For someone, by someone
Five fragments for the week of June 15, 2026
Hello from mid-June. And rest in peace, David Hockney. Forever connected to London in my mind.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
If the model is right, the durable jobs of the future won’t be about monitoring AI systems or prompt engineering. Those are transitional roles in the automated sector. The durable jobs will be in the relational sector, where the human element is the product itself.
Some already exist and are growing: nurses, therapists, teachers, boutique fitness instructors, personal chefs, bespoke tailors, craft brewers, live performers, spiritual guides, childcare workers, and many varieties of hospitality and care work. Others are emerging: experience designers, human-AI collaboration artists, provenance certifiers, community curators. Many haven’t been invented yet, just as six out of ten jobs people hold today didn’t exist in 1940.
The most common pushback I get when I say this is: ``but not everyone is creative, not everyone will be artists.’’ I think this misunderstands what’s being asked. You don’t need to be Picasso. You need to be the person whose involvement makes the product feel like it was made for someone, by someone.
– Alex Imas, “What will be scarce? The economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work,” April 14, 2026. Referenced in “At least you’re likable,” shared with me by Celine. Luxury creativity is a phrase that’s been tumbling around my mind lately.
I use the word “interlocutor” to describe someone who is invested in your work and helps you understand it more deeply, but is not directly involved in the way a collaborator would be. Interlocutors can help draw out what matters most to us (in a particular project, or in our overall practice).
– Celine Nguyen, “i’m teaching 2 workshops this summer and you’re invited,” June 14, 2026. Not to bury the lede: Celine is teaching two workshops this summer! And even though I only just saw her yesterday, I still feel some of the frisson of distance reading this; I wanna go bad.
taste, meanwhile, gets discussed like a gift. it behaves more like a muscle. predict the result of every experiment before you run it. cover a paper's results section and guess the numbers from the method alone. mark down which of this month's releases will matter in two years and check your hit rate later. a forecast plus a correction, repeated a few hundred times, is how every good model gets trained, including the one in your head.
– @itsreallyvivek on X, “how to be good at research,” June 10, 2026. Now that my Claude-vision is quite tuned (and considering that the author is a research fellow at Anthropic), I think much / possibly all of this piece ran through the Claude filter. But this is still good advice, even / especially if Claude had something to do with it.
People are increasingly aware of the pitfall of "people pleasing" when it comes to how you treat others.
But I think there is an equally dangerous tendency to adopt an attitude of people pleasing towards ourselves.
Being a people-pleaser towards yourself takes the form of mistaking self-indulgence for self-care / self-love.
That is, the only way such a person knows how to express love towards themselves is via indulging their desires and immersing themselves in comfort.
But often the best self-love we can give ourselves is the gift of boundaries, discipline and challenge.
– @TVachaW on X, June 13, 2026. Sometimes, out of the swirl of the feed, something useful surfaces: right place, right time.
one of the underrated harms of AI is the death of vernacular design
now the kebab shop sign is gonna look like claudeslop instead of chaotic dafont goodness
– Joseph Alessio on X, June 12, 2026. “Vernacular”: been a while since I’ve seen you, old friend. Vernacular photography (which I took to mean: other people’s family photos found at flea markets) was a durable fascination of me for some time in my twenties.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com