“Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” — John Culkin, A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, 1967. The line is nearly always given to McLuhan, and nearly always in a slightly different form than the …
“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it. They will appear wise, but not be so.” — Thamus to the god Theuth, on the invention of writing, in Plato’s Phaedrus Sometime in the …
The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts. –Aristotle Many years ago, during a particularly wayward period of my misspent youth (i.e.: my cowboy period), having pulled a calf from …
You cannot win a bet on a future impossible to predict. You can only become a human who survives regardless of outcome. Three AI fears walk into a bar. The first tries to order everything on the menu at once …
The most durable advances in Agentic AI are not what the demos suggest.They are what the plumbing demands. Convening the Ministry Thirteen years ago I came back to hands-on software engineering and data science after a long stretch in management …
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” — William Bruce Cameron (often misattributed to Einstein) Thirteen years ago, when I began my journey back into hands-on coding after years of management consulting, …
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus I have been thinking a lot recently about permanence. In our industry, we have spent the better …
There’s a moment in every scientific revolution when the instruments start agreeing with each other too perfectly; when the thermometers, barometers, and galvanometers begin telling the same story not because they’ve been calibrated together, but because they’ve all stumbled upon …
There is a moment in every great jazz improvisation where the individual musicians stop playing at each other and begin playing through each other. Coltrane called it “sheets of sound.” Miles simply called it listening. I’ve been thinking about this …
The most profound shift in computing isn’t that our tools got faster. It’s that they started saying “I disagree.” We built the first agents as polite function-wrappers—Lisp macros that could choose between search strategies, expert systems that weighed confidence scores. …
The Agentic Pattern: Software That Negotiates Its Own Reality Read more »