25 Fields Medalists reflected last week “[we all need] to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.” Their public statement calls out the important connection between a groups goal, and the group itself. It is a caution that we must not destroy the social fabric that clothes us. What we do to that fabric, we do to ourselves.
Slowly make haste, and without losing courage;
Twenty times redo your work;
Polish and re-polish endlessly,
And sometimes add, but often take away
Nicolas Boileau
AI is having a profound impact on my creative process, as an artist, as an engineer, and as a business owner. Generative AI can remove some of the pain from making new things. What is the price we pay for it's help? Does it really make us faster to use AI to create something, or do we spend the same time, but in a different way? I've often heard people use different versions of "Go slow to go fast". It's embedded in ancient stories like the tortoise and the hair, carved in Greek letters on ancient buildings. Festina lente. σπεῦδε βραδέως. Make Haste Slowly.
That is a travesty. I can't help but hope we can find ways to protect projects like this in a way that doesn't require government or corporate regulation. Others have mentioned a Web of Trust / Social Credit - if we could wire that into the the http protocol ...
The current hiring process is a good example of the AI Arms Race that Cory Doctorow was writing about recently. https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/10/deep-state-wopr/#abelard-... - It's also a good example of a multi-polar trap. The rules of the current game assure everyone looses.
AI use in the creation of this article is inconsequential. There is obvious joy and high fidelity information here. Perhaps some vibe coding made the animations easier to develop, and made it possible to produce this in reasonable time. Who cares. Love of craft is evident. What more proof do you need that this is worthy of human attention?
Focused generally on communication, with BPMN being one tool among many. No one here gives a 1/2 damn about BPMN, but I think you will find the article worthy of the 5 minutes.
I love the story of Clever Hans, which says so much about humans and so little about horses - I get the point that it makes these experiments very difficult.
my dad passed away within a year of retirement. I remember there being studies at the time saying this was common, but the research doesn't seem to hold this up as much any more.
But I agree that "purpose" is critical to life. I tend to think of it as having a meaningful role in our "community" - but there seems to be wide flexibility in what defines a community. I was certain for a very long time that we had to work to live meaningful lives, and I think I've drifted slightly away from that notion over the last year. We just need to be important to at least one other person. There is great deal of "work" involved in just doing that.
Accountability is especially beautiful when self directed. It isn't us holding the cat accountable for the vase. That is pointless. The cat holding itself responsible, that is what makes our relationship with them possible.
I work for a small start up. We often work with corporations. It does, from a distance, seem like giving a shit separates the two. I feel that. But you look inside big companies, and lots of folks inside care a great deal. I've also been through incubators and accelerators. And some of those people didn't give 1/2 a fuck.
Corporations aren't people. LLMs aren't people. Personification of these things is the source a great deal of trouble.
You may have said it better than I, in shorter words. An LLM in the hands of someone with expertise is life changing, and in the hands of someone without it - it's a bit dangerous, but also wonderfully empowering, even if they can't make a good chair on their first try.
Spent a delightful weekend in Quebec last month. Beautiful city, great culture, friendly people, best damn duck I have ever eaten in the a resteraunt they must having teleported from southern France
Great tool for a Makerspace - really appreciate the ability to use the same tool for laser cutting, 3d printing, and CNC. These are big jumps for people typically - having a familiar tool would help people transition from one area to another.
What brings me back to hacker news are these posts that ask questions yanked unexpectedly directly from my own soul, in words more articulate than I could manage. And then somehow manages to answer those questions. Thank you.
12 years ago I got divorsed. My wife and I had a company together, and she kept the company. I hadn't spent time with family in years, had few friends outside of work. I did independent contract work out of my house. Deeply isolated times, interspersed with part time custody of my son. I ended up starting a Makerspace , renting a building and setting up a 3d printer. That was all 11 years ago. We now have 6k square foot building, 8 different guilds, from pottery to black smithing. I count myself beyond lucky for the community. Like the author, I sent too many years discounting the most important part of life .. Our relationship with other humans.
Same experience with Google. I was setting up SSO for a new web application and set off some AI flag on a sub domain for our company website. For 2 weeks every visitor saw a warning that out site was a phishing scam. Nightmare. With no recourse. No number to call. No person to talk to. No actual explanation of the error (I still don't know exactly what I got wrong). I just took it down, waited, and prayed.
All these comments are from the standpoint of being managed, with a derogatory view of someone who would stoop so low as to take a management role. I liked the article. Managing people is ass hard. Doing so is a way to make peoples working lives better, anf to tackle problems larger than a single person can accomplish. Thinking about how to do it better is good thing. It takes courage.
I hate web forms. You hate web forms. Especially when when they are long. Or one form follows another after another after another.
We have conversational LLM's that can make this feel much better, and there is this great BPMN diagramming tool that makes it easy to describe the flow of long, complex sessions like these. Together they can give everyone a far better experience.
There is a companion video and a working demo - where you can run the model, change it, and refine it to cover new topics or extend the conversation.
We are really excited about this technique and look forward to your feedback.
We are working on a workflow engine as well - picking up concepts from the past - not quite as far back as mainframes, but I respect looking back to the past for things that work well, and re-applying them to a new world. I'd be up for sharing notes. Our work is here https://github.com/sartography/spiff-arena -- live demo is here https://spiff.works/agent-demo
I hold a lot of hope that visual workflow tools like this will help more people use software to solve their own problems. With an LM's assistance a lot more people can create code but they need some kind of organizational structure - a software architecture that "citizen developers" can easily conceptualize. Targeting Data analysts and scientists seems like a good idea.
I admire the openness of the platform you are creating. I appreciate your blog post's note that current SaaS, cloud native, multi-tenant systems don't permit the kind of flexibility you need. There is substantial depth here - you have been working on this a while. Secrets for api calls, a repository for sharing solutions. I'd try it if it ran on Linux.
My company is working on a similar project, and I have mad respect for your efforts and how far you have come.