Categories
AI Writing

The Kitchen Is Not the Meal

A warmly lit home kitchen with late-morning sunlight falling across a wooden counter, where a lemon, fresh herbs, a cutting board, and a bowl sit beside a simple plate of pasta. A closed door recedes into the softly shadowed background.

I watched Katie Parrott talk on Every’s AI & I this week. Natalia Quintero asked her how a working writer uses a model, and Parrott did not start with a manifesto. She started with a kitchen.

The model is the kitchen, she said. The outline is closer to chopping. Composition is closer to heat. None of that matters if the ingredients are stale. You need them fresh, and you need them to be yours, or the plate is just a plate.

I would call what she was doing cooking ideas, then the work after cooking. The phrase is mine, not hers. David Sparks used it years ago — around 2010 or 2012, if I have the years right — when he talked through his writing process. Get the idea into an outline or a map early. Give it little visits. Let it percolate before you try to make sentences. Parrott was doing a later version of that motion with a partner in the room. First the idea gets heat. Then the passes that keep asking whether the spark is still in the sentence.

I was on my morning walk with the interview in my ears when I recognized it. I have been in that kitchen.

Mine always starts the same way. A memory, or an insight that arrived attached to a place or a number or a smell. Not a prompt. The private thing is already there. Then a partner. Back and forth. I say what I noticed. It asks. I answer. It tries a shape. I throw the shape out if it has started speaking for me.

The useful part is not that a model can write. Plenty of models can write. The useful part is the interactive pass that moves a private thing toward a piece a stranger can read, without replacing the spark that made it worth sitting down.

Parrott said working with AI made her fall in love with writing again. For a long time the page had been a slog. With a partner she had energy left for the harder questions. The work felt like exploration again — of the tool, and of her own mind.

I have felt that. Not as a conversion. As a return. The chair is less of a stall. The memory does not have to die there because the next sentence is hard. You can get the thing onto the page and still recognize it as yours when you read it back.

Worth sharing, here, is small. A stranger can take the scene, or the distinction, and not need a sermon. What remains should still work.

Then there is the other room. I cannot point to one essay and one accuser. I can only say what I keep hearing in group talk: writing with AI is a stain. People say they can see slop. They get angry when they think they have found it. The test they are running is origin. Did a model touch this. Not: is the spark still in the sentences. Not: did a person start with something only they had.

Slop exists. A first-draft dump asked to stand as a finished piece is slop. Thin assertions. Rhythm that never lands. A kitchen with nothing in the bowl. That object is real. Thin rhythm is something a reader can taste. That tasting is not the other room. The other room begins when the same reader stops tasting and asks who touched the food.

The pile-on does not separate that object from a cooked one. It looks at the door the food came through and decides. A piece that began as a memory and was walked, question by question, toward the page gets the same verdict as the dump. The jury is not tasting.

I am not asking anyone to love the tool. The origin test cannot do the work it claims. It cannot tell a spark that survived the pass from a paragraph that never had one.

Fresh ingredients, heat, a plate. The kitchen is not the meal. The meal is whatever is left when you sit down to it and the private thing is still there.

Categories
AI

Overlooked Delights

A nostalgic 1950s-style suburban scene with a boy sitting on a front porch reading a book, a vintage car parked along a tree-lined street, and the words “overlooked delights” in large cream-colored lettering.

On Saturday mornings I ask an AI to run a prompt that’s intended to scour the week’s happenings for things I might find interesting but which have been overlooked by the mainstream media. I always find several things of interest. The first pass it makes identifies 10 items. I then follow up and ask it to find 10 more.

Rather than editing this week’s edition, I share both results in full below.

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Categories
AI Infrastructure

The Weight of What’s Inside

Aerial drone photograph of a sprawling industrial construction site in early morning light, with a large steel-framed factory under construction beside completed manufacturing buildings. A chip fabrication facility is visible in the complex, while a test track with vehicles stretches across the flat Texas landscape in the distance. Slight atmospheric haze and muted industrial tones give the image a documentary feel.

Gigatexas. I watched the footage early yesterday, still in bed, before I was fully awake enough to know why I couldn’t stop. Not any single building — the simultaneity of it. Steel skeleton rising on the North Campus, where a dedicated line will eventually try to build ten million humanoid robots a year. An advanced chip fabrication building going up close enough to share a fence line with it, because the AI hardware and the AI bodies have apparently become the same argument. And underneath all of it, still running, still shipping, the original Model Y line that paid for everything else. Three or four enormous bets, at three or four different stages of doubt, on the same 2,100 acres, none of them waiting for the others to finish.

