Yes, I’m a relentless fanboy of whatever Paul Ford writes, but this is a truly wonderful post about what makes AI so addictive and impossible to look away from. He frames AI as a technology that truly has no shame because “it possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its carefree attitude toward plagiarism.” And so:

By aggregating the world’s knowledge, chomping it into bits with GPUs, and emitting it as multi-gigabyte software that somehow knows what to say next, we’ve made the funniest parody of humanity ever. These models have all of our qualities, bad and good. Helpful, smart, know-it-alls with tendencies to prejudice, spewing statistics and bragging like salesmen at the bar. They mirror the arrogant, repetitive ramblings of our betters, the horrific confidence that keeps driving us over the same cliffs. That arrogance will be sculpted down and smoothed over, but it will have been the most accurate representation of who we truly are to exist so far, a real mirror of our folly, and I will miss it when it goes.

I recently mentioned how I like to draw it until it works when I’m ramping up on a new system. Clint Byrum says it so much better in his post System Diagrams are Performance Caches for Cognitive Load. First, this bit resonated with me because it’s exactly the situation I currently find myself in:

Having joined just a few months ago, I was overwhelmed about 5 minutes into the meeting. The individual words and concepts all made sense. JSON parsing slow. Network transit treacherous. Changing things at the source hard. I got all of those components of the discussion, but through the whole thing I was just barely able to follow the overall system conversation and ask very basic questions to understand what was going on. I came away with a bunch of exploratory personal action items, and a very clear hole in my mental model of the system that needs to be filled.

Clint goes on to use a systems analogy for the individual people that make up a team—people and knowledge as components of caching, computation, and storage. This leads to a perfect explanation for why system diagrams are so important:

A single system diagram is where those primed nodes can push the most relevant bits of their information out of their local brain-caches, and into a high-performance distributed cache from which everyone can read. This will preserve precious cognitive load for those critical low-latency tasks. Of course, all of these caches may be stale. The local in-memory ones are particularly hard to test, but at least the system diagram is observable. Everyone can look at it, and if there are nodes with updates, they can update the cache.

So, prime those caches. Draw it until it works!

I don’t agree with everything on this list of how to send progress updates, but these two points are especially important and worth remembering:

Acknowledge changes explicitly. If you said a the last time and b this time, and b conflicts with a, you need to explain the inconsistency. People perceive acknowledged inconsistencies as cost of doing business, but unacknowledged inconsistencies as broken promises.

I name this section “challenges and requests” in my updates, but the underlying principle is the same:

Add a dedicated section for worries and failures. Be honest, have good plans, and don’t panic. People are drawn to conscientiousness and vulnerability but repelled from haplessness and histrionics.

If you’re a fan of the Murderbot series (and if you haven’t read it, get on it!) you will absolutely love this recent keynote speech by author Martha Wells at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University. She describes how Murderbot came to be, what it’s really about, and where the story sits within sci-fi and our world in general:

There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.

I won’t ruin the ending by quoting the final paragraph, I’ll just say that this is my favorite thing I’ve read in a long time, and you should savor every word.

This has been shared around quite a bit over the past couple of weeks, but Anil Dash has written another[1] modern classic in Make better documents. Excellent advice all around, including:

Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question. Very often, people feel a lot of anxiety about the need to preface their big dramatic point with lots of build-up. But you almost never want to be building dramatic tension in a professional context; this isn’t a thriller where you’re trying to surprise them with twists and turns.

And:

Similarly, you’ll want to constrain your requests to your audience to be something they can react to constructively. “Do we want to invest at the higher cost of Option A to move faster, or go with the lower cost of Option B to be more cautious?” That’s an answerable question! And it’s perfectly fine if it leads to a conversation where a third option is explored — but you never would have gotten there with a prompt that says, “What do we want to do next?”

---

1. Never forget: If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault  ↩

This is a bit of a meta post, especially if you’re reading this as an email as opposed to via RSS or the web… but bear with me please!

Justin Duke is one of my favorite internet people—ever since I met him while I was working on Postmark and we tried to convince him to switch his email provider for Buttondown. I now use Buttondown to run my little RSS-to-Email newsletter (yes, via Postmark!), and it was such a joy to chat with a fellow Open Web Enthusiast™ last week about owning your words, and what makes this partnership so special to me. He somehow managed to edit my ramblings from the interview into something that makes sense:

Despite sounding cliché, I hold a strong belief in the importance of owning your content, a sentiment echoed in the challenges faced when migrating from platforms like Substack. Their network is essentially their product, monetized in a way that complicates leaving, especially when payments are involved. […]

The internet’s enduring spaces, free from central ownership, are RSS and email. These technologies prompted my switch, betting on the most basic, reliable forms of digital communication. Embracing the POSSE model—Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere—resonates deeply with me.

I think this is also where I’m supposed to mention that if you’d like to help cover the cost of hosting this site (and paying for Buttondown!), you can become a Friend of Elezea for $3/month. Bargain!