Confuse them and you break both
Five fragments for the week of September 15, 2025
Hello from the middle of September. This week is all launch mode + looking ahead to lighting up the sky.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
In less than ~24 months, the world went from “video generation will never work, no way it happens” to “the audio on the generated video after the helicopter crashes is not as good as the sound of waves from the dinosaur riding the surfboard.”
– Cristóbal Valenzuela on X, September 9, 2025. Cristóbal is the cofounder & CEO of Runway, so he’s faced the cycle of claims firsthand (and is also motivated to mark progress, it must be said). In the same post, he notes “I call this the normalization of magic.”
companionship gets flattened into “AI friends.” in reality it’s splintering fast.
gen-alpha: plush or voice-first toys (codi, paro) that feel like playmates.
gen-z: social coaching and practice spaces (pi, http://character.ai): part vent buddy, part rehearsal room.
adults: burnout buddies and wellness check-ins (replika, woebot, pi again). seniors: longitudinal care layers (elliq, http://care.coach) where compliance and audit matter more than chat.
form factor matters: text-first = lightweight, high churn.
voice presence (pi, replika voice) = stickier.
embodied agents (plush, robots) = hardware margin but harder scale.intimacy also matters: casual hang vs emotional anchor vs life manager. every step up that ladder multiplies alignment + regulatory risk.
and intent splits utility (reminders, meds, scheduling) from affect (comfort, nostalgia, fantasy). confuse them and you break both.
– Natasha Malpani on X, September 6, 2025. I found this to be a densely insightful post.
Ink dries on the surface of parchment, but soaks into a paper sheet. This makes it a permanent medium, whereas parchment, which can be scraped clean and written on again, allows records to be revised after the event—opening the door to fraud. Accounts were always bound into ledgers for a similar reason: loose-leaf entries could easily be fabricated, but a ledger with numbered pages became tamper-proof.
– Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, September 10, 2024. Robin Sloan and I met up at the Ferry Building last week and he regaled me with stories and insights borrowed from this book, so I had to go straight to the source. The whole thing is studded with gold coins, another Sloanism, c.f.…
Place gold coins along the path. Don’t load all your best stuff high in the story. Space special effects throughout the story, encouraging readers to find them and be delighted by them.
– Roy Peter Clark recounting a piece of advice from Don Fry, as shared by Robin Sloan in a Kickstarter project update sent in 2009. I love the idea of words as special effects. This idea has stayed with me for almost 16 years now, making (let’s check) six appearances in Diagonal over time under the mantle of “golden details.” And actually, now that I look more closely, here’s something eerie: that Kickstarter project update was published exactly 16 years ago today, on September 15, 2009.
Unfortunately (actually, fortunately), almost all of the images I made from 1985 through 1998 have been lost. But since 1/1/1999, I’ve kept every image that I thought was somehow interesting. Now, the vast majority of these aren’t suitable for publication (to my standards); this collection is more of a sketchbook—concepts, prototypes, false starts, dead ends, and first drafts. Yet, each was a completed image on its own, not just what happens when you open the program or just change one parameter. My sketchbook has 13,598 images! That’s about 680 per year, on average, or almost two per day, over 20 years. From this assemblage, I’ve culled 1,229 into my body of work—those that are (or will “soon” be) on my web site (along with 55 others that were completed before 1999).
If you’ve used Ultra Fractal, you know that a fractal image requires at least two formulas, one for the fractal shape and one for the coloring. Most of my images use formulas that I have written. When I began, there wasn’t much fractal software available, so I had to write my own programs, and I’ve never lost the love of that.
– Kerry Mitchell, “The Last 20 Years,” January 5, 2019. Speaking of sketchbooks. (And another entry in my ongoing interest in fractals.) May we never lose the love of writing our own programs and formulas.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com