Stories

I’m neck deep in AI as part of my work. I have found peace with my loathing of the technology and the market forces it has brought with it. I am using it to push back on all the hype and bullshit. I spend a lot of my time working on standardization and find myself part of many different standards meetings where people, even those who work at AI companies, are frustrated with AI around them.

I love hate the recurring dances that occur in my head. I’ve experienced them enough now that I accept them for what they are, rather than letting them shape me. They are just isolated little dances that occur in the middle of the street of wherever I am headed. I’m heading to London tomorrow evening. Before any major trip my brain always responds with, “I don’t want to go”. And I don’t. Then my brain responds with, “you are speaking in front of an audience in London, and you’ll see a bunc...

I was riding my usual two loops of Central Park on my bike with Poppy. I was riding alongside a woman roughly my age, maybe a decade younger. She was on a Citibike with items in the front basket and large white over-the-ear headphones on. She was pedaling along at roughly the same speed I was when a cloth book bag full of something fell out of her basket and onto the ground.

I’ve read all the stories this week about the dangers of AI. That we have to slow down, because of just how dangerous AI is. I see lots of smart folks falling for the stories and becoming skeptical that it is not just a marketing tactic of these AI companies. Which is partly true, but when you zoom out and consider the wealth of information being omitted and the general ignorance of how technology operates at scale, you are left concerned, but in a very different way.

I’m on my way to Toronto from NYC by train. It is ultimately longer than flying from NYC, but once I get to and from the airport, and wait for 2 hours on either end, it pencils out pretty close. If at all possible I will travel by train over plane or automobile. I’m done being a driver of an automobile, and while I will fly wherever I need to go, I will opt for train travel over plane or car, even if it is more expensive or takes longer.

98% of the people who ride bikes in Central Park manage to ride past each other without speaking. There are 2% of the people who insist on yelling “on the right” or “on the left”. Which I find fascinating, and often leaves me wondering why they do this when most everyone else is able to navigate the many cyclists without a word. These riders are almost always boomers, but not always. They are always white. They are always spandex warriors riding a fast bike and wearing the gear. These are ...

I have a hierarchy in my head of people, bikes, and cars as I make my way around NYC. When it comes to cars, I don’t like most of them, I tolerate some, and I constantly shake my fist at the rest. I tolerate most delivery vehicles. Most of them are professional and needed. But at the bottom of the food chain it is the black SUVs that are the worst of the worst, which is ironic because they signal the best experience for the people riding in them.

I am two years into the AI realm after leaving Bloomberg. I use AI heavily every day. I am neck deep into using primarily Claude, but also Gemini, and occasionally ChatGPT. I intentionally am using it for as much of my API Evangelist operations as possible to understand how my audience sees the world. I use so much of it that I get outreach from companies wanting to work with them because I show up on top performers radar because of my Claude commits across my GitHub organizations.

This AI timeline we are in sucks. AI is everywhere. AI is consuming and infiltrating every industry. To be honest, what I was doing before this moment wasn’t much better. The tech is just on steroids now. It’s in overdrive. Even immersed in AI as part of my work, I still feel the same as I did when all of this began unfolding a couple years back. I hate AI. It is a bad timeline. It isn’t healthy. It doesn’t have any good uses that matter. The good does not outweigh the bad.

One of the things Sue Smith and I talked about the other day in our Write Through It conversation was how you can orient yourself in a system you didn’t build. It is a continuation of mine and Sue’s beliefs around the state of “View Source”, but beyond just learning web development, and actually understanding how systems work, not just a single website or web applicati...

I literally learned to program by right clicking on web pages and selecting view source. I am not classically trained as a programmer. I did not go to university. I just began reverse engineering what others built towards the end of the last century, and kept doing it in this century until I knew what the hell I was doing.

I keep trying to think about nothing, and it turns out thinking about nothing takes a lot of work. The moment I clear the deck and try to sit in the empty space, my mind rushes in to fill it—old conversations, half-finished projects, the next thing I am supposed to be doing, the last thing I should have done differently. Nothing is apparently the one thing my brain refuses to leave alone.

When I left Bloomberg almost two years ago the artificial intelligence hype of the market was overwhelming. It was noisy and chaotic. It still is, but I’ve found “my” signal in the noise. My feelings about AI haven’t changed. I am still 100% against it, but I have spent the last year HEAVILY using it so that I can understand the noise of the markets, and what people are saying when they get all glossy eyed and evangelical about this technology.

