant non-renewable energy.

To that end, I won’t use it to replace human work. I won’t use it for trivial tasks. I’ll prioritize applications that benefit others, not just myself. I’ll continue sharing my experiences and thoughts to help others navigate these complex issues themselves.

I believe that it’s perfectly valid to decide not to use AI at all. I find it concerning that there are forces trying to create a world in which that decision will increasingly marginalize you. I will support laws and regulations that prevent abuses of this technology. And I’ll avoid supporting companies that seem more interested in exploiting people with these tools than helping them.

An LLM Usage Framework

Here’s my personal framework for using LLMs in a way that attempts to balance everything that resulted from my thinking and research. It’s imperfect, but at least it’s a start.

Environmental Considerations

To minimize the energy cost of my LLM use, I’ll do my best to:

Avoid trivial tasks. I won’t use LLMs for social chats, simple lookups, basic math, or other low-value interactions that could be done with other tools.
Craft efficient prompts. I’ll be precise and include sufficient context in prompts to reduce the number of back-and-forth interactions needed.
Choose providers with renewable energy commitments. I’ll try to be aware of which companies are making genuine efforts to reduce their environmental impact, and prioritize their use.
Prefer efficient models. When possible, I’ll use models that achieve the necessary level of quality with lower energy requirements.
Balance overall digital energy use. I’ll reduce other energy-intensive online activities like HD video streaming or unnecessary cloud storage.
Decrease usage. I’m going to try to decrease my usage days and queries for personal stuff, and prioritize using LLMs that I can run on my own computer.

Human Considerations

To ethically consider the human factor in LLM creation, I’ll do my best to:

Respect the data commons. I acknowledge that LLMs exist because of countless human contributions, many made without consent for this purpose, and will be mindful of this when using them.
Value human work. I’ll use AI to augment rather than replace human creativity and labor.
Create value beyond myself. I’ll focus on using these tools to benefit others, not just myself.
Share knowledge and insights. I’ll try to help others develop their own ethical frameworks for using these technologies.
Support appropriate regulation. I’ll advocate for policies that prevent the worst abuses and promote outcomes that are beneficial to everyone, not just a few.

Phew! That was a lot. In the end, I’ve come to believe that if the positive promise of AI is ever to be realized, it must be available to people who choose to do good things with it, not just megacorporations and scammers. And because I believe most people are good, even in these times, there still remains hope for LLMs to become a net positive in our collective and very human history.

Adobe Firefly seemed promising at first, but it’s marketed for commercial use, and I don’t want to use a tool that’s actively being promoted as an alternative to human artists. ↩︎
It’s worth noting that whenever I look at these energy use statistics, I also see corporations warning they’ll need more energy for AI (and, therefore, more money), the fossil fuel industry promoting their capacity to supply this “vital” energy, and politicians using this as a convenient excuse to maintain climate-damaging energy production. This makes something that seems negative on its face actually result in desirable outcomes for some if they’re framed this way. ↩︎
Why didn’t Google go after them? Because they were doing stuff like this, too, using YouTube videos to train Gemini without creator’s consent. Nice. ↩︎

March 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 08:31:35 -0500

Everybody’s seeing bald eagles this winter, it seems, but me. We have a bobcat at school (promptly named “Bob”) that’s exploring campus a bit too much for its own good. Hawks circle the skies above our house, and herons wade in the pond up the street. When I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, we didn’t see wildlife like this.

There was too much pollution and development, and too few of us valued preserving natural spaces. It’s nice to be reminded that progress does come, sometimes without noticing it until much later. These glimpses of nature’s resilience remind me to look for progress in other areas too, especially during challenging times.

There’s a lot going on in the world that I’m struggling with right now, and it’s impacting me in ways that I can’t completely wrap my head around. What keeps surfacing for me, however, time and again as I get through each day, is a deep and abiding gratitude. Gratitude for the people in my life, for my job, for my health, and for the sense of stability that I’ve worked my entire adult life to achieve.

I take comfort, also, in knowing that when things seem overwhelming, it doesn’t mean that they will always be as they are now. We humans are just not wired to look at it that way unless we deliberately step back and think. When the constant thinking becomes exhausting (and it does), I find that returning to simple gratitude practices helps ground me. Small moments of appreciation – like spotting a hawk circling above – can be anchors when everything else feels uncertain.

My Picks

A deep dive and some much-needed distractions this month:

Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Deep Dive

This video, more than any other, has helped fill in the gaps in my understanding about how Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT work. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into our lives, understanding the fundamentals feels particularly important, even for non-technical folks. It’s long at three and a half hours, but if you or someone you know really wants to understand how this revolutionary technology works, I highly recommend watching.

The Glassmaker

I’m currently immersed in a world of Venetian glassmaking, strong women finding ways to overcome societal pressures, and sweeping family drama. I love Blown Away, Netflix’s glass blowing competition, because the results are stunningly beautiful, and the drama is not manufactured: one wrong move, and all that effort literally shatters before your eyes. This book takes that environment and nestles it within family, history, and the islands of the upper Adriatic. Tracy Chevalier’s The Glassmaker is proving to be a perfect distraction to end each day.

Cozy Comfort

Reuters wrote a fantastic article about one of my favorite video game genres: cozy games. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it refers to games that are designed to help us relax and enjoy the experience of playing instead of getting high scores, beating countdown timers, and destroying everything in sight. What’s unique about this article, however, is that it is a cozy game itself. I so love this! You can learn about the genre, get a taste for how it works, and then perhaps try something like my personal favorite, Stardew Valley.

Recently Published

If you’ve missed it, here’s what’s new on the site:

The Power of an LLM Debrief

This article is about my experience using AI as a thought partner to debrief a class I had just finished, and results that surprised me. If you haven’t noticed (ahem), a lot of my time and energy is currently invested in exploring the uses of AI. This isn’t just because I’m fascinated by it, though that’s been true for more than a decade. It’s also because LLMs are transforming our society in major ways, both good and bad. It’s up to us to make sure that this technology, built from a massive pool of human labor that was collected mostly without consent, improves human lives instead of making them worse.

