Month: June 2025

I took part in a group discussion Monday evening. The starting point was a utopian blog post about the future of AI. That blog post is titled “The Gentle Singularity.” It paints a rosy picture of a future like what was once portrayed on The Jetsons, only better. It is a picture that OpenAI needs to keep before the public for its own interest, a picture that I cannot see. Read for yourself if you want to read the AI maximalist perspective. There have been rejoinders from others working to build AI technologies that I find more compelling. But even more, I thought about the older, deeper insight expressed by Dostoyevsky in Notes from the Underground—

“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most destructive nonsense, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to have the right to his own fantastic desires!”

That is a much easier thing to imagine. As I sometimes say, with the grammar deliberately incorrect, people is people. I don’t see that changing any time soon.

As for the conversation itself, there was a wide dispersion in the room as to how much people interact with AI tools. I’m hardly a wizard and haven’t tried to vibe code anything yet, but I do keep multiple windows open to converse with large language models and we’ve built simple agents to streamline repetitive workflows. That put me around the bottom of the top quartile in terms of use. I like to hear how people use the tools. I might not be able to use them in the same manner, but hearing ideas from people in other fields is often the source of the greatest insights. I didn’t come away with any breakthroughs, but the conversation did get my mind turning on a few ideas.

Last night, I watched the final episode of the first season of Department Q. Netflix suggested it to me when it was released and I was looking for a new show so I gave the first episode a try. Besides, I was curious what might set the subgenre Tartan Noir (the actual description Netflix provides) apart. Then I proceeded to watch all nine episodes in the space of about two weeks.

As might be guessed, the show is set in Scotland and features some dark and violent themes. The novels on which the show is based are set in Denmark I’ve since discovered but Netflix decided to place the show in Scotland—similar climate but less need for subtitles. From the outset there is violence as the show begins with the main character, a detective, returning to work after being shot in the line of duty complete with flashbacks. Skirting rules in order to get him back to work, the detective’s superiors place him in charge of his own new department to work on cold cases. Mind you the department occupies the basement of the police building and the main character is not thrilled by this development, but it suits his own inner turmoil and outward abrasiveness. The department starts as only Detective Morck, but he is shortly joined by others battling their own inner struggles and they form quite a team of misfits.

They choose to investigate the disappearance of a prosecutor from several years prior, a young woman who vanished from a ferry shortly after a murder suspect she was trying was acquitted. I won’t offer a plot synopsis because I don’t like reading those. What I will say is that the characters have real depth, and with the length of a TV series there is enough time for the plot to breathe so that the characters are able to evolve and develop. The violence is never gratuitous but the show doesn’t shy away from the darkness either. There are moments of levity interspersed throughout, too, but what starts as a slow burn doesn’t end that way. There are also a number of subplots that arise as the investigation unfolds, each with its own set of characters and motivations and none of which distract from the overall experience.

In advance of today’s self-funded search event, the organizer hosted a dinner for all of the speakers and sponsors. Since the event is in the financial district and he is a foodie, he picked a Peking duck restaurant in Chinatown. It was one of those restaurants with such a literal, on-the-nose name that you know it is the real deal, complete with a large flag overhanging the sidewalk with a duck on it, and it did not disappoint.

The first time I experienced Peking duck I was in Peking, or Beijing as we now call it. It was a trip during a January term in college. There, they kept bringing out more duck and more beer and more duck and more beer. Before the meal ended one of the chaperones fell out of his chair, and it wasn’t from eating too much. That incident and how much I enjoyed the duck were the two standout memories of that evening though I have many other fond and not-so-fond memories of that crazy trip.

In comparison, this was a much tamer affair. No one had more than a drink or two, people discussed business topics and swapped industry war stories rather than what a group of college students might discuss, and there were other dishes on the family-style table for those who didn’t like the idea of eating the roasted duck. The duck itself was very good, though in fairness none of the times I’ve had Peking duck has ever lived up to my memory of the first time I ate it.

I capped off my evening with a cup of strawberry lychee ice cream. It isn’t a normal combination as lychees are native to Asia, but as I was in Chinatown in NYC it was available. Both flavors were mildly sweet and the ice cream was more an amalgam than an even mixture of the flavors. It wasn’t as layered as some ice cream I had on a Marrakech rooftop at the start of the year (that one also had a citrus bite that I like on the odd occasion when I don’t stick to vanilla), but it made the walk back to my hotel more pleasant.