I have had several conversations lately about burnout. I have had three pretty high profile burnout / meltdowns on API Evangelist, beginning with the summer I spent with Isaiah, which was different than the other two, which resulted from me working with StreamData and Postman. Both the conversations I had this week about burnout emphasized preventing the fourth one, which I actually don’t agree with all that much. I think the damage can be minimized from burnout, and I can definitely make ...

On this rainy Memorial Day Weekend I find myself moving from my laptop next to my chair to the couch where I have two books I am reading. One is Cyberlibertarianism, The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia and The Burning God by R. F. Kuang. It is common for me to be reading one piece of fiction and one non-fiction—it is how I balance.

As I exist with one leg full in the AI hustle and one leg outside in the real world, I am realizing the divide that is continuing to widen between us. Personally I would love to just get offline and exist 100% in the real world. I don’t like AI at all. But I have one more big push in the technology sector before I try to tap out once more. So I have to be immersed in it daily. I don’t have to like it, but I do approach it all with an open mind. One thing I notice though, is that there are ...

It is something you hear from folks about why they use artificial intelligence. Interestingly, it is the same thing people would say before this moment when you asked them why they don’t write. As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon, writing various fictional and non-fictional stories in my notebook, as well as running multiple Claude agents to crawl and produce machine-readable artifacts for thousands of different companies—you can really feel the extraction that occurs, leaving us without i...

I am fascinated by writing across my domains right now. I have several other lesser domains, but my primary ones kinlane.com, apievangelist.com, and naftiko.io, are what have my full attention in this moment of storytelling. I love writing. I love finding and telling stories. It really is the only thing that matters to me in all of this craziness we are doing online today. Chasing stories is what gets me up and keeps me going each day, and the rest is just noise from my perspective.

I was riding in the park with Poppy the recently and we had stopped to watch a couple of squirrels when a gentleman walked up to say hello and talk to us. He was a friendly fellow, and said he’d seen us before and was curious to know more about who we were and why we were riding around the park. After talking a bit, he said he remembered mentioning to his friends how I looked like a nazi with my menacing Rottweiler and sidecar.

I am always amazed the power of storytelling. Many people snicker and poke at me when I call myself a storyteller and like to diminish the role of telling stories. It’s not real. It’s for the fun things. It isn’t for grown-up businesses. Which is actually where storytelling matters the most, has the most power, and I always find the people in this camp are the ones who are easiest to manipulate using stories. Because they are completely unaware of what is going, or are they?

I am gathering signals from leading enterprises to understand what they are investing in. One of the ways that I gather signals is harvesting the job postings they publish. While not entirely honest, they are the most honest public signal available online today about a company. It is something they have to standardize and make public because they want to attract candidates, but like other signals they are also shaped to accommodate the larger enterprise narrative. With that said I find the...

I had a conversation with someone about their burnout and their theatrical exiting of technonology sector to explore something new. We talked about their journey, and how I am on my 3rd burnout heading for my 4th at some point. I don’t think it is unavoidable, but that is another post. This one is about choosing to say within the machine, despite the lack of oxygen, nutrients, and care, as well as the recurring waves of people I know who head for the exits.

I bought a ticket to see Ken Burns talk about his latest documentary on The Revolution War last night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York City. I very much needed to get out of the house after many days of avoiding the freezing temperatures outside. It turned out to be very much be what I needed this week in response to the last week’s of news and death i...

I wanted to relax on the couch this morning, but the stories coming out of Minnesota leave me needing to write. I don’t have as much emotional skin in the game now that my Trump supporting mother has passed, but I can’t help but reflect on the stories I was told growing up, and the deep hypocrisy of this moment when it comes to the government being perceived as the enemy, and Americans possessing the right to own guns. I grew up in a perpetual belief that the government was coming for you,...

I read and write my way through the beautiful chaotic mess that is my brain. I use it to get through each day, and today I need to get through my anxiety about going to sleep tonight with the possibility that someone I love very much might not being there in the morning. I went to sleep eventually last night, and after I awoke today, I messaged to make sure they were still with us, and thankfully they were. I am grateful. <3 However, this doesn’t mean that anxiety goes away, as tomorrow...