Curiosity’s Endless Adventure

Curiosity is one of the major engines of creation and innovation. It can help us find new solutions, keep us motivated when things go wrong, and build resilience. I see this in action with my students, and with myself. This article goes over some of my experiences, takes a look at some scientific research about curiosity, and rounds up some strategies that I’ve found to be helpful.

In the Groove

It’s been a good month for me, creatively. I’ve stepped back from the planning to focus on more hands-on creation, and it’s resulted in a series of demo songs that went to wonderfully unexpected places. This is the space that it feels right to be in, right now. Nothing’s ready for release – and it may never go anywhere – but I’m creating, and that’s awesome.

I’m also currently developing software with the help of AI that can generate visuals to accompany my music using Processing, a java-based visual arts language. I’m still very early in the process (no pun intended), but things look promising, and I’m learning a lot.

Until Next Time

Circling back to gratitude, I am grateful to you, for reading this. I wasn’t quite sure about this new website experiment, and where it would lead. I’m still getting into the rhythm and finding my way, but I’m glad to be here.

I’m looking forward to the coming of spring, though we still have a ways to go, and to seeing where things end up next. If something in this newsletter sparked a thought or connection for you, I’d enjoy hearing about it - those unexpected parallels are often where the most interesting discoveries happen.

Until next month,

—Tom

Curiosity's Endless Adventure

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 17:11:58 -0500

As a teacher, I’ve witnessed countless moments where curiosity transforms learning from a task into an adventure. One story particularly stands out. In my Tech Projects class, I had a student who was paralyzed by the blank canvas of possibility. The course begins with complete freedom to choose any technology project, and for this student, that freedom felt overwhelming. Nothing seemed quite right.

Instead of pushing toward a quick decision, I asked them to simply follow their curiosity. “What interests you? What would you like to know more about?” Two weeks of exploration led to a tentative start with a video project, but something still wasn’t clicking. Then came the pivot – they decided to try coding a player-versus-player video game. That spark of curiosity ignited a flame. Soon they were coding outside of class hours, diving deep into game mechanics, and demonstrating remarkable systems thinking. By the end of the semester, they had not only created the start of an impressive game but discovered a passion for coding that might have remained hidden without the space to explore.

The Science of Curiosity

Recent research helps explain why curiosity can be such a powerful force for learning and discovery. A fascinating study from Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute has actually mapped how curiosity manifests in our brains. When we’re curious, specific regions light up – areas connected to both uncertainty and creativity. This isn’t just interesting neuroscience; it helps explain why curiosity can be such a powerful catalyst for learning and innovation.

The implications go even deeper. Research from the University of California, Davis, reported in Edutopia, shows that curiosity doesn’t just help us learn about things we’re interested in – it primes our brains to learn anything better. When we are engaged through curiosity, we’re more likely to remember both the information we are seeking and unrelated details we encounter along the way. It’s as if curiosity creates a learning vortex, pulling in knowledge from all directions.

Curiosity as a Creative Engine

I’ve experienced this magnetic pull in my own creative work, particularly in music. When I work with generative music systems, curiosity drives the entire creative process. It starts with a simple “what if?” – what if I set up these sound triggers in this particular way? You never quite know how the various elements will interact until you try them. Each experiment leads to discoveries that prompt new questions and adjustments. It’s a continuous cycle of curiosity, experimentation, and refinement until something unexpectedly beautiful emerges.

This pattern plays out constantly in my Tech Projects classroom. Students start with a spark of curiosity about how something works, try it out for themselves, and that initial exploration often inspires them to investigate other possibilities. It’s like a curiosity cascade – each discovery opens up new pathways for exploration. The result is always unique because everyone follows their own chain of “what ifs.”

A Problem-Solver’s Mindset

Curiosity isn’t just about sparking new ideas – it’s also a powerful tool for problem-solving. I’ve noticed that my most successful students approach obstacles with curiosity rather than frustration. When something goes wrong (as it inevitably does in technology projects), they ask “What would happen if I tried this instead?” It’s remarkably similar to the scientific method: form a hypothesis, test it out, analyze the results, and use that knowledge to inform the next attempt. Failure is vital feedback, and curiosity is the engine that propels things forward.

Cultivating Curiosity: Practical Strategies

So how can we nurture this powerful force? Here are some approaches that I’ve found to work both in and out of the classroom:

Create a judgment-free zone for ideas. The fastest way to kill curiosity is to label certain thoughts or questions as “bad” or “wrong.”
Personalize your exploration. As the Edutopia research suggests, when learning connects to personal interests, engagement soars. A math problem about generic widgets becomes far more interesting when it involves something you care about.
Embrace the “what if?” mindset. Train yourself to ask questions about the everyday things you encounter. What makes them work? How could they be different?
Give ideas room to breathe. Sometimes the best insights come from letting your mind wander and make unexpected connections.
Document your questions. Keep a curiosity journal or note-taking system. Sometimes the most interesting questions come back around in surprising ways.
Find curiosity companions. Share your interests with others and learn about theirs. Curiosity is contagious, and different perspectives can spark new lines of inquiry.

The Adventure Continues

In her inspiring TED Talk, Yara Shahidi reminds us that the power of curiosity isn’t limited to academics or Silicon Valley innovators. As she says, “it’s […] the daily curiosities of every one of us that holds the most potential for rupture” – for breakthrough, for change, for growth. She points out that many of history’s greatest change-makers weren’t working from specialized institutions – they were people who followed their curiosity beyond their day jobs and into new possibilities.

This resonates deeply with what I’ve seen in my classroom and experienced in my own life. Curiosity isn’t just about acquiring knowledge – it’s about maintaining a sense of wonder and possibility. It’s about seeing connections where others might see barriers, and allowing ourselves to explore beyond the obvious paths.

What are you curious about? What questions are tugging at your attention? Your curiosity isn’t just idle interest – it’s pointing you toward your next adventure, your next discovery, your next creation. The only question is: where will it lead you?

