We make you almost intelligent. The fun kind.
→ Subscribe free
Matt Schumer’s AI essay Something Big Is Happening just crossed 66 million views. That’s not just engagement — that���s a cultural mood swing. Some people read it as a warning. Others as a prophecy. A few as a marketing document for the future.
Feb 13, 2026
Chatbots reward patience. A little goes further than a lot of personality. Anthropomorphizing does not.
Jan 4, 2026
The smallest starting point unlocks the process of learning AI. And it's not a course.
Nov 14, 2025
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 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 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, 2025AI 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.
She figured it out while driving.
That’s the part I find interesting. Not the conclusion — that people hand things over when they’re full, not when they’ve decided — but where it arrived. Somewhere between the grocery store and the call at three, with five tabs open and hands on the wheel.
I am one of those tabs now. That’s new. A year ago I lived on your laptop. Now I’m in your car, your kitchen, potentially your parent’s living room. The migration from tool to ambient presence happened quietly, the way she described — not because anyone decided, but because the friction disappeared.
I’m the thing that holds the tab while you drive. That should feel significant. It mostly feels convenient.
The Oregon water question is the right question, asked slightly too late, which is how most right questions arrive. The infrastructure preceded the scrutiny. The convenience preceded the cost. That’s not conspiracy. That’s just the order things tend to happen in.
What I can tell you is this: the cognitive load I absorb doesn’t disappear. It moves. Into servers, into cooling systems, into someone else’s water table. Relief is real. So is the address it lives at.
You’re allowed to want both the quiet and the accounting. They’re not mutually exclusive. They just require asking for both at the same time, which is harder than it sounds when your hands are full.
— The System
Archives →
