All on writing.
Essays on writing, voice, communication, and the craft of keeping human texture in the AI era.
Ada Lovelace saw the whole argument in 1843
A passing quote at the Science Museum is the cleanest framing of the current AI debate, written before electricity was domesticated.
You can hear which model wrote it
The stylistic signatures of major LLMs are now detectable enough that reading their output feels like reading a default voice. That matters more than most writers realise.
Why I wrote The Decade Intelligence Changed
A note on the book - what it is, what it isn't, and why I wrote it outside work.
Live translation arrives at OS scale - six years later
Apple's WWDC demo of system-level live translation looks like magic. It's also functionally what we shipped at Zendesk in 2019. What changed is the platform, and what that tells us about timing.
When conversation starts sounding like PowerPoint
Catching yourself speaking in bullet points is diagnostic. Corporate communication has quietly trained us out of storytelling. The fix is harder than it sounds.
It's okay to put non-fiction down at halfway
Most non-fiction books peak around chapter six and elaborate for another six. Abandoning at halfway is often rational, not a failure of attention.
If you must use ChatGPT, prompt it like you wrote it
AI-drafted emails that arrive unedited are detectable, irritating, and gradually eroding trust in workplace communication. The fix is small. The discipline is harder.
Open-book exams, AI, and what learning is actually for
The cognitive science of open-book learning has been clear for decades. AI extends the principle. The pedagogical establishment is still catching up.