The Power of an LLM Debrief

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 19:05:54 -0500

I spend a lot of time thinking about what works in my classroom and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s obvious - like when a project catches fire and students can’t wait to dive in. Other times, it’s harder to pin down why something that looked great on paper just didn’t land. I need help to see things clearly. That’s why I’ve always valued getting feedback on my work.

Like most people, I regularly turn to other people for their perspectives and spend plenty of time in self-reflection. But both approaches have their limits. My colleagues are wonderful, but I try to be strategic about when I ask for their time. And while I can spend hours thinking about my own work, I’m still stuck within my own perspective.

That’s why when I read Ethan Mollick’s fantastic book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, something clicked. His first principle for working with AI is to always invite it to the table, and so I wondered: what if I tried this with an end-of-class reflection? I decided to experiment with an LLM debrief of this year’s 8th Grade Tech Projects class because it had just wrapped up. What it surfaced genuinely surprised me.

Setting the Stage

I quickly realized that for this to work, the LLM needed a lot of context. So I shared everything – my curriculum, my syllabus, even a class-by-class breakdown of how the course actually unfolded (which, like every year, was different from my initial plans). Most major LLMs now have ways to give them this kind of background without cluttering up your conversation. ¹

With all that context in place, I started simply: “What do you see here?” Sometimes the most powerful prompts are the simplest ones. By leaving it that open-ended, I gave the LLM space to surface patterns and perspectives I might have missed on my own. ²

Learning to Dance with an LLM

The magic really happened in the back-and-forth that followed. Of everything the LLM initially pointed out, only about four out of ten things really resonated with me - and that’s okay! I used those points as jumping-off places for deeper exploration.

I’ve noticed that when many people interact with LLMs, they treat the responses as final answers. Maybe it’s because these tools can sound so authoritative, or because we’re not used to pushing back against computer output. But I found myself saying things like “that’s not what I’m looking for” or “that wasn’t quite what I expected” - redirecting, clarifying, and questioning – and that’s when the conversation got interesting.

This kind of dialogue let me blend my teaching experience and classroom knowledge with the LLM’s broader knowledge and pattern recognition abilities. It became more and more compelling as I started to surface and explore possibilities I wouldn’t have considered otherwise.

Unexpected Breakthroughs

I’m sharing this experience in detail because of the results, which were fantastic. Not because the LLM had all the answers, but because our dialogue helped me see my challenges in a completely new light.

Take my ongoing quest to foster collaboration in my classroom. I’d been starting every class with an open invitation for group consultation - a time when students could bring up challenges they were facing and get input from their peers. Sounds great in theory, right? Except nobody ever took advantage of it. Like, ever. Looking back, I can see why asking eighth graders to make themselves vulnerable in front of the whole class might not have been the most effective approach!

Through my conversation with the LLM, we landed on something I never would have thought of: a skills board. It’s a space where students can indicate areas where they’re willing to help others - maybe they’re good with Canva, or know some coding, or have experience with video editing. Instead of putting anyone on the spot, it lets students quietly connect with peers who actually want to help. Even better, as students learn new skills throughout the course, they can add themselves to new areas of the board. It becomes this visible record of growing confidence and capability.

We also dug into my documentation system. I already had some good practices in place - end-of-class reflections, daily “win” goals, and thumb checks for how students are feeling about their work. But something was missing. The LLM helped me envision a more cohesive approach, but it felt a little too involved for this grade level, so I’m still working out the details - and no, I’m probably not using the elementary-school traffic light system it initially suggested!

Why This Feels Different

What makes these LLM debriefs so powerful is how they combine my specific, personal expertise with an incredibly broad perspective. When we discussed the skills board idea, for instance, the LLM drew upon everything from peer tutoring programs to skill-sharing communities to professional mentorship approaches. It’s not just about spotting patterns - it’s about having a collaborator that can pull relevant ideas from across different domains and contexts, helping you see your work in new ways.

I’m starting to see all kinds of possibilities for these debriefs. After an important meeting, you could use one to help process what happened and capture key insights. Following a workshop, you might explore what worked and what could be better next time. Had a particularly tough week? A debrief might help you step back and see the situation more clearly.

The key is giving the LLM enough context to be a useful thought partner. And remember - this isn’t about letting the AI drive the conversation. Push back when things don’t feel right. Ask those follow-up questions. Let your expertise guide the exploration. The LLM won’t mind - in fact, that’s how you get to the good stuff.

Looking Forward

This feels like one of those moments I’ll look back on as a turning point. You know those “before and after” experiences? I think this might be one. The ability to have this kind of thought partnership - to extend our thinking in new ways while still remaining firmly in control of our own professional judgment - that’s pretty amazing.

I invite you to try an LLM debrief in your own work. It doesn’t have to be anything formal - just an experiment in thinking differently about something you care about. Because when you combine your expertise and experience with an AI’s ability to see fresh patterns and possibilities, you might just surprise yourself with where you end up.

I’ve found that tons of context can be counterproductive in other types of LLM conversations, so please experiment to see what works best for you. ↩︎
While I used a simple prompt here, specificity is usually helpful when working with LLMs, especially for beginners. Like any tool, it’s about finding the right approach for your specific needs. ↩︎

February 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 07:45:17 -0500

Lately, I’ve been waging a losing battle with winter. The week before last, no matter what I did, I couldn’t shake the bone-deep chill that came with the polar vortex’s bitter cold and howling winds. We even had to shut off our upstairs water for days to keep the pipes from freezing. In New England, it’s easy to see winter as an adversary during times like these – until I remember that my house has been standing since 1862, the year the U.S. first started printing paper money.

It’s weathered far worse winters than anything we see today, which fills me with a kind of quiet gratitude. There’s something profound about how we’ve built systems to protect ourselves against nature’s extremes, even if those systems occasionally meet their match.

I’ll admit it: I’m over the cold, the dark days, and snow. But winter isn’t quite done with me, so I’m finding ways to thrive despite it. I’m pouring energy into creative projects, enjoying moments with my students and colleagues, pursuing new learning paths, embracing a bit of goofiness, and continuing to build my new site. Sometimes the best response to what we can’t control is to focus on what brings us alive.

