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We Should Plan to Fail
Photo by Zach Lezniewicz on Unsplash For weeks, the system behaved exactly as designed. Aria had matured from a directory of experiments into a stable local agent: custom tools, a conversational interface, a growing memory layer, scheduled journaling, and enough reliability to test new ideas without worrying about what might break. Luna, the quieter counterpart…
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Building Luna: Part 1 – A Machine Learning (Through) Experience
Photo by Guzmán Barquín on Unsplash Readers following the Building Aria series probably expected Part 6 last weekend. I did too… until I made myself stop. Not from burnout or technical failure, but from a deeper question: what would actually be worth building next? So I imposed a two-week pause. No new features, no late-night…
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Building Aria: Part 5 – Intermission; Agents, Autonomy, and Decision Architecture
Photo by Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash This week, Aria stands still, for once. Not frozen, not halted, just still. The logs report cleanly, get flagged as needed. Every process hums quietly, every function loops without friction, and for the first time since the project began, there is equilibrium. The chat loop works, the infrastructure responds, the…
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Building Aria: Part 4 – The Alignment Mirror
Photo by Avery Evans on Unsplash Over the previous three entries, Project Aria has crossed three clear thresholds, though none of them felt clear while I was in the middle of them. In Part 1, she found her voice: more than a demo, she became a partner in conversation that carried beyond a single reply.…
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Building Aria: Part 3 – The Separation of Brain and Body
By the end of Part 1, Aria had a voice. She could hold a conversation, remember names in a fact table, and respond in Discord as more than just a proof of concept. Part 2 gave her agency: the ability to act through tools, recall through layered memory, and refine her own decisions when a…
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Building Aria: Part 2 – From Voice to Agency
Picking Up the Thread In Part 1, Aria reached her first milestone: she was live in a practical sense. Running locally in Docker, serving models through Ollama, and speaking through Discord, she could already respond in conversation. Messages flowed into Postgres, the last ten entries recalled with each new exchange, giving her a baseline of…
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Building Aria: Part 1 – Giving Shape to a Thought
Photo by EJ Strat on Unsplash Framing the Problem Everyone in tech seems to have a strong opinion on AI these days—especially generative AI, the kind that powers everything from chatbots to deepfakes to essays in classrooms. For the past year, I’ve been immersed in it, testing the major models, subscribing to the usual suspects,…
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The Architecture of Data Maturity: A Cultural and Technical Roadmap
Photo by Alex wong on Unsplash The alert arrived quietly, more of a whisper than a siren. A notification slid across the architect’s screen: Inventory anomaly detected—supplier feed variance exceeds threshold. Recommended action: divert 5% of allocation to alternate distribution center. It wasn’t the first time such a discrepancy had occurred. In fact, years ago,…
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Your Infrastructure Is Lying to You
Photo by Brian Kelly on Unsplash Every company that grows quickly builds roads to connect where they are with where they want to go. At first, those roads are simple: gravel tracks carved out of necessity, meant to get people and goods moving with minimal delay. They’re not elegant, but they’re fast. They serve their…
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Trading Applause for Alignment
Photo by Headway on Unsplash Author’s Note This piece explores a subtle but important distinction: the difference between applause and alignment. It’s not written as a critique of any one leader or culture, but as a reflection on a pattern many of us have observed and, at times, participated in—the slow drift from substance to…
Abstract Foundations 