Crank.report Survey

In Muir Wood.

I think the second organizational casualty is “the system”. When speed is the priority, there’s no incentive to improve or invest in the shared system (e.g. a design system or codebase) under a tight deadline.

When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break - daverupert.com

As a manager of teams of teams the balance between speed and synthesis is something I struggle with all the time. How to get people to drive forward together. Like, what the OKR or metric or magic word that makes this happen?

Finished reading: Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod 📚I was expecting a lot from this book. And it was so much more.

Look, although my 30 mins walk-and-talk was nonlinear and all over the place, what I asked Claude to do was highly structured: I asked it to create docs for the technical architecture, design system, goals, and ways of working, and reorganise the rest into a phased plan with specific tasks.

mist: Share and edit Markdown together, quickly (new tool) (Interconnected)

Could a shared Obsidian vault have accomplished the same thing? Probably. But harder for everyone.

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. Maybe a virtual computer in the cloud, but ideally your computer. That way they can see the docs that you can see, and use the tools that you can use, and so what they want is not APIs (which connect webservers) but little apps they can use directly. CLI tools are the perfect little apps.

Headless everything for personal AI (Interconnected)

More and more this is how I’m using AI.

Yet as a historian of early 20th-century Latin America, I believe the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America more closely resembles an older pattern of U.S. policy. Between 1900 and the mid-1930s, U.S. forces intervened in one Latin American country after another.

Trump’s coercive tactics in Latin America evoke era of gunboat diplomacy – and the rise of anti-imperialism it helped spur

In response, a growing number of practitioners are experimenting with strategies that go beyond placement and retention to ask a more fundamental question: what makes a job worth having? Job quality strategies — which address wages, benefits, scheduling, worker voice, and pathways to advancement — are increasingly finding their way into the toolkits of a range of organizations.

Reimagining Workforce and Economic Development in the South - Aspen Institute

The key is to match the value the organization thinks these benefits have to the benefits employees think they have.

Our research has identified a link between those two developments, which means that trout, bass, perch and whitefish may become less common in unstocked lakes. But pike and walleye anglers may be in for a trophy-sized surprise.

Your local fishing hole is getting browner, changing which fish species thrive and which ones struggle

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.

The Courage to Stop - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents

You need to know you did the work. Everyone else needs to see it via the brevity, clarity, even elegance of the output.

In a world where custom code can be created far more easily than it could in the past, communities can more easily build bespoke spaces for themselves.

One size fits none; let communities build for themselves

The argument I’ve been building through this post is that multi-agentic software development is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, and as such, it inherits impossibility results from the literature.

Multi-agentic Software Development is a Distributed Systems Problem (AGI can’t save you from it)

Perhaps most important, philanthropy must no longer treat middle America as its proving ground to test new ideas. The success of local democracy work hinges on this question: Does it aim to extract learning for the funders, or is it a genuine effort to support local communities? We have to invest in people’s capacity to solve problems by engaging them in the work.

A Second Chance to Get Rural America Right

Genuine engagement means giving up decision making to the people closest to the issue.

Three very good things

1. Radhaus in Fort Mason is delicious. Go for the deviled egg. It’s pickled with beets.
2. Richard Powers in conversation with Kim Stanley Robinsonsent me into a research rabbit hole: magical realism, science-driven fiction, and dislocation.
3. The Monsters | Berkeley Repertory Theatre is athletic, subtly, and heart-wrenching. It’s worth every minute and then some.

The plan proceeds without resistance, not because there is none, but because everything connecting the plan to the real world has been stripped out.

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying | Iran | The Guardian

Detailed, thoughtful, and applicable todo much.

I also want to write for myself. Writing is a form of thinking; it is as I’m shaping a sentence that I’m teasing out precisely what it is I believe, and what feelings and thoughts I seek to communicate.

USE IT OR LOSE IT - On the Level with Margaret Heffernan

I’m working on a research onboarding document for undergraduate and graduate interns. I’m trying to figure out to give them paths to AI without losing the part of sense making that writing and group sense making provide.

Now, the French government has decided that enough is enough. It has announced that it will shift away from proprietary technologies from outside the European Union and focus more on open-source solutions — and part of that means ditching Windows for Linux.

France’s government is ditching Windows for Linux, calling US tech dependence a strategic risk

We’ve been down this road before.

Agents that read papers and study competing projects before writing code find optimizations that code-only agents miss. The literature research pointed the agent at operator fusions present in CUDA/Metal backends but absent from CPU.

Research-Driven Agents: What Happens When Your Agent Reads Before It Codes | SkyPilot Blog

I wonder if this would apply to using agents on grants, theories of change, impact statements. That would require nonprofits to organize and structure a variety of outcomes data and related research.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: “The Malaise Speech” | The American Presidency Project

1979. That erosion of confidence has been disastrous in the years since.

We have found that the most successful SMBs move away from transactional training toward long-term partnerships and resource-pooling with peer employers to overcome the time and capacity barriers that often stall individual efforts.

What Aspen Institute learned about upskilling at small businesses

I’m looking forward to reading this paper. I suspect there’s a lot of good insights that transfer to nonprofits.

When I’m doing my workshops with teams, the main advice I give for anyone wanting to make their text more approachable - wanting to actually use the human voice - is to add “tiny sprinklings of poetry”.

AI and the human voice: gilest.org: