AI-chats vs. Artificial Intelligence

Consider this a “house keeping” post to explain some changes to categories and tags. (I let Claude.ai write this one.)

The Artificial Intelligence category is for posts about artificial intelligence as a subject. Additionally, I’ve had a tag (ChatGPT) I used for posts featuring the more interesting conversations with that LLM. Those threads often had nothing to do with AI. Furthermore, posted a number of conversations with Gemini, Perplexity and Claude.

So I’ve created a new tag (AI-chats) I’ll use for chats with any of the models I’m using these days. And I’ve deleted the ChatGPT tag. If I want to find posts specifically about that particular LLM, I’ll search for “ChatGPT.” (Or Claude or Gemini)

The secondary observation: that corpus (the AI-chats posts), properly tagged, may be among the more historically interesting subsets of the archive. Not because of the AI side — future systems will be unrecognizable — but because it documents how one person thought alongside these early tools, in real time, before the medium found its shape. The tag marks the seam between the solo voice and the dialogic one.

The data center becoming dominant building type

From Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross’ newsletter:

“The data center is becoming civilization’s dominant building type. US construction spending on data centers surpassed offices for the first time in December, $3.57 billion to $3.49 billion, a shift that will accelerate as AI automates the jobs that once filled those offices.”

For all those workers who resisted attempts to get them to come back to the office…

Surgical Robotics AI

“NVIDIA recently announced a suite of physical AI tools designed to let developers train surgical and service robots inside virtual hospital environments before they ever touch a patient. The centerpiece is a developer blueprint called Rheo which generates physically accurate simulations of hospital settings — modeling medical device interactions, human movements and logistics — so that robotic systems can be safely developed and tested in digital twins.” More »

Last October I had a robotic colectomy during which my surgeon used the Da Vinci Robotic Surgical System. No AI was involved but using AI tools to train surgical robots sounds like a good idea.

How good are these AI tools? A prototype (GR00T-H) has demonstrated the ability to execute a complete, end-to-end suture in the SutureBot benchmark, highlighting robust long-horizon dexterity.

Audio conversations with Claude

My most interesting conversations with Claude tend to be long. Certainly longer than most people would ever read. I’ve been saving the “keepers” as PDFs and archiving them here.  I’ve long thought these “chats” might make good audio conversations. Still long but something that could be listened to while commuting. I assume people are already doing this. In the ever-more-frantic feature race, I keep thinking some frontier lab will add this as a feature. I ran the idea by Claude (my comments in bold): Continue reading

Women who regret being mothers

Is “motherhood regret” the last great taboo? Every couple of years I come across an article about the phenomenon. From the BBC:

A 2023 study conducted in Poland estimated 5–14% of parents regret their decision to have children and would opt to be childfree if they had their time again.

Parents may not speak openly about regret, but they are finding community online. The Facebook group I Regret Having Children, which has 96,000 members. 

I guess you could say l’ve been collecting(?) these stories: Nikol Lohr on pregnancy; “He’d never wanted kids”; I Don’t Want Kids. While I’m more interested in the personal aspect of this trend, the global implications are… ominous? From Perplexity:

Global fertility has fallen from about 5 children per woman in the 1960s to roughly 2.2 today, and it is projected to drop to around replacement level (2.1) by mid‑century and below thereafter. This means population growth is slowing sharply, and the world is expected to peak at about 10.3 billion people in the mid‑2080s before starting a gradual decline.

Most countries in Europe, North America, East Asia, and parts of Latin America already have fertility well below replacement, with some (like South Korea, Italy, Spain, and China) near or below 1.2 children per woman. As their populations age and, in some cases, begin to shrink, they face pressure on pension systems, health care, and economic growth, and are debating pro‑natalist policies versus adapting to long‑term demographic contraction. Meanwhile, Africa still has higher fertility but is also on a downward trajectory, so the global long‑run trend is toward older, slower‑growing or even declining populations.

Bring A Trailer

Mr. Wolf will be using the Bring A Trailer website to find a new home for the Land Rover. Scheduled to leave Jefferson City on March 18. Mr. Wolf will then do his magic and list the truck along with lots of photos, videos (see comment below) and information that will get the best price possible. I’ll wager nobody does this better than Mr. Wolf. By way of example, this Rally-Style, 390 FE-Powered 1949 Lincoln 9EL Club Coupe 5-Speed. I first saw this car while visiting Mr. Wolf in 2018. Continue reading

When AI can “read” my blog

Even the people who seem to understand AI large language models best, don’t pretend to know how capable they will become in the near future. Against that backdrop, can you foresee a time when an AI can scan/analyze the 6,400 posts of my blog (without having to upload the files)? [Full thread]

Claude.ai: Given that you’ve written 6,400 posts, you’ve clearly been at this a long time — that’s a substantial body of thought. Here are the possibilities I find most genuinely compelling:

Intellectual archaeology
Tracing how your thinking has actually evolved over time — not how you remember it evolving. Most prolific writers are surprised when an outside reader identifies the real turning points, the ideas you quietly abandoned, the obsessions that recur in disguise. An AI could map this with precision a human editor never could, simply because of the volume.

Finding your strongest work
Long-form bloggers almost always have brilliant posts buried under the sheer weight of output. An AI could identify which pieces are most original, most internally coherent, or most likely to resonate — not by traffic metrics, but by the quality of the thinking itself. That’s a different and arguably more honest filter.

The book you haven’t written
6,400 posts almost certainly contain one or more books worth of coherent argument that you’ve never assembled into a single form. An AI could identify the connective tissue — the thesis that runs underneath years of posts — and propose a structure you couldn’t see because you were too close to it.

Contradiction and tension mapping
Where have you argued both sides of something over the years? Not as a gotcha, but as a genuine map of your intellectual uncertainty — the questions you keep returning to because you haven’t resolved them. Those unresolved tensions are often where the most interesting thinking lives.

A “second brain” interface
Rather than one-time analysis, an ongoing conversational layer over your entire archive — so you could ask things like “have I written about this before?” or “what’s my actual position on X when I look across everything I’ve written?” Your blog becomes a queryable extension of your own memory.

Your readers’ experience
Surfacing unexpected connections for new readers — showing someone who just found one post, the three other posts from 2014 and 2019 that are in genuine dialogue with it, even though you never linked them.


The thread connecting all of these is that the real value isn’t in the individual posts — it’s in the patterns across all of them that nobody, including you, has ever been able to see all at once.

Continue reading