Some of you who have been reading here for a while will remember that for a long stretch I was working on something called…”The Faust Baseline.“
I wrote about it often.
Tested ideas around it.
Refined the language.
Tried to explain what it was and why I believed it mattered in a world that is quickly filling with artificial intelligence.
For a time it was front and center in many of the posts here.
Then one morning I stepped back and looked at the whole thing differently.
Not with frustration.
Just with a little distance.
What I realized was something that most builders eventually discover about the things they make.
There comes a point where you stop hammering on it every day.
You set the tool down.
Not because it failed.
Not because you stopped believing in it.
But because the tool is finished enough to stand on its own.
So that’s what I did.
I placed the build on the shelf.
Not in the dark.
Just on the shelf.
Anyone who wants to look at it can still find it. The writing is there. The ideas are there. The work that went into it hasn’t gone anywhere.
It simply isn’t something I feel the need to push every morning.
The world has a way of deciding when ideas are useful.
Not the builder.
The builder’s job is mostly to create the thing and leave it where people can see it.
And sometimes that takes years.
In the meantime life keeps moving.
Technology keeps changing.
People keep asking new questions about the tools we are building and the world they are shaping.
That’s where the writing here returns to its original place.
Observations.
Reflections.
Stories about what we see happening around us.
Some days it will be about the country.
Some days about technology.
Some days about something as simple as a quiet Saturday morning and a family gathered in the kitchen.
The Baseline is still part of that landscape.
It’s just no longer something I’m trying to carry on my back every day.
It’s there if the moment ever calls for it.
On the shelf.
In the light.
And in the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done here.
Sitting at the desk in the morning, looking out at the world, and writing down what I see.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
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