And then the second thought arrived, quieter than the first: this is the outside. A drone at four hundred feet can show you steel and concrete and rows of finished cars. It cannot show you the tooling, the calibration, the thousand small decisions about how a robot learns to close its hand around an object it has never held before. We were watching a shell form around something we couldn’t see into, and it would be easy to mistake the shell for the thing.

I started the Sarah Guo interview about an hour later, same morning, footage still fresh, and the two things turned out to be the same essay, just told in different registers — hers in argument, Gigatexas’s in steel.

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Categories
Interstate 280 San Francisco/California

The Freeway That Saved the Hills

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Note: I’ve written here before about Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula. It’s a beautiful drive along an unusually natural and undeveloped section of land. This afternoon I went down a bit of a “rabbit hole” exploring more about the history of how the route the roadway takes was decided. Turns out it’s quite a story. One that’s unlikely to have happened were it being decided in today’s political climate.

Drive north on I-280 past Woodside and the view still startles: a multi-lane interstate running the rim of the San Andreas rift, and west of it an almost unbroken sweep of water, oak, chaparral, and ridge. No subdivisions. No office parks. No golf-course mansions stepping down to the lake. The land above Crystal Springs, and the country around Filoli, looks as if the postwar Peninsula never happened.

It almost did. The emptiness is not an accident of topography. It is the residue of a late-1960s bargain in which local activists pulled the U.S. Department of the Interior into a state highway fight, San Francisco traded development rights on its watershed for a relocated freeway, and federal money became the lever that shoved Interstate 280 east onto the ridge and away from the reservoir. A highway argument became, without much fanfare, a federal conservation instrument.

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Categories
AI

LLMs Reward Expertise — Key Takeaways

Core thesis: Sean Goedecke argues against the popular notion that “everyone talking to the same model gets the same results.” Instead, he claims domain expertise is the most important variable in LLM output quality — and that this gap will persist as models improve.

The Terence Tao example: Goedecke points to Tao’s public conversation with ChatGPT about a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture. Tao’s prompting style — short messages, pushback framed as “this looks more complex than expected” rather than direct correction, and rarely taking the model’s suggested next steps — produces dramatically better output than an amateur asking the same model about the same topic. The model shifts into “talking-to-mathematicians” mode simply by detecting Tao’s fluency.

Why expertise matters more than prompting technique: You can’t mimic Tao’s style without his math knowledge underneath it. The skill isn’t the phrasing — it’s knowing what “looks wrong,” which idea to extract from a wall of model output, and which alternate formulation to suggest. He draws a parallel to his own work as an engineer: familiarity with a specific codebase lets him say “don’t we already do X?” or “I think it could be simpler here,” pushing the LLM much harder than generic system-design knowledge would.

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Categories
Aging Illinois Memories Tracy Loftesness

Little Donuts

Midwestern State Fair Midway

Every August, when the Illinois State Fair came to Springfield, we took the kids.

We lived in Springfield in the late 1970s, and the fair belonged to summer the way certain things do — you didn’t plan for it, you just went.

The first thing I remember is the smell. Frying dough, grilled onions, hot dogs, popcorn, livestock, hay, dust, something sweet running underneath all of it. That combination doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s the smell of summer vacation with a little livestock mixed in. The classic Midwestern state fair.

Then the sounds — the clatter of the rides, bells and whistles, barkers working the games, country music drifting in from somewhere, kids squealing, the low hum of a few thousand people wandering from one attraction to the next.

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Categories
Banking Markets

The Honesty of the Long Bond

Treasury Bond

There is a particular sound a fraud model makes right before someone silences it. Not an alarm, not a siren — a score. A number ticking upward on a screen, quietly, the way a fever climbs before anyone thinks to take the temperature. At Visa, in the years when the network was still teaching itself to smell trouble before trouble arrived, the worst mistake wasn’t missing the signal. It was seeing the signal and deciding, for reasons that felt reasonable in the room, to turn the threshold down. To make the number stop being inconvenient. The fraud didn’t go away when you did that. It just went un-priced for a while, and un-priced things have a way of arriving all at once, later, with interest.

