The Potato, the Spreadsheet, and the AI That Checks Its Own Work

Of late, the newsletter has turned into me linking to longer posts on my blog. There’s the usual links and wastebook as well. This makes it more of a digest than a stand-alone item. As you can tell by the volume of blog posts below, I like blogging though and I’m glad I’m doing I do it more! Original contentSpeaking of, several little things on the blog: The ultimate bike-shedding story, and, always make your own slides.

Meatsack context engineering to defuse tense conversations

In a tense situation, take a moment to say out loud your opponents position, feeling, and perspective. This is like setting up context and prompting for an AI. You put that in the context window and it flavors the ongoing conversation. It’d probably do interesting stuff in AI chats. Those chats are so explicit and non-confrontational that these dynamics probably already happen. 🔗 How to Fix Breakdowns in Communication

Feels a little bit like a platform standard so powerful that you need an AI front-end to make it usable by mere mortals.

Yes: Kubernetes started as a way to orchestrate containers, but its true innovation lies in its API model. The declarative resource pattern, with its desired state, actual state and continuous reconciliation, has proven to be a universal abstraction. It works for workloads, infrastructure, policies and more. That universality is why Kubernetes has become the foundation for IDPs. It provides a consistent way to define, extend and enforce platform building blocks.

🤖 Writing for Baby Shoggoths: How AI Became Literature’s Last Reader

{Some crazy-town stuff in here, but interesting and probably, mostly, correct. -Coté} Human writers may soon craft words primarily for AI rather than other humans, as large language models increasingly consume, interpret, and influence the world’s text. The essay explores the strange idea that “writing for AI” could grant influence over future superintelligence—or even a form of digital immortality. Summarized by AI. Source summarized: Baby Shoggoth Is Listening - The American Scholar.