Category: Artificial Intelligence
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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 Changing of the Tides: Navigating Work in the Age of AI and Erosion
Photo by Samuel Scrimshaw on Unsplash A Rising Undertow Last spring, the National Association of Business Economics surveyed 600 hiring managers and came back with a jaw‑dropper: more than half said applicants “couldn’t summarize a one‑page memo without AI help.” In the very same quarter, ChatGPT crossed a billion monthly users. If you picture modern…
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The Convenience Trap: Why Borrowed Solutions Build Fragile Companies
Author’s Note Every time I teach someone to automate a daily task — or pitch a simple tool that quietly saves an hour a week — the same question always comes up: “Why should we spend hours or days building something that only saves minutes or hours?” I see the same question through a different…
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AI Art: Ethics and the Misplaced Fury of a Disrupted Age
Author’s Note This isn’t a confession—and it isn’t a eulogy for AI art. It’s a line I’ve chosen to draw, and a prototype I’ve chosen to share—because refusing to use exploitative tools is only half a solution. The other half is creating an alternative: one built on consent, transparency, and the dignity of original work.…
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The Unmaintainable Future—Or Not
We’ve been automating labor for millennia—but only now can we skip understanding completely. Millwrights in ancient Persia and medieval Europe captured the steady push of wind and water to grind grain and saw lumber—turning the brute labor of entire villages into the quiet arc of a wheel. Coal and steam amplified that leverage; the Industrial…
Abstract Foundations 