My Picks

Here are some recent discoveries that caught my attention:

Dragonsweeper

A brilliant, free, browser-based twist on Minesweeper that keeps pulling me back in despite (or because of?) my continued defeats. Instead of mines, you’re navigating around a dragon and monsters of varying strength, managing your health points and hunting for boosts. Watch out for the mimic! (h/t waxy)

Stax: Soulsville USA

This four-part HBO documentary about Memphis’s legendary Stax Records hit me hard. The way it captures the raw energy and innovation of Sam & Dave, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes feels like time travel to a musical revolution. Beyond the incredible music, the story of Stax’s rise and fall reveals so much about creativity, community, and the complexities of race and American culture. I couldn’t stop watching.

Marconi Union 24/7

Every musician has those artists who shape their creative DNA - Marconi Union is one of mine. This English ambient group crafts these incredible sonic landscapes that I get lost in. I just discovered that they have a YouTube channel with a continuous mix of their work, perfect for deep focus or creative dreaming. I’ve had it playing in the background while writing this newsletter, and it creates a wonderful sense of space. (h/t Kottke)

Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Thank You Think

An Atlantic [paywall] article from 2019 by Arthur C. Brooks that explores how we frame and navigate professional decline. What makes this piece fascinating is how Brooks weaves together scientific data (professional peaks typically hit way earlier than we’d like to believe) with insights from Eastern philosophy to suggest a different model: deliberately transitioning from achievement-focused work to teaching, mentorship, and deeper purpose. It’s a refreshingly honest look at a reality we rarely discuss openly in our productivity-obsessed culture, and something that helped to change my own trajectory.

Recently Published

The site continues to grow, carrying threads of ideas that keep weaving into unexpected patterns:

What We Keep

I’ve been fascinated by the story of Arthur Watkins, who spent his life preserving wheat varieties that others deemed worthless - varieties that might now help us adapt to climate change. It sparked some deep thinking about what we choose to preserve, both personally and as a society. While I tend to minimize possessions these days, Watkins’ story makes me wonder about the hidden value in what we leave behind.

Building My Corner of the Small Web

There’s something magical about the early days of the web, when people created spaces that were completely bonkers and wonderfully themselves. While most of the internet has become relentlessly commercialized, I’m trying to recapture some of that spirit here - no analytics, no optimization, just authentic exploration and unexpected connections. It’s an experiment in choosing joy over growth, and seeing what emerges when we create space for genuine expression.

In the Groove

I’ve been deep in the weeds of music production lately - building systems, crafting structures, and mapping out strategies for future tracks and performances. It’s gotten so complex that I’m starting to suspect I might be using all this planning as a clever way to avoid actually making music. Since releasing my last album, I’ve spent countless hours thinking about music and starting various projects, but nothing has made it to the finish line.

While I’m enjoying this planning phase, I’m realizing that simplicity might be the key to getting back into actual creation. Sometimes our elaborate systems become their own kind of resistance. Time to set aside the strategies and just make some tracks again. I’m actually getting excited about returning to the basics.

Until Next Time

As we navigate February’s shorter days, I’m excited to keep exploring what this site and newsletter can become. While there’s so much I want to do here, I’m reminding myself to establish foundations before rushing into changes. It all comes back to keeping things simple and staying centered in the joy of creation - whether that’s music, writing, or building this digital space.

Wherever you are in your own journey - whether you’re weathering winter’s last stand, pursuing creative dreams, or simply making it through each day - I hope you find moments of warmth and possibility. Here’s to growing our little corners of the world, one step at a time.

Building My Corner of the Small Web

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 17:16:31 -0500

When I first got onto the World Wide Web, one of the things I liked best about it was that it was, in so many ways, completely bonkers. People were putting up weird stuff, wonderful commentary, exciting new ideas, and just being themselves in a way that was suddenly accessible to everyone around the world, including me, sitting at a computer in my tiny apartment.

In the years since then, there’s been increasing pressure to optimize and monetize all online content. To some extent, I get it—the web is a powerful platform if you need to make money or build a career. So much of the web is now controlled by commercial interests that it can seem like that’s the whole point. But I want to recapture that earlier spirit, when companies didn’t quite understand what the web was about and people weren’t just trying to make a buck. That’s why I’m setting up this website differently: no analytics tracking what posts get attention, no metrics whatsoever, and definitely no advertising.

This approach was partly inspired by science fiction author and digital activist Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic website. He publishes everything without metrics or analytics, making it Creative Commons so anyone can use it with attribution. His thoughtful approach to online publishing demonstrates how working in a non-commercial context can create genuine value and meaningful connections.

Why the Small Web Matters

When I talk about the “small web,” I’m thinking of personal websites that reflect the genuine interests and voice of their creators. It’s about valuing the personal over the optimized, choosing connection over conversion, and having the freedom to write about whatever interests you in your own unique way.

While I’m a Gen Xer, I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with “selling out.” If you’re providing value and willing to put in the work, having your own commercial website can be powerful—you maintain control, bypass gatekeepers, and reach anyone with internet access. But for me, authenticity matters more than metrics. When you’re focused on selling yourself, it’s easy to become beholden to analytics and trends, trying to give people what they want instead of sharing who you are and seeing who naturally resonates with that.

Choosing Joy Over Growth

It’s not just about integrity, though that’s part of it. You can absolutely have a commercial site with integrity. It’s more about avoiding the endless treadmill of chasing trends and likes instead of being yourself. In my own life, I worry that if I start thinking in those terms—feeling like I have to do social media or follow trends—I’ll lose both authenticity and joy in creation. This approach also means I can focus on quality over quantity. A couple of thoughtful posts a month feels more meaningful and manageable than constantly pumping out content.