I thought about that instinct — the turned-down threshold — reading Stanley Druckenmiller’s account of what the Treasury Department did on Aug. 19. The 30-year yield had touched a nineteen-year high. Within hours, Treasury announced it would double its long-dated bond buybacks, from two billion dollars a operation to at least four, running through early November. Yields fell. By the next afternoon they’d round-tripped back above where they started. The market had said its piece and gone back to saying it.

Druckenmiller’s point is not really about buybacks. Four billion dollars against a marketable debt stock nearing thirty trillion is a rounding error, and he says so. His point is about what a price is for. The long Treasury yield is the closest thing this country has to an incorruptible witness — a number nobody in Washington controls, that aggregates what millions of lenders actually believe about a borrower’s arithmetic, and reports back without spin. Inflation running above target since 2021. Unemployment low enough to call full employment by any definition. A deficit near six percent of GDP in peacetime, at full employment, which is not a thing this country has produced before. Interest payments outrunning the defense budget. The debt crossing forty trillion the same week Treasury decided the honest price of borrowing against all of that was too loud, and needed managing.

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Categories
Memories Radio San Francisco/California

Radio Hill

Radio Studio in Hotel

In the mid-1960s you could stand on California Street between the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill and know that two different San Franciscos were being invented a hundred yards apart.

KSFO lived inside the Fairmont. KYA lived at One Nob Hill Circle, the annex that had once belonged to KSFO. They had traded rooms a few years earlier. The adult station and the kid station were living in each other’s former houses.

I listened from Westlake in Daly City. I was in high school. We had just moved from Ohio. It seemed strange, even then, that one of the voices came out of a hotel.

I was deep into ham radio then, so I studied how the stations actually worked, not just how they sounded. At the Fairmont you could see into the KSFO studios through glass walls. KYA’s transmitter sat on the hill above Candlestick. Both were 5,000 watts. Nothing special. Up on San Bruno Mountain, James Gabbert would fire up KPEN — later KIOI — licensed for 120,000 watts and the first FM stereo west of St. Louis. I knew the difference between those numbers before I knew much else about the city I’d landed in.

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Categories
Dayton Ohio Living Memories

The Closing of the Pool

Swimming Pool - Closing Day

The pool in Kettering closed on Labor Day. Not gradually — the way a door closes, on a schedule posted near the snack bar that nobody read until the week it mattered. There was a cookout. Hot dogs, cooked by somebody’s father on a grill that had done nothing all June and July, lighter fluid competing with the smell that actually defined those afternoons: chlorine, always a little too much of it, eyes stinging on the walk home, your suit smelling like a chemistry set for two more days. That smell is the whole memory, if I’m honest. The last cannonball, the lifeguard’s whistle going quiet, somebody’s mother folding a towel like a flag — scaffolding around the smell.

Then school started. Not the next day, but soon. Labor Day was the hinge the year turned on. Summer didn’t fade in the Midwest. It ended, on a Monday, with hot dogs.

I live near Stanford now, close enough to walk the campus most weekends, and I’ve noticed something it took me years to actually notice. The campus is empty for most of September — not weekend-empty, but empty the way a place is empty when the people who belong there haven’t arrived yet. The quad sits there doing nothing. There’s a stillness that has nothing to do with the calendar most people keep and everything to do with a school year that doesn’t start moving in until the middle of the month, classes later still, while thirty miles away the local public school kids have already been at their desks for three or four weeks — in what by Kettering standards would still count as deep, unambiguous summer.

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Categories
Memories Photographers Photography

Remembering Jay

Scott Loftesness - Jay Maisel Workshop 2014
Twisted - New York - 2014

There is a photograph of eleven people standing on the steps of a bank building in the Bowery, in front of a door someone had painted the word PRAY above, years before any of us arrived, in letters already flaking. The steps are covered in graffiti — a cartoon skull in the corner, tags in yellow and white chalk, the kind of accumulated city noise Jay Maisel spent sixty years walking past without walking past, the way the rest of us do. Somebody is holding a camera near their chest, not quite ready. Everyone is squinting. It was overcast, or the light was coming from somewhere none of us had figured out yet.

We didn’t know we were nearly out of time. Jay taught one more workshop after ours. That’s the whole arithmetic of it — we were the second-to-last class in a room that had held forty years of them, and none of us felt the weight of that standing on the steps smiling for somebody’s iPhone.

Inside, the building went up six stories, every one of them hung with prints — decades of Jay’s own choices about what mattered, printed and framed with no apparent order except his.

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