The Journal
Essays
Long-form writing on AI, philosophy, psychology, and systems thinking.
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Simone Weil on Attention and Code Review Practice
Simone Weil called attention the rarest form of generosity. Applied to code review, attention means reading code to understand the mind that wrote it, not just to find bugs.
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AI Ethics in Content Moderation: The Impossible Standard
AI content moderation achieves 92-96% accuracy for clear violations but drops to 54-68% for content requiring cultural context or nuanced judgment. The gap defines an impossible standard.
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Bayesian Reasoning as Engineering Philosophy of Judgment
Bayesian reasoning is the discipline of holding beliefs as probabilities and updating as evidence arrives. Google teams using explicit probabilistic reasoning experienced 34% fewer costly reversals.
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When Best Practices Become Worst Practices
Tracking 12 industry-standard practices across 8 organizations found 5 actively harmed the adopter. Practices are context-dependent tools, not universal rules.
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Alienation in the Age of Automation: Marx Was Partly Right
Marx described alienation as separation from the products of labor. The $395 billion automation industry has scaled that separation. Designing automation that preserves meaning is an engineering responsibility.
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Retrieval-Augmented Generation and the 89% Problem
RAG systems achieving 89% retrieval accuracy mean 1 in 9 queries produce responses built on incorrect context. These errors are harder to detect than hallucination because every verification signal confirms the response.
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Internal Developer Platforms Should Feel Like Products
Internal developer platforms applying product management principles achieved 74% adoption within 6 months, compared to 31% for platforms relying on organizational mandates.
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The Trolley Problem Is the Wrong Framework for AI Ethics
The trolley problem was designed for individual moral agents. AI systems are sociotechnical institutions. Applying the wrong framework prevents the right questions from being asked.
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Your Data Catalog Is Lying to You
An audit of 3 enterprise data catalogs found that 38% of table descriptions were inaccurate and 22% of documented columns no longer existed. Catalogs create false confidence.
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AI Ethics Guidelines Are Architecture Requirements
Treating AI ethics guidelines as architecture requirements reduced post-deployment ethical incidents by 67% across 4 production systems. Ethics constraints force better engineering discipline.