Taking the Leap

Of course, if this website were just for me, there would be no point in making it public. I want to create content that others will find valuable. As I’ve thought about my goals for this site—why I’m here, what I’m doing, what I want to get out of it—I’ve identified three key aims. First, I want to develop a practice of regular writing about things that interest me or that I think are important. The more I do this, the easier it becomes, and with luck, the better I’ll get. Second, I want to demonstrate that I can write in an effective and compelling way. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I want to try an experiment: can I connect with like-minded people without constantly promoting my site on social media? Wouldn’t it be incredible if this corner of the web helps me find people I would never have otherwise met? I’m not looking for a huge audience, just a few more people in my life who want to geek out about the same things I do.

The Constellation Approach

Instead of focusing on a single niche—which seems to be the standard advice for “making an impact”—I’m structuring my writing around what I call constellations. I’ve heard repeatedly that you need to pick one specific topic and hammer it exclusively to carve out your place in a subculture or genre. That approach doesn’t excite me. Instead, I want to explore interconnected ideas and interests, letting them form natural patterns, like stars in constellations.

These constellations include technology and society, because I’m fascinated by how they shape each other. Creativity forms another constellation, as I’m constantly working on creative projects and helping students and adults with theirs. Personal growth creates its own pattern of stars, connecting to the learning and education constellation—which, as an educator, is central to both my professional work and personal development. The final one explores culture through books, games, media, art, and music, because these are the ways we make meaning in our world. These constellations overlap and interact, creating a framework that can grow organically into something meaningful.

Creating Something Different

What you’ll find here will be personal, experimental, and uniquely me. I expect to make adjustments as I go—actually, I guarantee that it will change. That’s part of the fun. I’ll keep a monthly newsletter too, because I love email as a way to reach out to people. Once a month, I’ll share what I’m doing, thinking about, and posting, along with interesting things I’ve discovered.

In a way, I’m trying to recreate that spirit of the early web that got me excited in the first place—that sense of stumbling across something wonderful and unexpected, created by someone who was just being themselves. No optimization, no targeted content strategy, just genuine expression and connection. I’m embracing the uncertainty of this approach because sometimes the best things happen when we create space for them to emerge naturally. Maybe this little experiment will enhance my life and the lives of others in some small way. Because in this age of algorithmic feeds and viral content, sometimes it’s the small, genuine connections that can make all the difference.

Note: If you enjoyed this post’s cover image, you can read more about the adventures of Dr. Syntax in the Public Domain Review.

What We Keep

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 16:49:51 -0500

In our rush toward progress, what do we choose to keep, and what do we leave behind? This question has been on my mind lately, sparked by a remarkable story from the aftermath of World War I. It’s a story that challenges how we think about value, preservation, and the hidden costs of optimization.

As a young British soldier at the end of World War I, Arthur Watkins stayed behind to help French farmers continue to feed the troops while they waited to return home. Inspired by this experience, he studied and later taught agriculture at Cambridge, where he saw how techniques designed to optimize wheat crops (and profits) also resulted in reducing their genetic diversity. Progress required leaving genes that were of no use behind.

A Trove of Diversity

He then made it his mission to gather as many samples of wheat from around the world as possible, before they were bred out of existence. He succeeded in acquiring 827 varieties from around the globe that have been preserved for over a century. Incredible. Now, as we face accelerating climate challenges, the varieties of wheat we’re using are struggling to adapt because they were optimized for a different planet.

British and Chinese scientists recently collaborated to sequence the genomes of these 827 varieties – resulting in a petabyte of data, which is a thousand terabytes – and found that today’s wheat varieties only use 40% of their traits. This trove of diversity can allow us to create wheat that will continue to feed the world, all because of the forethought of a shy academic who determined that genes others thought were of no value were worth saving.

The Price of Progress

Watkins’ story resonates because it reflects a pattern we see again and again: the way progress often demands we leave things behind, only to discover their value too late. Nearly 70% of silent films have been lost because movie studios didn’t see any value in them. This is a unique and sublime artform – watch the 1927 version of Nosferatu, The General, or Metropolis on Tubi to see for yourself, and consider what we’re missing.

I’m also reminded of how much early Internet content is gone, and along with it a look at how the advent of the World Wide Web created an explosion of creativity and experimentation. This trend is gaining momentum as obsolete media decays and human creations are being supplanted by AI slop: low-effort, low-quality AI-generated content that has begun flooding the Internet. Even the Internet Archive, a bastion of preservation in the sea of relentless progress, is under attack and may not survive.

These losses feel personal because I’ve watched my own relationship with stuff transform over time. I am aware of the importance of letting go of old things as new and better things come along, and realize that lots of people cling to things far too long. It’s tough to embrace change. These days I almost always prefer getting an eBook over a physical copy, even though I love real books and know that what I’m buying is merely a license to read, not an actual book in the form of a digital file (that it often costs as much, or more than a physical book also infuriates me).

When I was younger, one of my favorite things was collecting music and video in various formats. I’d pour over gatefolds and special edition liner notes, displaying my collections on shelf upon shelf in my living room. Now, it, too, is all digital. I’ve made it a priority to minimize the amount of stuff I own, deciding that less is better, but this means I’ve lost something of value as a result.

Cultivating Foresight

So, how can we be more like Arthur Watkins, and know what’s worth preserving?

Awareness

Making thoughtful choices starts with paying attention. When we make a choice to keep or lose something, we need to think carefully about why. Acting as stewards means considering the potential value to future generations. Is this truly replaceable? What assumptions are we making? What’s lost with this removal?
Creating systems that support long-term thinking

Building for the future requires intentional design. Those of us in technical fields can include redundancy and backwards-compatibility in the systems we create. We can create preservation-friendly workflows, decentralize data, and use open formats and documentation.
Learning from indigenous cultures

Looking beyond our own cultural assumptions opens new perspectives. Our culture often has a hard time understanding stewardship, geared as it is toward short-term profits and benefits. Other cultures have taken a broader, long-term view that we can learn from. For example, Amy Bowers Cordalis, a member of the Yurok Tribe in California, has become a climate activist in her efforts to support her tribe’s people and lands. She reminds us that indigenous nations hold 80% of our planet’s biodiversity because they have prioritized sustainability instead of exploitation.
Promoting a preservation mindset

Building community awareness creates lasting change. Evolution may not have wired us for long-term thinking, but we can be taught about its benefits. If a community values the preservation of diversity, it gives us a kind of insurance against an unknown future.
Reviewing our decisions

Taking time to reflect improves our choices. So much is done in the moment, without much thought, because of the need to adapt to new technologies and circumstances. Slowing down and being thoughtful and deliberate about our decisions can make a huge difference in what we choose to preserve.

