Of Hearts and Minds

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piaopulencia

Notes from the Chaos Garden: Three Things I've Been Turning Over

It's been a really busy summer acclimating to new household dynamics, keeping up with the homestead and of course, kids. Our pond, whose first year being filled naturally stayed pretty useful for the ducks until late June when the heat took over, presently functions as a dragonfly den

The Network They Couldn't See

There are things that hold entire worlds together that never get counted until they're gone. My partner and a close friend got let go on last Wednesday. My partner had been there over 13 years. My friend, who he'd helped get connected with the role, was

All the Way Down

My partner was building a home server workstation. Effectively what would be running our homestead infrastructure (think: planting details, watering systems, home automation). The first attempt went wrong somewhere in the assembly and he lost his gaming PC in the process, down a machine instead of up one. He reordered

One Dock, With Coordinates

On what happens when you hand a language model a blank canvas and ask it to solve a geometric problem it was never built to solve.

Quiet Solidarity

I've been re-watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood on Netflix, not for the first time, probably not for the last, because there's something specific about returning to a story whose ending you already know when the actual world has stopped offering legible ones. The nervous system gets

What Holons Remember That We Forgot

There's a scene in Daniel Suarez's Freedom™ where a character is touring a holon, one of the Daemon's self-sufficient communities organized within a 100-mile economic radius. Farms. Fabrication. Renewable power. Mesh networks threading it all together. Augmented reality overlaid on the landscape

Designed to Render (How)

A standalone third companion to The Chain of Trust (What) and The Dirty Pool (Why). An AI assistant surfaces an answer with total confidence, clean formatting, reasonable tone, and plausible citations. The interface looks great, but the output is wrong. And the user, seeing nothing to flag distrust, acts on

The Translator in the Room

Aakash Gupta, a former VP of Product and one of the more widely read voices in the PM world, had flagged an exchange worth paying attention to in a LinkedIn post. An X user had asked Nikita Bier, head of product at X, for a feature: add search to the

The Wait Is the Work

Last Sunday was supposed to be too late. The plan had us planting saplings on Friday. Pear, apple, raspberry, blueberry, each one already mapped to a spot, a season, a role in something larger we're building. We'd timed it, accounted for it, built it into the

Least Common Multiple

Summer 2017 There's a playlist on my Spotify called Summer 2017. I made it for my, then daily, commutes into work via Metra or L. The north side of Chicago in summer has a specific quality of light — low and gold in the mornings, the kind that makes