Daily one-pagers about AI, leadership, technology, and being human.

johnmaconline

I'm writing to think, learn, and remember in public. I'll be here everyday.

July 27, 2026 1 minute read

Art For Sale

It used to be that your song, your book, or your TV show had to be selected by the gatekeepers of the channels. The publishers. The networks. The distributors.

Only they had the financial ability to create, produce, and distribute the art you made.

You, the artist, could make a prototype of your thing (or a promise to make it), but then your job transitioned from creator to promoter. Please take my thing and add it to your curated catalog/shelf/channel.

That was how you sold your art — to the gatekeeper, not the consumer.

With modern tech, the gatekeepers don’t carry as much weight because anyone with a phone and a laptop can create a song, a book, or a TV show and make it available directly to the consumer. No curated channel necessary.

AI makes that even easier. And the content has grown exponentially.

So then the problem switches to standing out amongst the noise. How do you get your art noticed by the consumer?

Maybe we’re going full circle back to the gatekeepers. Curation. Selection.

Maybe AI helps with generation and curation.

The future is an interesting place for art for sale.

July 26, 2026 1 minute read

A Dry Well

Human Leadership The250

It happens.

You run out of things to say. Which is a result of running out of ideas you’re thinking about. Which is a result of not reading, listening, watching, or thinking about ideas.

Ideas fill the well.

Keep the idea stream flowing into your head.

July 25, 2026 1 minute read

Useful Arguing

AI Human Leadership

I’m a tried-and-true conflict avoider.

ChatGPT tells me that people like me avoid conflict because we experience it as a threat to safety, acceptance, or the relationship. OK. I can buy that.

But professionally, I need to argue.

Creative conflict, when done right, is a great path to better. It’s the only path to best.

Surround yourself with teammates with whom you can argue usefully.

July 24, 2026 2 minute read

Breaking the Breaking News Cycle

AI Human Technology

Breaking news! Again.

In low-level, embedded software, we use a concept called an interrupt.

An interrupt is either a hardware or software signal to the processor to stop what it’s doing right now and handle something else. Interrupts give us important functionality such as event, time-critical, priority, and CPU-sharing functionality.

What happens when you touch the screen of your sleeping iPhone? The screen hardware sends an interrupt signal to the processor. That signal wakes it up, and then it runs code to figure out what happened, and that code turns on the screen.

Each time the process gets an interrupt, it must switch context. Stop what it’s doing, save off the current state of everything into memory, and then start working on the new stuff. When the new stuff’s done, then restore all of the previous context from memory.

It takes time and resources.

News outlets, social media companies, and influencers use interrupts on us. They make money on our attention, so they play the lowest common denominator game. Urgency. Importance. Fear. FOMO.

That little buzz. The banner. The voice inflection.

All interrupts to your brain. You have no choice but to run a little routine every time that interrupt happens.

None of this is new. Newspapers were the (first offenders)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism].

But AI ramps it up exponentially.

Only you can break the cycle.

July 23, 2026 1 minute read

Taking Off

Human Leadership The250

When a pilot pushes the throttle forward and the plane starts gathering speed, he doesn’t suddenly pull back to stop it.

Instead, he keeps that throttle forward, dumping as much fuel into the engine as he can, until the plane gathers enough speed to take off. To take off, you need enough speed to produce enough lift in the wings to overcome gravity and drag.

Once he’s in the air, with gravity overcome, then he can back off.

Taking off is expensive. It costs resources, energy, focus, and commitment.

But also, you can’t get in the air unless you do it. Pulling back too soon doesn’t make it more efficient. It makes it unattainable.

Take off first. Then optimize.

July 22, 2026 1 minute read

The Luck of the Draw

Human The250

I like playing cards.

Not gambling. I mean family and friends sit-around-table-with-a-beverage cards. And I’m up for playing most games — hearts, spades, rummy, canasta, gin, and any of a million others. I don’t know them all, but happy to learn if you have a favorite.