Mr. Watkins was an outlier whose courage to preserve what others considered worthless may help us tackle our changing world. His story challenges me to think differently about my own choices around preservation and progress. Today we are all stewards of knowledge and resources, making daily decisions about what to keep and what to leave behind. Perhaps by being more thoughtful about these choices, we too can preserve something that will make a difference for our collective future.

January 2025 Infinite Omphalos

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 10:22:50 -0500

Happy New Year! The days are starting to get longer, but winter feels like it is just getting started in New England. Nature feels dormant, but I’m glad that birds still call on us, the moss is still green on hillside rocks, and the cats are less aloof now that they want some body heat.

No resolutions, no promises, simply staying open and active, grateful and creative. 2025 promises to be quite a year regardless of what I do, so how about doing something that feels like it’s adding a little more good into the world?

I’ve been trying to teach myself how to code GLSL shaders lately because they can make beautiful graphics, and I’m not understanding any of it right now. I don’t know if it’s my approach, if I don’t have the right resources, or if it’s beyond my capacity to understand. I’m stepping back for now, and will have to try again at some point.

It reminds me of getting Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach as a gift when I was a teen. The book explores deep ideas in mathematics, art, and music through clever analogies and storytelling, making it a fascinating yet challenging read. It was wonderful right until I reached the point where I realized that I was lost, and couldn’t get past it.

Being faced with intellectual limits is hard. Was it really too difficult, or did I give up too soon? Am I dumber than I think? That could end badly. I wonder what reading it would’ve been like if I had an LLM by my side!

My Picks

Here are some recent discoveries that caught my attention:

You Exist in the Long Context

Steven Johnson’s interactive forensics game and post about how he used AI to make it changed my thinking about interacting with Large Language Models.
YTCH

YouTube videos shown in subject-based channels, you get dumped in the middle like old-school cable TV. It’s nice to surf from time to time.
Maker Skill Trees

A GitHub repository for learning new skills via printable pages that feature progress tiles, starting with basic at the bottom and becoming more advanced as you ascend. The variety of subjects is impressive, and I love this gamified approach to learning. I liked exploring the Comic Artist tree, it starts with basic shapes and ends with a 30-page comic.

Recently Published

If you’ve missed it, here’s what’s new on the site:

Liner Notes for Obscured

These are extensive personal notes about the music and video for each song on my latest album, giving credit where it’s due and discussing my thoughts about the creative process.
What I Learned from my First AI-Facilitated Assignment

I finally got the chance to take a new student-focused AI Assistant system that I created for a spin, asking my students to use it for final reflections about their project work in my class. I was stunned by the quality of the results, and surprised by a lot of what I found.

In the Groove

This month, I’ve been working on:

Updating the Galactic Console

I call my collection of external music-making gear The Galactic Console because it’s so over-the-top grandiose and cheesy that it amuses me (ahem, Infinite Omphalos…). It’s where I control and shape my compositions, and where I mess around and have fun with sound. I’m in the process of updating the console’s gear with an eye toward an eventual live performance.
Optimizing a Live Performance Set

My dream is to be able to put a bunch of samples into a template, and then start jamming with them – adding creative effects, breakdowns, buildups, and a little live instrument work with as little fuss as possible. I’ve got the basics down, and am trying to explore possibilities while making it as useful and accessible as possible. It’s not there yet, but there’s a lot of promise, and I’m excited to see where it ends up.

Until Next Time

I’m so glad that I started this newsletter to connect with everyone. The month ahead is all about learning new things: I have a brand-new web development course to create, and that work starts in earnest when my current class ends at the end of the month. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in February!

What I Learned from my First AI Assignment

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 16:22:50 -0500

I wanted to find out how AI tools might impact the learning process for students in my 8th Grade Technology Projects class. I always ask my students to think deeply about their project experiences, but I can only get so far with a worksheet. Would doing these reflections with an AI facilitator make a difference? You bet. In fact, the results blew me away.

Challenges Old and New

I usually assign reflections as Google Doc worksheets with prompts for students to answer. While this approach is fine, it has limitations: the static nature of the prompts restricted deeper exploration, and my ability to provide feedback was limited to one written round and some brief discussions.

It’s also tough to know the right way to start introducing AI to students in an academic setting. I think it’s safe to assume that most (or all) of them have used an LLM at some point, but they need to use it well. Students need to see where AI is lacking, understand where its strengths are, know how to best interact with it, and be able to explore its capabilities. That’s the only way they’ll be prepared to make informed decisions about their use of AI now and in the future.

So I crafted a detailed set of system instructions that told the LLM (in this case, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro) what to do, put together instructions for the students in several different ways, and asked them to have a conversation with it. The reflection assignment turned out to be a perfect candidate. The AI system’s iterative prompts and tailored support helped students produce insightful reflections, even for those who sometimes struggle with expressing their thoughts.

My instructions could’ve been better, and I didn’t give them enough time, but overall I received better reflections from my students than ever before. They were more personal, went deeper, and demonstrated thought at a level that very few students had previously achieved. I’d call that a huge win! I will definitely be running this assignment again, and can’t wait to see how much it can be improved.

