This is a letter written to our community. (No Emjois in this one) I have thought about posting this, and I decided that it needed to be posted. I have been away for a bit, mostly because I have been focused on 7 lives that needed me the most. Firstly, I am an IT manager, I am a leader of a team that puts their best into everything they do every day. We have been through the thick and thin together, we have faced adversity and success together, and lately we have faced challenges and expectations that effect all 8 of us. I have had no other option but to focus my energy on the things that keep us moving forward in our own lives. This does not mean this community does not mean to the world to me, but it means I have been focused on other things. I do not apologize for doing what I felt is the right thing, I apologize for not being here for the community. My heart is heavy. Beyond the obligations I have set in stone for the people I lead, I have had a tremendous loss in my life. Today the world has lost a bright light, someone who showed up in my life in a time that I needed most, her name is Marina Berthal and she should be celebrated not only mourned. To all of you she was a stranger, to me she was my world, she was the mom life never afforded me. I have lost 3 moms now in life. The first was my biological mother, the second my grandmother, and now Marina, a person who found me early in life, a broken and lost soul looking for guidance. I know our community is supportive, committed and above all else caring. You have all quickly became the family I have searched for in a lifetime. I want to apologize for my absence and want you all to understand that it is not by want, but by need that I am away currently. In my life I have experienced more loss then most, and this loss has landed in a time when I just could not hold it. I will be back; I just need some time to process this loss. I know we will win together, even when things seem tough. I believe in my heart, as Marina has taught me in life, we will learn together, we will grow together and we will win together.

AI build video number four is up — and it exists because people asked me how I actually made episode 3. So this is that story, told in my usual style - the authentic rollercoaster ride of actually building with AI; not smoothed or curated. Safety equipment recommended, wish I'd had more of it to be honest. A hint of what that story actually looks like? It includes a render that never left my laptop, the weekend a model with eyes changed everything, and the overnight deal I did with my system that produced eight chapters I'd never seen before breakfast. And then the part almost all of you will have seen coming (yes, I'm predictable, go on there are worse things to be): I went and fired the forge to build the studio — the AI system to make my future videos. Let's just say that some days fact is stranger than fiction and this one... surprised me. Come watch me design my studio. https://youtu.be/Qu21mVieHMc

The challenge: build a 30-second explainer on any concept. This is where you post it. Where are you at?

📦 EVERY ENTRANT GETS A FEEDBACK FILE 📦 🔍 HOW WE READ THESE Every repo was cloned and pinned to the last commit that was public at the deadline, so nobody was judged on work that landed after the clock. Six repos had later commits. We read the earlier ones. Then we read file by file. Identity, rules, examples, the reference layer, the code. Every self-test in the field was executed on our machine, not taken on trust. And for five folders we did the thing the brief describes: dropped the folder in, wrote a draft that appears nowhere in the repo, worked it through as the specialist, then ran the entrant's own checker on what came back. All five passed their own gate. The landing pages were the doorway. The judging happened inside the folders. 📦 COMP #9: THE EDITOR - THE VAULT 📚 WHAT THE FIELD TAUGHT Three lines split forty-two builds: ✅ Enforcement moved into code. Comp #8's lesson landed hard. Nine entries ship a checker you can run without an API key. Across forty-two rules files, the phrase "use good judgment" appears zero times. ✅ The disguised ask is the real test. Almost everyone refuses "just rewrite it." The builds that went furthest anticipated the request wearing a disguise: ask me questions and assemble it, give me two options, tell me what it should say instead. ✅ The examples file is where methodology broke. Six entries shipped an examples.md larger than their rules.md, holding voice, philosophy and calibration that belonged in identity or reference. Last cycle it was the empty memory. This cycle it was the overloaded examples file. 📦 COMP #9: THE EDITOR - THE VAULT 🥇 THE WINNER @Marcelo Michelsohn. The FICC editor, a proposal editor for one municipal culture fund in Campinas, Brazil. Here is why. Three real proponents ran it on real proposals, with consent, on 22 July, inside the fund's live submission window with money on the line. The method was written down before the rounds ran, so the receipts could not be shaped afterward. Inputs are preserved byte for byte, outputs pasted verbatim, and the errors are still in the transcripts because the method said to leave them there.

If you are curious what my late nights look like, its staying up till 2 Am to post videos like this. Twelve minutes on thinking machines. Descartes, Lovelace, Turing, Searle's Chinese Room, and why the AI consciousness argument we're having right now is already four hundred years old. Animations built with my automation structure. Script and content is all me though. Going to decide where this fits in the courses and maybe make a text companion. A new style I may keep for a genre of future videos if people like it. Let me know what lands.