“Sumawka Caller”

There is an old German wiki out on the internet. Twenty-five years old. A site where programmers post notes for each other, the way people did before everything got slick. One volunteer keeps it tidy. That is the whole staff. One man. Starting in May, he began deleting spam. Pages he did not write, appearing…

A dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions. I want to give you something to hold onto. Not an argument. Not a side. A staff. The kind of stick a man leans on when the ground is uneven and he cannot see far ahead. You…

I want to tell you about a kind of failure that does not look like a failure. You know what a break-in looks like. Somebody picks the lock. Somebody kicks the door. There is damage, and you can point at it. This is not that. In this one, the door opens normally. The guard checks…

I want to tell you about something that has nothing to do with whether AI is smart. It is smart. That was never the argument. Here is the thing nobody puts on the box. Every time you open a new conversation with an AI, you are talking to something that has never met you. Not…

I had a water leak this week. Small one. Underground, between my house and the water company’s line. The kind you don’t see. The kind that shows up on a bill. I spent the evening working it out with an AI. Pipe size, pressure, what it would cost, whether to hire it or do it…

There is a farm outside Maysville, Kentucky. Mason County. Hour and a half up the road from my house. A woman named Ida Huddleston owns 71 acres of it. She is 82 years old. Her daughter, Delsia Bare, has 463 more. Their people have worked that ground for generations. Last spring a company came calling….

Let me start with the strangest thing happening in American politics right now, and it has nothing to do with any candidate. The party that controls the House is redrawing the district maps. In the middle of the decade. Off schedule. Several Republican-led states have moved to redraw congressional lines this cycle. California voters answered…

I want to tell you about a mistake I made two days ago, because it explains everything that follows. I found a research paper. Good one. Serious people. I read the date off the page I found it on and started building around it. The date was wrong. It wasn’t the paper’s date. It was…

I was talking to my son tonight. I thought real talk. I was working my way toward something. About life efforts. About what a person’s plain self is worth when they aren’t performing. I used Dolly Parton as the example. Not the rhinestones. Not the songs. Just her. The gift she gave people was being…

I want to ask you a real question, and I am going to give the other side a fair hearing before I answer it. First, what a session is. A session is one conversation. You open the app, you type something, the machine answers, you go back and forth, you close it. That whole stretch…