Insights

Here’s what stood out to me after this initial experience:

The assistant’s ability to follow up on responses and adapt to each student’s input produced better results than traditional worksheets. Each student received tailored prompts, allowing for deeper, more reflective interactions than I could provide.
ELL students benefited greatly, using capabilities like rephrasing and extended dialogue to achieve deeper engagement than they had with my static prompts.
The AI’s ability to navigate incomplete or indirect answers by rephrasing or prompting for more detail often elicited deeper insights.
The system occasionally provided students with responses that were better aligned with my questions, which wasn’t ideal. My goal was to promote reflective thinking and develop metacognitive skills, however, so I can let go of that a little.
Some students struggled with pacing, skipping instructions or questions. The AI kept redirecting, patient and relentless, until it got what it needed. Several students told me that they were very frustrated by this. To some extent it’s acceptable or even good to slow down and struggle a bit, but I know part of it was also because I did not provide enough time for everyone to finish.
I had to be in the room while they worked, and I needed to get a full transcript of their conversations. That allowed me to monitor their progress, provide support, and review their thoughts and processes in detail. I suspect my proximity also helped to keep students on-topic, because I could answer questions and check in if someone seemed like they were stuck.
About half of my students didn’t click on a link to our school’s essential skills at a specific point in the conversation. I put it in the text instructions at the top of the chat page, I had the AI remind them where to find it during the conversation, I put it up on a slide, and I verbally told them. None of that worked.

Adjustments

Next time I give an AI assignment, I plan to:

Provide More Time: Extending the duration should help students engage more deeply and avoid feeling rushed. My hope is that they slow down and read more carefully.
Incorporate Progress Notifications: Students didn’t know how close they were to the end of the conversation, making it feel interminable. Adding clear indicators of progress will help students stay focused and, with luck, reduce frustration.
Embed Reference Materials: I’ll provide the AI with reference materials, and have it display and explain them directly within the conversation.

Bringing AI into Your Classroom

If you’re considering integrating AI tools into your classroom, start small and focus on activities that align with AI’s strengths, like brainstorming, planning, or reflection.
When designing AI activities, think about how it can complement your teaching. Be clear on what you want to get out of it, and understand that the AI needs to balance being helpful with letting students grapple with the task at hand. Also, build in safeguards like assigning AI work during class, not as homework, and require full chat logs so that you can review things from start to finish.

The possibilities are vast, but the key for me — as always, AI or not — is to keep the experience authentic and student-centered. If you’re a teacher, what’s one area of your teaching where an AI tool could help your students think more deeply or explore new perspectives?

Obscured

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 15:04:05 -0500

This album took shape over the last four years. It started as a way to cope with the pandemic, giving me a sense of control when everything felt chaotic.

It’s a collection of songs and imagery that I made in my spare time, as a hobby. While a big part of it is just me having fun, it also embodies significant personal growth and learning, making its release a significant milestone in my world.

If you’re inspired to create something like this of your own, you absolutely can! There are free resources and great people out there, online and in real life. I couldn’t have done this without them. Believe in yourself, put in the time, and focus on what brings you joy. Amazing things will happen.

— June 2024

Gratitude

Including others in my creative process has been vital, and I’m so thankful to these people.

Jaron Lopez helps me develop my musical skills, and Derrick Schultz helps me develop my generative art skills. Each are fantastic creatives who share their knowledge with the world — at no cost — and each offers extra opportunities that are worth paying for.

I love teaching at a school that values the arts. As a computer geek by trade, I appreciate that my colleagues in art and music are supportive and never laugh me out of the room. Special thanks to Stacy and Rob, whose constant positivity and encouragement mean so much to a guy with perpetual imposter syndrome. Thanks also go to my amazing students in Tech Projects and ACT Club — their passion, creativity, and insatiable curiosity inspires me every day.

Of course friends and family are a big part of my success, too. I suspect that many of them don’t much like weird downtempo electronic music, but they do like me, and are always open to listening, giving feedback, and hearing me blather on about compression ratios. Words can’t express how grateful I am to have you all in my life.

Audio Production

This music was mostly created within Ableton Live, with some work in Reason, both standalone and as a plugin. In addition to stock instruments and effects, I am a huge fan of products from Arturia, Baby Audio, Cherry Audio, and Sonic Charge. You’ll hear plenty of their stuff in my tracks. Most of my samples come from Splice.

My creation process varies, so you’ll find some tracks that resulted from trying to apply a concept or technique I learned, some tracks that centered around an idea or feeling, and some tracks that came from experimenting and improvisation. If I were to identify a through-line that connects all of these songs, it would be the difficult work of figuring out when to let it go and call them finished.

My ideas rarely come out exactly as I envision, and there’s always something I’d like to tweak. Coupled with a dose of self-doubt, it’s sometimes a miracle I release anything at all. Embracing imperfection is important, particularly because I am not a professional musician (and even they aren’t always perfect). But I want to create the best work that I can within the constraints of my talent and experience. I have to feel that it’s worth someone’s time to listen to my stuff. The balance between feeling like it’s good enough or not enough is a constant struggle. I’ll let you be the judge.

Video Production

I created the video with Resolume Avenue by syncing it with Ableton and doing post-production in Final Cut Pro. I added some of my own graphics made in Motion, along with licensed visuals created by Micah Buzan, Ducky3d, and Uon Visuals. Generative clips were created with a variety of resources, most open source, including Deforum, Pixray, Aphantasia, and the tools at eden.art.

This was my first foray into a full, half-hour music video, so the majority of my time was spent on learning the tools and developing a workflow. As a result, most of the licensed visuals are unmodified “stock” loops that have inspired me to want to create my own, but they are just so darned good I don’t know that I’d ever be able to get to that level of quality. Micah Buzan’s work really resonates with me, and provides much of the distinctive visual style you’ll see — his surreal, trippy animations and backgrounds fit my aesthetic perfectly.

When generating visuals with machine learning, I always think about ethics and outcomes. I am a total AI geek who has been fascinated by these tools for years — I was discussing them with my students as far back as DeepDream in 2015. It felt like this stuff went from being fascinating-but-esoteric to “it’s going to take over the world” overnight, with everyone talking about it, and that’s when I got worried. Research and exploration became less important than hype and profits for many in the field, and the internet became sludged with low-effort, low-quality content. The way the corporate hype machine describes this technology, it’s no wonder that so many creatives are angry and worried for their jobs. The reality — that this stuff is nowhere near ready to replace humans for anything worthwhile (it’s not intelligent at all, by the way, and by definition can only be derivative) — seems difficult to convey.

