Mathias Meyer

After a pretty low-yield summer in the greenhouse we left tomato and chili plants to their own devices for a couple of weeks. Lo and behold, the late October harvest is here and it’s pretty good. (No AI was involved in the growing of these chilis).

Can't help but feel/fear that at least part of our future is in pressing buttons to keep agents moving along, turning us into mere monitors, out of touch with how and where work is being done. More than 40 years ago, a paper warned about the "Ironies of Automation." Worth a read again today.

Don't really have a lot to add to what Kellan wrote up here on middle managers. Except I had to write 15-18 pages for my term paper, so I had to. It's been a fun research project that I hope to turn into some less scientific writing, tho Kellan already did the work: laughingmeme.org/2026/09/14/m...

After two years of late frost leaving our fruit trees fruitless, this has been an absolute banger of a harvest. The tree was so laden with fruit we had to bind branches together for support. The peaches aren’t the greatest for eating, though they are tasty, but make for excellent jam or compote.

AI continues to feel like an ouroboros to me, the snake that bites its own tail. Whatever gains are perceived/assumed/purported are then outweighed by the increased effort required to manage whatever those gains product as output.

If anything, AI slop may contribute to dividing folks on social media platforms even further. On the other hand, it may also contribute to us realising how important human connection is. Maybe it offers us a counterbalance and an appreciation for the people around us, seeking conversation instead.

AI continues to feel like an ouroboros to me, the snake that bites its own tail. Whatever gains are perceived/assumed/purported are then outweighed by the increased effort required to manage whatever those gains product as output.

Companies fire employees based on the promise they could be replaced by AI only to realise that it's not that easy. invezz.com/news/2026/07...

AI continues to feel like an ouroboros to me, the snake that bites its own tail. Whatever gains are perceived/assumed/purported are then outweighed by the increased effort required to manage whatever those gains product as output.

Ask everyone to increase (pardon, maxx) their token usage, only to then realise (quelle surprise!) that that stuff is expensive in real life and that tokens used, just like lines of code, is no realistic measure of value created: www.msn.com/en-gb/money/...

AI continues to feel like an ouroboros to me, the snake that bites its own tail. Whatever gains are perceived/assumed/purported are then outweighed by the increased effort required to manage whatever those gains product as output.

You can create incredible amounts of content, including spam, that is posted by AI agents, generated from data harvested from the very platforms they now flood, only to then have to manage them using other AI agents. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia... www.theverge.com/tech/975398/...

I've written a whole bunch of postcards on my recent trips and it's been genuinely fun and also slight puzzling to see all the responses I've gotten from folks receiving them. It's usually a photo of the card, sometimes receivers included, together with a thank you note.

For me writing them, I get to write whatever I please, something weird about the place I'm at or something surprising that happened to me. Or, to keep it simple, just what the heck I'm doing on these trips or why I'm there.

I've written a whole bunch of postcards on my recent trips and it's been genuinely fun and also slight puzzling to see all the responses I've gotten from folks receiving them. It's usually a photo of the card, sometimes receivers included, together with a thank you note.

Puzzling because I found it surprising that people would send me photos. The thank you notes were lovely, though I was also thinking of times when the response would be a phone card or a call, not a digital response. Avoiding those was the whole point of writing a postcard in the first place.

Proper tomato harvest today, Black Russian and Cœur de bœuf. Last couple of hot days have done magic in the greenhouse. Going to be a feast.

When in doubt, go for the Riesling. Excerpts from a little solo wine trip through Germany (Unstrut, Lower Franconia, Black Forest, Mosel, Saale) and Alsace that I was on over the past nine days.

Whenever I'm at Dussmann I like to sneak signed bookmarks and stickers into the copies of our book @intentionalorganization.com, hoping it brightens someone's day when they pick up a copy 😃

Harvest season continues. Zucchinis are growing well this year (though some of the blossoms have also fallen prey to the weeks of rain), tomatoes are ripening nicely, albeit taking on too much water: