Recent Posts
A Surprisingly Beautiful Inhaler
I don’t remember exactly when I got diagnosed as an asthmatic. Some of my earliest core memories are going to a hospital for pneumonia: trundling into a van in the dark; returning home to Slidell and convalescing while watching “The Wizard of Oz” for the first time, a rubbery “Robbie the Robot” from “Lost in Space” in hand.1 2 A few years later, on the cusp of Junior High, I would learn the diagnosis word “asthma,” start allergy shots, and begin a medicine regime (a super start to socially-awkward years!)
Since then, I’ve had a rescue inhaler prescription. I used the device less in Europe, even less in the Bay, and a tad bit more in NYC. Across the years, the brands and the actuator look-and-feel have changed, but I can say this: never have I seen a more beautiful inhaler than my current generic albuterol sulfate.
The design is clean and considered - it’s like Wes Anderson worked in pharma. It is, to quote the Old Man from A Christmas Story, “indescribably beautiful.“3
Tool Creation and Cognitive Space
I was intrigued by a recent post by Alex Tiniuc about tool creation in software development. In “Unexpected Benefits of Building Your Own Tools”, Tiniuc describes how he’s been making a video game (main task) but that he took a detour to work on a simple tool for editing the inventory of “assets” (game-developer-speak for “stuff in the world”) possible in the game (side task). But once he returned to the main task, he found he’d boosted his productivity in such a way that he wasn’t in the weeds anymore; he was working at a higher level and, freed of drudgery, seeing ways to make the game (main task) better.1
Tiniuc observes that when we develop small tools that save us cognitive burden, we create, in aggregate, space for inspiration and intuition to blossom. I found a fascinating echo in the case of Tiniuc and that of William Oughtred a 16th century Anglican clergyman and mathematician.
AI Experiments Steven 2: Searching for Coordinate Systems
I try to be realistic about AI and its impact on our world. My previous post explored how well Claude performed as a movie companion and philosophical conversationalist.
But let’s balance that with an example where multiple AIs - Gemini from Google, OpenAI, and even my beloved Claude - failed spectacularly. The prompt was simple:
Show me the book that introduced the graphical Cartesian coordinate system to the world.
None of these whole-dinosaurs-of power-consuming, copyright-trouncing-systems could deliver. Instead, they wrapped their “NO RESULTS FOUND” or “I don’t know” in purple prose apologies.