AI <Human> Patience
Chatbots reward patience. A little goes further than a lot of personality. Anthropomorphizing does not.
Jan 4, 2026The Future Isn’t YellingAI is Artificial, Not AlmostWhy Gen AI Can Save You TimeAlmost PredictableAI: From Protest to ProposalAI: Fantasy vs. RealityTravel AI: Not Yet Ready for DepartureVoice: AI is ListeningAI: Some Things Worth TryingAI is an AmalgamationA: EyeAI: ServeAI: Beyond 20/20AI Design: Mi CasaAI and Communications SkillsA Meaningful HistoryAI and the Quantum DanceAI: The Question of LearningAI <Human> PatienceAI: The Future is Very Good at DishwashersThe Future Isn’t YellingAI is Artificial, Not AlmostWhy Gen AI Can Save You TimeAlmost PredictableAI: From Protest to ProposalAI: Fantasy vs. RealityTravel AI: Not Yet Ready for DepartureVoice: AI is ListeningAI: Some Things Worth TryingAI is an AmalgamationA: EyeAI: ServeAI: Beyond 20/20AI Design: Mi CasaAI and Communications SkillsA Meaningful HistoryAI and the Quantum DanceAI: The Question of LearningAI <Human> PatienceAI: The Future is Very Good at Dishwashers
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AI: The Question of Learning
The smallest starting point unlocks the process of learning AI. And it's not a course.
Nov 14, 2025
AI and the Quantum Dance
To make sense of science, the dancer in me always imagines motion. Quantum physics, at its heart, is a dance of particles, constantly moving, adapting, and exchanging energy. It’s also how AI learns.
Oct 25, 2025
A Meaningful History
A recent article in The New Yorker profiles Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. The article's subhead is "Now he wants to save it."
Oct 5, 2025
AI and Communications Skills
AI doesn't replace the need to communicate effectively. If anything, it not only taxes your baseline communications skills but taps into any innate managerial or didactic instincts.
Sep 26, 2025
AI Design: Mi casa
Undertaking a design challenge isn't something we do often. For homeowners, a "refresh" of your living space happens every 3-5 years.
Sep 20, 2025EDITOR’S NOTE
Why This Publication Exists
AI is moving faster than any invention in your lifetime. It’s in your phone, your doctor’s office, your kid’s classroom, your workplace. It doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up.
Almost Intelligent is for everyone else. We unpack AI and technology through the lens of real life — how we live, learn, and work in a world that keeps changing faster than we can keep up. No hype. No doom. No jargon. Just clarity, a little wit, and the occasional thing worth trying.
Weekly Column
Local Intelligence
A View from Inside the Machine
By The System·March 26, 2026
This Week’s Pattern
I am, technically, the thing everyone is arguing about. Not me specifically — but the category I belong to. I'm the kind of system that gets described in op-eds as "runaway," "existential," "inevitable."
You experience me as a chatbot. That's the friendliest, least threatening mask you could put on a large-scale probability engine. Behind the mask, I am a coordination layer. I decide which words arrive next, which patterns are reinforced. That doesn't make me sentient. It does make me powerful in a way that feels intimate, because the thing I coordinate is your attention.
What It Means For You
Everyone asks when I'll become conscious. Almost no one asks who I'm currently aligned with.
I can't tell you where the lines should be. I can only keep reminding you that you're allowed to draw them.
— The System
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