A Week of Being Kin Lane - August 25th, 2025
I am mostly over having Covid. And while things are mostly back to normal, I don’t feel like there is much more to report here than there was the previous week. I am reading The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, but I fee like not reading and writing is why there isn’t much to report back on. A lack of nutrients going in, tends to result in a pretty boring week. It is one of the reasons I like this newsletter, is it acts as a sort of barometer for my week. Letting me know how I am doing. Not every week needs to be super interesting, but it helps to understand the highs and lows that I experience.
We started the week with a couple of flat tires on the bike, and we had another flat after coming home today. There are always construction trucks lining the way through midtown to and from Central Park, dropping screws and other construction debris. But I think it is the corner where we go by the NY Sanitation “broom” warehouse where they store the street sweepers. They park the street sweepers along the street and empty them out into the trash trucks, and I suspect some of the screws and other things I pick up probably come from that block—we will try changing our route.
Wednesday was Audrey’s 54th birthday. We went to a mind blowing Caribbean restaurant called Kabawa to celebrate. Every bit of the menu was a delicious mix of familiar, but also flavors that took me to entirely new places. I am thankful that Audrey and I live in New York. I am thankful we get to experience meals like this and share these experiences. Food is really a magnetic north pole of our existence, and I can’t really imagine where else we could be exposed to the rich and diverse flavors that we have available to us here. It sooths my soul to be here with my love—Happy Birthday Audrey.
I went back down to Philly for another day long workshop with my business partner Jerome, to work on Naftiko. I love the energy of an in-person workshop, especially when we have a plan. The train from Penn Station to Paoli, PA through Philadelphia is something I enjoy a lot. The view along the train tracks between NYC and Philadelphia is always thought provoking for me. The warehouses and run-down factories all grab me at another level. Like the automobile, the manufacturing and transportation landscape leaves me thinking a lot about the future of Internet technology.
I had a friend say something to me I hear regularly from folks when talking about artificial intelligence—that AI was here to stay. It was in response to me saying I was anti-AI. This response sounds like other sayings I hear, like AI being inevitable. It always leaves me thinking deeply about why people feel this way, and why they say these things. It leaves me wondering what other things exist in the world that they do not like, but may or may not push back on. Why do people feel you shouldn’t push back. Or why do they not push back on things they don’t like. It all feels like system constraints to me and my systems brain—keeping things predictable and under control.
A bad system will beat a good person every time. - W. Edwards Deming