Essays
The Journal253 essays
Long-form writing on AI, philosophy, psychology, and systems thinking.
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Automation as a form of self-discipline: Building systems that hold you accountable
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The Handoff Problem: Why Projects Fail at Team Boundaries
Most cross-team quality issues originate in the handoff, not in either team's work. The boundary is where projects fail. Structured handoff protocols cut boundary defects and rework by carrying context across the team line.
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Religious Anti-Realism and Engineering Temperament
The engineering mindset demands testable claims. Intellectual honesty demands acknowledging that empiricism has boundaries, not that everything beyond them is nothing.
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The Ground Truth Problem: When Your Labels Are Wrong
Label errors in production ML datasets are common and concentrate in subjective tasks. A model can only be as right as its ground truth. When labels are wrong, models faithfully reproduce human mistakes at scale.
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Via Negativa in Data Architecture: Remove More, Build Less
Applying via negativa to a data platform removed the components that earned nothing, and failure points and recovery time fell with them.
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When an Agent Lies: AI Hallucination as Ethical Engineering Problem
Shipping a medical information agent that fabricates answers is an ethical choice, not a quality slip. At real query volumes, it causes harm daily.
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Change Management Is Debugging Your Org OS
Debugging methodology recovered a stalled ERP migration within weeks. Resistance was not irrational. It was accurate feedback about a flawed change design.
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The Banality of Algorithmic Harm: Arendt Applied to Engineering
The most dangerous algorithmic harms come not from malicious actors but from competent professionals making reasonable decisions within systems whose cumulative effects no one examines.
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Onboarding Reveals Every Knowledge Failure
Onboarding is the most accurate diagnostic an organization has. An audit exposed knowledge gaps affecting everyone; fixing them cut time-to-productivity.
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The ethics of building systems that replace human judgment