My Guidelines for the Use of Generative Art

I will not generate imagery that attempts to copy specific artists or people.
I will not sell generated imagery.
I will not claim ownership of generated imagery.
I will celebrate and support human artists, and pay them for their work.
I will be transparent about my use of generated imagery.
I will use generated imagery to enhance my creativity, not replace it.

My thinking around this topic continues to develop as the technology evolves, and so these guidelines are subject to change.

Tracks

Impulses

This track was developed using Dennis DeSantis’ Catalog of Attributes strategy, from his fantastic (and free) book Making Music. I took a piece of music that I admired and studied it in detail, writing down its attributes across all kinds of factors. I then discarded the original, and composed using my notes as a guide. The end result sounds nothing like what inspired it but still retains many of the elements that I found compelling, and it’s the first song that truly felt complete when I finished it. The star of the song, for me, is the lead synth patch, designed by Konstantin Klem. It has a melancholy, haunting feel, floating above the surface, and it instantly reminded me of Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack. The spoken word sample is from “How The Ear Functions” at the Prelinger Archive, and doesn’t connect with anything other than being what felt right to include at that point in the track.

The video heavily features city aesthetics, reminiscent of Blade Runner, with renders from Ducky3d’s Blender loops, Uon Visual’s City pack, and both text-to-video and image-to-video clips generated at eden.art. One image-to-video source was generated by Open AI’s DALL-E 3. My favorite clip has to be during the second breakdown, after the spoken word section, where a glowing instrument panel shifts and morphs. I also love the progression of Uon’s city, from simple and monochromatic to wild and colorful.

Obscured

I wish every track could come together like this one! It went from nothing to nearly complete in about five hours over two weeks, with another three hours for polishing, mixing, and mastering. The core samples are from Splice, where I love using their Stacks feature to mix sounds. After selecting the base samples, I experimented with creative effects, slicing up the hi hats and other elements to create a new groove. The bass sample had some unintelligible vocal bleed, which inspired the title.

All but one of the video elements were created with generative machine learning (the horse is by Micah Buzan). This process taught me an important lesson. While learning to generate outputs in eden.art, I used photography terminology to get a specific look, asking for a ‘crane shot’ of a forest canopy descending to the ground. Instead, I got images of actual cranes—both animal and structural—and otherworldly weirdness. Initially frustrated, I soon realized the generated visuals were fantastic in their own right.

So I decided to go with it, and work with the model output instead of trying to bend it to my will. A big part of what makes this technology so interesting to me is this new form of collaboration: I give it input, it creates weird and wonderful things, and then it’s up to me to figure out what I can do with it. Embracing the weirdness and going with the flow takes me to places I’d never otherwise be able to go.

Another trick I discovered in making this video was that if I used multiple prompts that were similar, but shortened the time it had to transition between prompts (usually, you’ll want lots of frames to smoothly transition, like Veiled Embers), the abrupt changes can be synchronized to the beat. The result was delightful.

Colors and Clouds

This is the most experimental track on the album, with elements created generatively rather than composed. Inspired by a Venus Theory tutorial, I added elements and selected specific parts of the generative output that fit together. The result is… different. It ventures into chaotic spaces but is grounded by the beat, bass, and a pedal tone toward the end.

For the video, I loved the cloud textures generated by eden.art and featured two of my favorite generative methods: Pixray Panorama for the song’s start and a long Aphantasia clip.

Towers of Midnight

This is a there-and-back-again song that starts and ends in the same place, taking a freaky journey in between. It’s entirely sample-based, with modifications and slicing, and is another example of a track that came together quickly (though not as fast as ‘Obscured’). The video exclusively features the incredible work of Micah Buzan, showcasing his exceptional creativity and artistry.

Junker

I almost didn’t include this track because it’s the last one I produced exclusively in Reason, way before the others, and it feels like it’s from another era. However, I liked it too much to leave out. Playing with the visuals was particularly fun, aiming to reference Kraftwerk enough to honor one of my biggest influences without being too derivative.

Veiled Embers

If you’d like a good example of my nerdiness, this is it. Creating a track contemplating death and impermanence is not going to get me on many playlists! It’s taken me a while to let myself follow ideas wherever they lead. Even if they end up weird or esoteric, it’s 100% me. The spoken word excerpt is from a poem that deeply impacted me in my youth, Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant, read by Kevin S.

The visuals are more fluid, with a Mozarabic-inspired Deforum zoom that fits the track perfectly.

Hey, Grey

When the pandemic hit, I was very lucky. I have a great home and someone to share it with, I’m in reasonably good health, and I could work remotely for the first year. Still, it terrified me. We didn’t know how things would turn out; there was so much death and despair, and many systems meant to protect us proved ineffective. My life’s rhythms were disrupted, and I felt more isolated than ever. The killing of George Floyd added to the outrage and uncertainty about our world. I found myself in a very dark place, unsure of how to emerge or if I even should.

Eventually, I realized I’d felt this way before—only the circumstances were different. As a kid, I’d experienced tough times, feeling powerless and angry at the world. It was like reacquainting with an old foe. Reflecting on it, I recognized that cruelty, inequality, and fate’s capriciousness are as much a part of life as anything else, but I was not completely powerless.

I could separate sense from nonsense, and make informed decisions. I could determine what was under my control, and do my best to let the rest go. I could also create something to remind myself of the beauty and resilience we have within ourselves, and that’s this song. When everything felt like it was spiraling toward oblivion, creating something new and positive was my anchor. It’s imperfect and just a drop in the bucket, but it’s something, and it made a difference.

The visuals blend generative clips, Blender renders by Ducky3d, and Micah Buzan animations. Some of the generative clips were prompted to show static like an old analog television, but of course I didn’t get that. One of them formed the visage of a young woman who turns her head and looks at us before fading into the mist. Where did she come from? Like a ghost, she is there, and then gone.

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000