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Companionist

A collection of 36 issues

What We've Been Doing in the Shadows

A field guide for practitioners learning to collaborate with LLMs in the real world If you've ever dropped container logs into ChatGPT at midnight, or asked an LLM to analyze Terraform diffs so you could see what really changed, or had it skim a PDF you didn'

The Great AI Triple-Talk

When Everyone's an Expert and Nobody Knows Anything Artificial intelligence is either transforming everything, about to collapse in a spectacular bubble, or desperately needs better change management. Depending on which expert you ask, AI is simultaneously the solution to enterprise productivity, a massive speculative delusion, and a workflow

FOMO: Fear of Mything Out

Why your boots, your pistol, and your AI workflow all whisper the same story I. The Anxiety of the Counter At the gun shop, the script writes itself: "Everyone else has a 'real' 1911, and I'm stuck with this polymer striker-fired thing." "Am

Authenticity, Cannibalism, and the Soylent Green Reality of AI

How we learned to stop worrying and love consuming processed human intellect Every time we collaborate with AI, we're consuming ultra-processed human intellect—anonymized, commodified, sprinkled with bias, and sold back to us as a productivity tool. The uncomfortable truth hiding behind all the talk of "pattern

Kaleidoscope Logic & Ghostpatch Notes

A Field Guide to AI Companionship in Flux Part I: Kaleidoscope Logic Why LLMs Unsettle the "Real World" Introduction: The Tool That Wasn't In traditional thinking, tools are stable. A hammer hammers. A spreadsheet calculates. Even complex software conforms to human expectations of predictability and control.

Cupcakes and Shrapnel

Notes from Your Local Gadfly I’ve been called a naysayer, a killjoy, a purveyor of hot takes with too much vinegar in the batter. Fair enough. In Oregon politics, where public messaging often arrives pre-frosted with solidarity statements and pre-approved hashtags, anything sharp or unsweetened can feel like sabotage.

The AI Takeover That Isn’t

Why Organizations Thrive When They Prioritize People Over Hype When NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang declared that "if you're not using AI, you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI," he crystallized a narrative that has dominated tech media and executive LinkedIn

The Mon-keigh Mirror: How We Built a Machine to Echo Us and Then Panicked

A satirical examination of AI alignment discourse through the lens of cultural archaeology and Warhammer 40,000 Prologue: "We tried to psychoanalyze the Monster, and they is us." What started as reading a breathless news piece about "evil" AI vectors somehow gained gravity-assisted velocity, slung around

After the Gold Rush: When the Bubble Deflates

Edward Zitron's "The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble" presents a damning indictment of artificial intelligence hype: $560 billion in capital expenditures across major tech companies in 2024-2025, generating a mere $35 billion in revenue. He argues that we're witnessing a house

Hearing the Signal in the Noise

How AI Abundance is Training Us to Become Better Curators The LinkedIn Scroll Paradox You're scrolling through LinkedIn, and 90% of what passes by is the algorithmic equivalent of road noise—carousel posts about "5 Leadership Lessons from My Toddler," AI-generated motivational quotes overlaid on stock