CIqSi
Follow Your Whims
Between the hallucination warnings and the governance panic, it's easy to forget a generative model is also just a fun tool to mess around with. Five vanity websites, built on a whim, and what they actually taught.
Personal
Stories, reflections, and field notes
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Posts (27)
CIqSi
The Secret to Perfect AI Outputs: Name the Canon
Nearly every established discipline has a canonical reference that already settled the argument you're having with a model. Name it, hand it over, and let the model regularize its own work against a standard instead of your improvised feedback.
CIqSi
Most AI Conversations Fail (Here's Why)
Tell the model to close every response with a short list, split by who acts. It turns a wall of prose back into something you can actually run a project on.
CIqSi
Why You Should Always Ask for the File
Stop accepting reports. Ask for the artifact — the actual numbers, the actual error, the actual file — and the confident-sounding failure disappears.
CIqSi
Why Playing the Game Is Slowing You Down
Be the coach, not the player. On taking the seat that directs a team of AI agents — and the practice it takes to get good at it.
CIqSi
The Typing Pool
A finite brain masters only a few skills in a lifetime. Commanding a machine that learned everything is the new skill multiplier.
CIqSi
Things You Want to Do
Now that you don't have to do the thing — what do you actually want to do? The closing post of the What's Left series.
CIqSi
What You Had to Do
A department of a hundred writers documented mainframe billing programs. Every one of them had something else they'd rather be doing. They knew.
CIqSi
The VAX in My Pocket
My first employer ran Florida's telecom on millions of dollars of mainframes and VAX clusters. My phone outclasses all of it. We never stopped to notice.
CIqSi
The Consolation of Difficulty
A late friend had two sayings. The first one gets you started. The second one keeps you going. In the age of AI, the second one has gotten more useful, not less.
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 8: Estepona
The DNV paperwork meant Geordie had to become the primary visa holder. One week in Estepona to build the file. Three apartment listings. One cat.
LinguaMama
When LinguaMama Is Not for You
Most companies won't tell you when their product isn't the right tool. We will. Honest guidance on who this is built for — and who should go find something else.
By Any Other Name
Sting, Voltaire, Einstein, and Geordi La Forge — a small taxonomy of the monomym, plus the graph theory hiding inside genealogy, gut bacteria, Star Trek interfaces, moral foundations, language models, and evolutionary psychology. The name is the node. The projects are the edges.
LinguaMama
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 7: Administrative Silence
The Spanish DNV can be filed from inside Spain, lasts three years, and has a default approval mechanism. We were fifteen kilometers from the border.
LinguaMama
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 6: The Yaris Cross
We got a car. Our visas were canceled. We hired a fixer. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the hobby project became something else.
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 5: Tavira
After the visas, the lost passport, the French EV, and the broken chargers, we made it to Tavira. It was worth it.
LinguaMama
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 4: Do Not Get a French Car
We landed in Lisbon at 5:30 AM with everything we owned, one cat, and a rented Citroën. The charger didn't work. My European friends had warned me.
LinguaMama
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 3: You Cannot Come to Portugal
Our attorney said we couldn't come. We were paying for a flat we'd never seen. We rebooked for December 26 and went to see butterflies instead.
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 2: Portugal, Probably
Spain was the plan. Portugal was the better deal — five years to an EU passport. We sold the house and moved to a shack to make it happen. Then we found one passport on the kitchen counter. There had been two.
LinguaMama
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 1: Everyone Else Left
I spent the pandemic watching everyone on YouTube move to Thailand and Portugal. Then something shifted. Part 1 of the LinguaMama origin story.
Fibertarian
Your First Week as a Fibertarian: What to Expect
A realistic guide to the transition, including the unglamorous parts
LinguaMama
I Built an AI Language App Because Everything Else Felt Wrong
A computational linguist's journey from studying how LLMs learn language to building an app that applies those same principles to human language acquisition.
LinguaMama
Building LinguaMama: How We Use AI to Create Personalized Comprehensible Input
A behind-the-scenes look at how we use modern AI to generate, personalize, and deliver thousands of hours of comprehensible input content at scale.
CIqSi
Leonard Nimoy's Last Tweet Beats Thomas Sowell's Most Famous Line
Exploring how Leonard Nimoy's garden wisdom transcends Thomas Sowell's "no solutions, only tradeoffs" to find meaning in an indifferent universe.
CIqSi
Digital Sewage Treatment: The Unglamorous Future of AI
As frontier models exhaust clean data sources, learn why digital sewage treatment systems for enterprise data will become the most critical and valuable AI infrastructure.
CIqSi
The Magic of Discovery: Early Computing Memories
A personal reflection on encountering computers for the first time in the 1970s and the lasting impact of those early moments of technological wonder.
CIqSi
The Last Programming Language I'll Ever Learn
After 40 years and dozens of programming languages, I haven't written a single line of code this year. Not because I've retired, but because I've learned my final language: English.
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