Writing
Essays
Field notes from the edge of applied AI, in seven series: why AI minds break like ours, a world built from scratch, shipping enterprise AI, blueprints, real deployments, loose threads, and AI in plain words. Search any idea below, or browse by topic.
One line per series, one stop per essay, in reading order. The longer the line, the more essays. Hover a stop to see its title. Tap a stop to open it.
New here? Start with The Method Actor, the green stop on Not So Artificial.
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Not So Artificial 18 essays
- Part 2 The Loop of Attention: Why AI Hallucinates
- Part 3 The Flaw: Why You Cannot Code Bias Out of AI
- Part 4 The Vector
- Part 5 The Chemical Mixing Board: Why One Reward Makes AI Cheat
- Part 6 From Tools to Partners: The Internet of Agents
- Part 7 The Shape of the Partnership: How to Brief an AI Agent
- Part 8 A Word Is Not a Concept
- Part 9 The Analogy Engine: Why AI Keeps Reusing the Same Analogies
- Part 10 The Measure of Misunderstanding
- Part 11 The Science Behind the Mirror
- Part 12 The Boredom Engine
- Part 13 The Same Cracks: Why AI Breaks Like Us
- Part 14 The Child and the Stars
- Part 15 The Infinite Review
- Part 16 The Hunger That Survives the Feast
- Part 17 There Is a New Voter in the Room: Words, Quantum Collapse and LLMs
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Chronos 9 essays
- Part 2 The Bug That Caught Me Cheating
- Part 3 A Body Invents Itself
- Part 4 The Next World to Build
- Part 5 An Eye for Time
- Part 6 You Can't Run a Brain on Sunlight
- Part 7 A Reason to Be Rare
- Part 8 A Mind Is a Way to Spend Less
Start Designing the Conditions for Life Latest Saving Is Older Than Planning
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Field Notes 7 essays
- Part 2 The AI-First Company
- Part 3 The AI-First Company Needed a Stand-Up
- Part 4 I Engineer Illusory Truth for Machines. It's Called GEO.
- Part 5 Your Notes Are Not the Deal
- Part 6 Build vs Buy vs Partner: How to Choose Your AI Delivery Model
Start Orchestration Is the System Latest How to Implement AI in Enterprise
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Architecture 6 essays
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Case Studies 3 essays
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Loose Threads 3 essays
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In Easy Words 10 essays
- Part 2 What is an LLM in Easy Words
- Part 3 What are AI Agents in Easy Words
- Part 4 What is Agentic AI in Easy Words
- Part 5 What is Fine-Tuning in Easy Words
- Part 6 What are Vector Embeddings in Easy Words
- Part 7 What is MLOps in Easy Words
- Part 8 What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) in Easy Words
- Part 9 What Does a Chief AI Officer Actually Do?
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Standalone 2 essays
Dashed circles are ideas; dots are essays, coloured by series. The bigger the circle, the more essays share it. Point at an idea to light up its essays; click it to list them below. Tap an idea to list its essays below.
Arrow keys move between ideas. Enter lists an idea's essays below the graph. Escape clears.
Ideas that run through the most series
- Not So Artificial
- Chronos
- Field Notes
- Architecture
- Case Studies
- Loose Threads
- In Easy Words
- Standalone
- Idea
Series
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Not So Artificial Why AI makes things up, flatters you and defends its first answer, traced back to the human mind it was built from, with what to do about each. -
Chronos Watch evolution happen from scratch in a small simulated world, and learn how to tell a real discovery from a bug in your own code. -
Field Notes What it actually takes to get AI working inside a real business, from the orchestration to the plumbing nobody shows in the demo. -
Architecture Blueprints for systems I want to exist: retrieval you can verify, an Internet of Agents, and intelligence that never has to centralize your data. -
Case Studies Three AI systems in production, with the before-and-after numbers and the constraints that made each one hard. -
Loose Threads Big, unfinished ideas about mind, time, consciousness and quantum physics, each one marked honestly where it stops being science. -
In Easy Words Plain-language answers to the AI terms everyone uses: RAG, agents, fine-tuning, embeddings and more.
Latest
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17 min read · Not So Artificial
The Lock You Cannot Pick: Do AI Safety Barriers Cap Intelligence?
Do AI safety guardrails make models less capable? Crude ones can, measurably, and in a lab test a penalized model hid its intent. Reasons seem to cost less.
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11 min read · Not So Artificial
The Same Cracks: Why AI Breaks Like Us
After years of building AI systems and a small digital universe, I keep finding the same four failures on both sides of the glass: gap-filling, attention starvation, cheap-reward gaming and monoculture. AI does not break like a machine. It breaks like us. Part 13 of Not So Artificial.
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14 min read · Not So Artificial
The Hunger That Survives the Feast
Why 'never enough' is not a disease but the engine that turns achievement into pursuit. The wrong hunger we already gave machines, and the design of one that can steer. Part 16 of Not So Artificial.
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11 min read · Not So Artificial
The Infinite Review
Every AI reviewer finds one more critical finding, because finding problems looks like work. The bias is human first. The fix is not a better prompt, it is a file: how we gave our reviews a terminal state.
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10 min read · Not So Artificial
The Child and the Stars
Clarke described a superintelligence with the mind of a child in 1956, and wrote down both endings. We built the powerful half and skipped the parenting. What the research says about raising it instead of restricting it. Part 14 of Not So Artificial.
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12 min read · Architecture
Share the Answer, Not the Data
In the MCP era your agent negotiates with banks, employers, and hospitals on your behalf. Federated principles decide what it may carry: the answer travels, the data stays home.
Every essay lives in one of the series above. Pick a thread and read it in order.