Each game sits on the spectrum between luck and skill. Some sit very close to pure luck. Others move more towards the skill end.

When you sit around that table, each player has a certain level of skill.

But everyone is subject to luck of the draw.

July 21, 2026 1 minute read

Eye of the Beholder

Human The250

A beholder is someone who looks at, observes, or sees something.

Your eye. Their eye. My eye.

An eye, of course, is an instrument. A sensor. It sends signals to the brain. Our eye focuses incoming light through the cornea and lens onto the retina, where rods and cones convert it into the signals. Those signals travel through the optic nerve to the brain, which then processes color, depth, motion, and detail into a stable visual scene.

For each of us, it generally sends the same signals. If you replace your eye with my eye, you’d see the same thing the same way.

Yet we rarely see the same thing as each other.

The beholder makes all the difference.

July 20, 2026 2 minute read

Extra Wires

Human Technology The250

When my wife and I rented our first apartment, I wanted to flex a little about how handy I was and help her understand how lucky she was gonna be with me as her husband.

The job was simple. We had a chandelier with two switches across the room from each other. We wanted to replace one of the toggle on/off switches with a dimmer switch. Piece of cake.

I bought the circular dimmer, grabbed my tools, and found the circuit breaker. Ten minutes later, I had it done. Except there was this one extra red wire that disappeared into the wall. I didn’t know what it was, so I just properly taped the exposed end and tucked it back into the box behind the new switch.

I tested it, and whamo, it worked great.

Until you switched the other light switch across the room.

Hmm. This was before YouTube and the internet, so I didn’t have easy access to information to debug this.

We went along for a few weeks like this. Dimmer worked great as long as the other switch was in a particular position. No problem, we just left it like that.

Then my in-laws came for dinner. My father-in-law was a savant at maintenance and fixing stuff. It’s what he did professionally and as a hobby. Could fix anything.

Given my new son-in-law status, I didn’t really want to ask him about it (because he was also a ball-buster), but my wife let the cat out of the bag.

“Hey, Dad, how come…” And she shows him what’s going on.

He looks at it for 10 seconds, and asks me, “How did you connect the traveler wire?”

“Um, what’s the traveler wire?”

“This is a 3-way switch circuit. It requires a 3rd wire. What did you do with it?”

“Oh, I didn’t know what that was. I just tucked it back in, unconnected.”

He just stared at me with a little smirk, and my shame was on full display. Then he laughed. Then my mother-in-law laughed. And my wife just smiled at me.

“You should never have extra wires. If you do, you did something wrong.”

Extra wires. Duh.

July 19, 2026 1 minute read

Hanlon’s Razor

Human Technology The250

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Robert Hanlon, a man after my own heart, was a computer programmer from Scranton, PA. He submitted this phrase in 1980 to a humor collection called Murphy’s Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong.

Being the subculture creators that we are, a bunch of programmers created [The Jargon File] (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html) in the 90s and included it. It fits right in with the programmer outlook on the world. This is where it gained most traction.

Didn’t get invited to the meeting? It’s not because they don’t want you there. Someone forgot.

Your friend ignored your message? It’s not because they are ignoring you. They forgot.

You get cutoff in traffic? They’re not targeting you. They’re just not paying attention.

You see this one every day. Don’t assume someone or the system is out to get you.

It’s likely just inattention.

July 18, 2026 1 minute read

AI-y

AI Technology The250

As in, “That’s a little too AI-y for me.”

We can add it to the long list:

Old-timey
Preachy
Salesy
Techy
Sciencey
Artsy
Cartoony
Churchy
Cutesy
Gimmicky
Plasticy
Engineery
Sitcomy
Drama-y
Hallmarky
Instagramy
Christmasy
Self-helpy

Not only is AI generative, but it’s adding to the lexicon.

johnmaconline

A Dry Well

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Useful Arguing

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Breaking the Breaking News Cycle

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Taking Off

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The Luck of the Draw

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Eye of the Beholder

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Extra Wires

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Hanlon’s Razor

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AI-y

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