Now-ish

France calls its heat waves canicules, from the particular prevalence of great heat from the end of July through the end of August, the time of year when Canis Major’s bright star, Sirius, rises at dawn.

Different parts of France define canicular heat in their own ways. Marseille is canicular when the temperature exceeds 36°C by day and 24°C by night. This causes the sea to become unrefreshingly warm and the sand of the beaches to get hot enough in the afternoon to deform acetate-framed sunglasses. Ask me how I know.

Plage des Catalans (5 August, 2024).

It was during one such canicular period at the end of July that I began the final phase of the renovations I’d started in February: Constructing two built-in shelving units, cutting weird-shaped shelves for the hallway closet, glueing cork tiles over the self-leveling concrete I’d poured a few months ago, channelizing quite a lot of previously ducted wiring, and reinstalling the baseboards I’d torn off to re-level the floor. While it is possible to do these kinds of things during a week-long canicule, I cannot recommend it.

During this period, I also sliced an important finger deeply and very inconveniently while shaving off the insulation around some wires. Thanks to immediate good advice from an old friend who is now an ER doc, the wound was closed basically overnight and healed to the point of being barely noticeable less than a week later. Superglue and 3M SteriStrips are magnificent, but even more magnificent is #expertise.

I took a day out from chiseling brick wall in early August to see the Olympic sailing at the new marina at Borely. Having sailed a lot 25 years ago in Singapore, I knew that watching a regatta from shore was unlikely to be very engaging — really the only way to watch a regatta properly is to be on the race committee boat — but I was expecting at least some advanced realtime drone video tech from the Olympics. I was not expecting 3 small video walls showing only animated simulations of on-water action and almost no shade structures under which to escape the unrelenting sun.

Animated live-action at Marseille Marina (8 August, 2024).

By mid-August, the Chaos of construction had been replaced by the kind of Order only possible with an abundance of shelving. So I went back to the Auvergne to finally retrieve all my books from the storage unit. I made a big loop: First to the storage in Cournon, then up into the mountains of the Livradois-Forez and the Massif du Mezenc for a few days — to see pals where I used to live, cook from their potagers, and think about how to build an ideal-typical umami sauce — before eventually coming back down to Marseille and the sea.

Sunset above Saint-Julien-Chapteuil (12 August, 2024).

Construction by day, theory by night. Sort of.

While rebuilding the office, I’ve been working with some government clients to develop programs that teach teams how to do better innovation work by helping them think more flexibly and progressively about what problems to solve. I’ll write more about these soon, but if you want something like this for your team, let me know.

My newsletters have slowed down a bit in the last few months as I’ve been using them as a way to explore and unpack for myself the implications of meaningmaking for technology. Writing down ideas that are still forming is slower than writing about ideas that have already formed.

Meaningmaking is the act of making subjective decisions about the relative value of things. Meaningmaking is not obviously connected to technology or to tech products, but I’m increasingly convinced that it is the crux of how we must think about building technology that replaces human work. This is because humans do meaningmaking all the time (often without realizing it), machines (including AI systems) cannot do it at all, but AI systems falsely appear to be able to do meaningmaking. I call this AI’s seductive mirage.

The conclusion I’ve come to is this: AI applications fail spectacularly when they are not designed to leave meaningmaking work to humans. And the modern approach to technology product management does not comprehend meaningmaking in how it designs and builds products and the companies that sell them.

So I’m now working with some collaborators on outlining what product management that comprehends meaningmaking could look like. The next newsletter will be about this approach to product management, and why it will allow us to build better and more commercially successful AI applications.

Updated 19 August, 2024