The ramblings, thoughts, and channeling of Kin Lane.
This AI timeline we are in sucks. AI is everywhere. AI is consuming and infiltrating every industry. To be honest, what I was doing before this moment wasn’t much better. The tech is just on steroids now. It’s in overdrive. Even immersed in AI as part of my work, I still feel the same as I did when all of this began unfolding a couple years back. I hate AI. It is a bad timeline. It isn’t healthy.…
One of the things Sue Smith and I talked about the other day in our Write Through It conversation was how you can orient yourself in a system you didn’t build. It is a continuation of mine and Sue’s beliefs around the state of “View Source”, but beyond just learning web development, and actually understanding how systems work, not just a single website or web application.
I literally learned to program by right clicking on web pages and selecting view source. I am not classically trained as a programmer. I did not go to university. I just began reverse engineering what others built towards the end of the last century, and kept doing it in this century until I knew what the hell I was doing.
I keep trying to think about nothing, and it turns out thinking about nothing takes a lot of work. The moment I clear the deck and try to sit in the empty space, my mind rushes in to fill it—old conversations, half-finished projects, the next thing I am supposed to be doing, the last thing I should have done differently. Nothing is apparently the one thing my brain refuses to leave alone.
When I left Bloomberg almost two years ago the artificial intelligence hype of the market was overwhelming. It was noisy and chaotic. It still is, but I’ve found “my” signal in the noise. My feelings about AI haven’t changed. I am still 100% against it, but I have spent the last year HEAVILY using it so that I can understand the noise of the markets, and what people are saying when they get all…
I have had several conversations lately about burnout. I have had three pretty high profile burnout / meltdowns on API Evangelist, beginning with the summer I spent with Isaiah, which was different than the other two, which resulted from me working with StreamData and Postman. Both the conversations I had this week about burnout emphasized preventing the fourth one, which I actually don’t agree…
On this rainy Memorial Day Weekend I find myself moving from my laptop next to my chair to the couch where I have two books I am reading. One is Cyberlibertarianism, The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia and The Burning God by R. F. Kuang. It is common for me to be reading one piece of fiction and one non-fiction—it is how I balance.
As I exist with one leg full in the AI hustle and one leg outside in the real world, I am realizing the divide that is continuing to widen between us. Personally I would love to just get offline and exist 100% in the real world. I don’t like AI at all. But I have one more big push in the technology sector before I try to tap out once more. So I have to be immersed in it daily. I don’t have to like…
It is something you hear from folks about why they use artificial intelligence. Interestingly, it is the same thing people would say before this moment when you asked them why they don’t write. As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon, writing various fictional and non-fictional stories in my notebook, as well as running multiple Claude agents to crawl and produce machine-readable artifacts for…
I am fascinated by writing across my domains right now. I have several other lesser domains, but my primary ones kinlane.com, apievangelist.com, and naftiko.io, are what have my full attention in this moment of storytelling. I love writing. I love finding and telling stories. It really is the only thing that matters to me in all of this craziness we are doing online today. Chasing stories is what…