№ 037 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Real Love Is Thermodynamically Impossible
Kindness is thermodynamically possible. Real love, built on mercy and a void of self, is not. Here's what parenthood taught me.
37 essays · 2018 to now
Fragile Future
Notes from the field, by Jared Lukes.
Technology, humanity, philosophy, and maths.
Someone Still Has to Make It Real
I've said it's the era of the songwriter. Here's the part I skipped: someone still has to make it real, and that person is about to be the most valuable one in the room.
The Dark Forest Era: Why I'm Self-Hosting Again
The dark forest is coming, and AI is ushering it in. I've started self-hosting my own agentic apps over Tailscale: fast fiber, underused machines at home, and a trust economy that's quietly rearranging itself.
№ 034 · FRAGILE FUTURE
The Chicken and the Egg of Academia and Autodidactic Learning
Self-taught builders have scars; academics have scaffolds. The sweet spot is build it, break it, fix it, then go find yourself some rigor.
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№ 033 · FRAGILE FUTURE
The Era of the Songwriter
As an AI engineer, I get asked about the future of work constantly. We're entering the era of the songwriter more than the banjo player. AI condenses skill, and that hands the room back to the idea people.
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№ 032 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Starfleet or Idiocracy: Vote Today!
Humanity stands at a crossroads, between primal instincts and a collaborative future. Scarcity is over; the mindset that built the survival circuitry is the part we still have to outrun.
Python: The Last Human Language
Python is no monopoly. Its strength is semantic alignment with human cognition: code that lets people think without first reshaping how they think. That's also why it may be the last language designed for us.
When GPT Fails, You Might Be Onto Something
LLMs are pattern-matchers trained on the meat of the curve. If yours stalls when you push it, that might mean you're not echoing the crowd, that you're early.
№ 029 · FRAGILE FUTURE
AI Is a Mirror, Showing You the Unsettling Truth About Repetition
AI reveals a hidden truth: repetition shapes reality. What you repeat, you become. Change the loop, change yourself.
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№ 028 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Influencers Are Getting Fleeced by A.I. Companies
AI companies have hit peak data and are now hunting expert reasoning. Creators and professionals, especially the ones who teach in public, are the new training set.
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№ 027 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Who's Really Cheating? The Hypocrisy of Higher Education
Universities are cracking down on AI use, but their fear exposes a bigger problem: education's obsession with memorization over real learning.
About Your Job, Can We Put a Pin in That?
Wave Two of AI is here: agents that loop, iterate, and refine. Listen to the engineers, not the CEOs. The engineers will tell you the truth about what's coming.
Can We Dream the Future?
Joseph Campbell said you can't predict a myth any more than you can predict a dream. Challenge accepted. There's a goldmine in forecasting the next mythology, and we sure could use a good one.
№ 024 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Prompt Engineering for API Creators: Why You Need Two Agents for the Job
Stop trying to make a single AI agent be a jack-of-all-trades. Separate creative thinking from formatted output: one agent goes wide, another parses the output into something predictable.
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№ 023 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Where Is My Island of Misfit Toys?
A rainy-morning meditation on aesthetic morality: how we treat butterflies versus spiders, the payola fight that became Misplaced Music Radio, and the longing for a real movement to be alive for.
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№ 022 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Quit Trying to Hire Talent
Talent is a misunderstood concept. What we call "talent" is mostly thousands of hours of practice and overactive minds finding ways to stay interested. The label costs us more than it gives us.
A Night with Willie Nelson: Lessons from the Road
An unexpected night in Duluth with the goat of cannabis and country, and a meditation on how authenticity attracts the most diverse audience you'll ever stand in.
Will Generative AI Squeeze Out 'Heads-Down' Work?
As generative AI rewrites work culture, the value of solitary deep-focus work is up for debate. The expert who handles the edge cases is more important than ever, even if the loud-and-pretty tier doesn't notice yet.
№ 019 · FRAGILE FUTURE
The Complex Legacy of Generation X
Gen X rode the wave from American Dream to digital revolution, and built a startup culture that often glorified disruption at the expense of sustainability. Generation Y inherits that.
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№ 018 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Whispers to Roars: Practical Steps to Amplify Quiet Voices at Work
Five practical steps for surfacing the quiet voices on your team, plus a story about John Olson climbing scaffolding to celebrate a brand pivot before anyone else knew it was happening.
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№ 017 · FRAGILE FUTURE
The Fragile State of SaaS
SaaS gets more fragile as AI erodes the novelty it was built on. Why open source, passion, and real purpose decide what survives.
Why I think you should take your ball, and go home
Exposing the sad truths behind the attempt made by corporate America to vertically integrate creative services.
The Honey Trap: The Essential Role of Critical Thinking in Innovation
The pull toward relentless positivity in thought leadership dulls real thinking. The case for keeping the bitterness of honest critique in the mix.
№ 014 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Beyond Black and White: Embracing Life's Complexities
Have you ever found yourself stuck in the binary of good and evil, better or worse, only to realize that everything is more like a flavor, a blend?
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№ 013 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Redefining Writing in the Gen AI Age
I never developed strong keyboarding skills, so writing was the hard part of every job I had, from programming to running a digital agency to corporate research. Speech to text is what changed it.
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№ 012 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Don't get eaten in the forest
The dark forest theory says the internet is shifting to more secluded, secure spaces, and generative AI is speeding that up. Since 2015 the home server has been quietly gaining traction.
Humble Beginnings to Digital Equality: A Gamer's Journey
My gaming story is not the usual one. It is rooted in the disparity between modest beginnings and the advanced world of gaming, and what truly hooked me was never the games themselves. It was the connections they fostered.
Another #$%@ing article about AI
Rights in generative AI are a nuanced battlefield: scraped data, artists' styles used without consent, and a lawsuit from the New York Times. Untangling it is the price of responsible progress.
№ 009 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Predatory Education Ruined UX
A look at how the capitalist education market can ruin an entire design practice in just a few years.
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№ 008 · FRAGILE FUTURE
AI and Robots: Catalysts for Human Collaboration
AI surpasses human capabilities, inspiring a shift from individual competition to collective achievements and collaboration for greater goals.
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№ 007 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Fearless thinking
To ponder AGI, one needs to consider the role of fear in thinking. I take fear as a primary human motivator, because of its deep relationship with pain.
Thank you, code mentors
A retrospective of all the help I got becoming a data scientist.
Digital novelty is evaporating
The digital realm no longer holds the allure of novelty that it once did.
№ 004 · FRAGILE FUTURE
The Overlooked Reality of AI and Job Displacement
The job-loss debate misses the real shift. What actually happens to work when the cost of a task falls to near zero.
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№ 003 · FRAGILE FUTURE
6 emerging design practices
6 emerging design practices I see shaping our future with a few sci-fi twists.
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№ 002 · FRAGILE FUTURE
Pi is insignificant to Maths
3.14159265359… don’t care. And here’s why.
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