A Tangled Cetacean and AI Safety Theater Note: This is a heavy topic involving the death of stranded whales. Over the weekend a young humpback whale was stranded on a beach in Oregon. They were tangled in rope from crabbing equipment. People came from all over the area to help, posting that they had extra wet suits, lights, and other tools, as well as volunteering to be in the cold ocean overnight. A dangerous situation, and yet they were all coming together for this creature. I was riveted...
25 days ago • 3 min read
Using Models Together ChatGPT Atlas and Earth Index A lot of my experimentation lately is using common AI tools in different ways. I decided to see what would happen if I tried using ChatGPT with geospatial models. And I just did a simple experiment where I was working to create labels in Earth Index and using ChatGPT's browser Atlas as my partner in that. I'm sharing with you part one, which is not the more successful part of doing this. ChatGPT has difficulty using the map and it would have...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Introducing the Promptatorium I’ve been following the work of some folks who are using LLMs more efficiently than I am. One of the key skills seems to be orchestrating a series of agents working together. I've had a little success with doing this in while coding, but not to the extent that I have observed others. I was looking for another way to explore more deeply. I’ve always been interested in simulating biological systems, so instead of trying to figure out how to orchestrate a bunch of...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
You'll Always Remember Your First System Early in my career I always panicked a little when beginning a new role. This time, I was really panicking. I'd just joined a Ruby on Rails shop after spending years in the .NET world. The organization I was coming from ran an entire Microsoft stack down to the version control. My new role? A different programming language, a different database, different source control, it was all different!I shared an office with the most senior developer there and...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Quick Fixes Can Poison the System: Your Inventions in a Complex System are Crucial I could solve my rat problem in a weekend. Box of rat poison, hungry rats and by Monday most of the rats would be gone. Except poison doesn’t stay where you put it in the system. The rats eat the poison. The cats eat the poisoned rats. My dogs eat the poisoned rats. The hawks and owls eat the poisoned rats. I’d be trading “rats are eating my feed” for “dead cats, poisoned dogs, and worse rodent problems.” How...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
AI as a Teacher: How to Use AI Tools to Learn About New Systems I have a set of AI tools I use regularly as part of my daily workflow. In this post, I’ll share how I use them to learn about a system I was unfamiliar with, and how these tools have become part of how I teach myself new things. I have been thinking a lot about how games can help people learn to use AI. I have been building a game called Promptatorium where you write prompts to create organisms that then go live in worlds with...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Maybe Just Start with a Roast: How Low-Stakes Experiments Build Real AI Adoption Yesterday started with me asking ChatGPT: “Give me the laziest way to cook this roast.” Could I have looked at a few recipes? Used my intuition? Cooked to temperature? Sure. But I use low stakes activities like this to see where AI is at as it is evolving quickly. It suggested low and slow in the oven: specific temperature, timeline, the works. Perfect. I tossed it in and went about my day. Four hours later, the...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Move faster without losing context: capture in real time, then refine with AI. At 8:00 AM we kicked off a revenue conversation: should we charge a stakeholder group we don’t currently serve with premium offerings? Sales, customer success, engineering, product, and our CEO joined. The product manager and I owned the follow-up. I captured the meeting in Granola (AI meeting recorder/notes) and asked it to outline the options we discussed. After the meeting, the PM and I huddled with Granola...
2 months ago • 1 min read