Speights Craft
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Jonathan Speights

Jonathan Speights
Image of Russell Crowe in the movie A Beautiful Mind where he is writing exotic math equations on a window.

Felicific calculus and making yourself legible to machines

Can I use AI to quantify my own job market value in a way that is more useful than LinkedIn Premium? Way back in 1789, Jeremy Bentham (the Panopticon guy) introduced the concept of felicific calculus, an algorithm that could be used "for calculating the degree or amount of

By Jonathan Speights 12 May 2026
A screen capture of a Flash game called QWOP where inscrutable keyboard controls are used to control a runner.eved and falling on your face is common.

Without Grace And Running

Taking a closer look at the hidden costs of velocity. In my very first post I acknowledged one of the more unfortunate impacts of my Eye•Full project: it was impacting my sleep. As the project advanced, I was spending more and more time trying to work through strategies or

By Jonathan Speights 05 May 2026
A painting by Benjamin West - Hamlet- Act IV, Scene V (Ophelia Before the King and Queen)

Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight

What values are we encoding when we remove people from the system? In the early 1980s, Steve Jobs famously told Scientific American "What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the

By Jonathan Speights 28 Apr 2026
In the movie Spaceballs, John Hurt looks down in alarm to see another xenomorph bursting out of his chest.

Oh No, Not Again

I want to switch gears and talk more explicitly about costs, the slippery details around how much a token is worth, and what we might look forward to as major providers like OpenAI and Anthropic get ready for their IPOs that are expected this year. To do that, I want

By Jonathan Speights 21 Apr 2026
The Orion spacecraft Capsule Parachute Assembly System team pose for a photo in Yuma, Arizona. (U.S. Air Force photo by Christopher A. Okula)

Collaboration and Expertise Are Signal, Not Noise

Last week, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific after traveling farther from Earth than any humans have in more than fifty years. The spacecraft Integrity was built with the combined expertise of thousands of engineers, scientists, and mission crew. This product of a sustained international collaboration carried them around

By Jonathan Speights 14 Apr 2026
Scene from the movie Heat where the character of Nate (Jon Voight) tells Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro), "You can't miss once."

It's not all about the tools

It's about human goals and what the tools help you see. I’ve been thinking a lot about tools and the impact the tools we choose have on what we create with them. It’s not a new idea. Edward Tufte made this point back in 2003 when

By Jonathan Speights 07 Apr 2026
A treasure map illustrating the path through numerous AI tools that I used to develop and ship a native iOS app.

My feelings about AI are unresolved

I’ve been going a little bit crazy trying to reconcile the two dominant ways of thinking about AI. I simply cannot avoid hearing about how the technology promises more than it delivers, is a vehicle companies can use to substitute agents for actual employees, risks deskilling professionals, appropriates other

By Jonathan Speights 31 Mar 2026
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Speights Craft

The walls of this house hear songs we don't dare sing.