Flights South, Stories Home

Morning routine. Coffee and conversation with Jim and Kathy. Booked the Ushuaia flights. Logged new wines. Steve's data center numbers. Walked to Suds, drafting a casting call. Beers with Tim. Stories on the walk home. Andromeda Sprint Review.

Agents, Bootmakers, and a Locked Lighthouse Door

Events and activities that occurred on Wednesday, October 28, 2026

The day opened at Coffee Culture for my fortnightly morning with Jim. It is still nominally a backgammon date, but these days we rarely open the board; mostly it is just good conversation. Kathy joined us this time. Jim and I have been considering taking up Go instead.

Back home I closed one of the open loops on the Antarctica trip. Aerolíneas Argentinas now flies to Ushuaia from Aeroparque rather than Ezeiza, so Tim and I booked the same pair of flights: south at dawn on January 26 and back to Buenos Aires on February 10, in time for the long flight home. The hotels are the last real gap in the itinerary. I also logged the six bottles I picked up at River's Edge on Tuesday's fall color drive, and finally wrote down what my one-to-five star ratings mean, starting with a three-star Maryhill rosé.

Steve Froelich followed up on my Salon talk with a few pages of his own on data centers and what he calls the AI bubble. His headline figure puts the AI data center buildout from 2025 to 2032 at more than ten trillion dollars, about 3.6 percent of GDP a year, which is above what the country spent on railroads at the height of that boom. He also worries about a revenue gap of roughly five trillion dollars, about companies financing each other in circles, and about GPUs that wear out long before the buildings that house them, unlike the dark fiber left behind by the last bubble. I checked his 3.6 percent and found it defensible across eight years of a growing economy, closer to four or five percent against today's GDP, and we talked the numbers through on that evening's Andromeda call.

In the afternoon I walked to Suds and used the walk to work on No Further, the third story in the Arrivals collection, by voice. The Cape Blanco shoot moves to late April, which gives the casting call room to breathe. I settled its order, moving from the Arrivals concept to the storyline, then the character, the sets and scenes, and finally the logistics. I had been wondering whether a model would rather play a lead or a supporting role, and the answer I reached was to make her both the lead and a co-author, shaping the character's motive and the beats within the three acts, with her words free to run alongside the poem. Her answer to the simplest question, why she is there at all, may tell me more than any portfolio. If someone answers quickly and can wait for a weather window, a November shoot is still possible, and since the lighthouse tours end in October, the locked door in the story would be true to life.

Tim was at Suds, and he had booked the same Ushuaia flights a few hours earlier, so we agreed to split a hotel room. He had no objection to the smiles.photos theme camp for next year's burns and suggested rotating the theme from day to day. He is also building a video game on his own, an Oregon Trail set on Mars with a retro-future look, and I offered to playtest. Our conversation drifted to what it is like to live a little in the future, in a house and a set of systems I have automated heavily with Claude. It reminded me of Astoria, the print ad engine that was my first project with the Brazil team back in 2009. When you are ahead of the curve, the core pieces you need do not exist yet, so you build them, and years later people use their descendants every day without ever thinking about how they work.

The walk home turned into story time, with three short pieces told along the way: "The House That Thought," "The One Law," and "October Man." The line I kept from the last one closes the day's theme better than I could: "He has been lucky after all. Not because nobody left, but because he loved enough people for the leaving to matter."

The evening's Andromeda Sprint Review with Steve and Mark ranged widely. Steve walked us through agentic commerce, the shift from software assistants to agents that spend money on our behalf. Walmart is building ways to register and approve outside shopping agents while Amazon blocks some of them, and Visa, Mastercard, and OpenAI with Stripe are each publishing protocols for how an agent proves who it is and what it is allowed to buy. Steve spotted the gap right away: a mandate for a thirty-dollar beach towel does nothing to stop an agent from buying ten towels at three dollars each. We compared two kinds of job disruption, the New England bootmakers whose numbers held steady for ninety years while their skill was stripped away, and the switchboard operators who were simply gone between a Friday and a Monday. Steve added a third kind of personal agent to his taxonomy, a companion for conversation, rehearsal, and checking the flaws in your own reasoning, kept apart from the agents that act for you. His story about Chegg stuck with me most: it lost to free AI not because the answers were better, but because they were good enough and free.

By the time the transcript was pulled and summarized, the day had earned a quiet glass of wine. It had moved between the far south and the near future, from booking a flight to the end of the world to arguing about how machines will shop for us, and the thread through all of it was the same one Tim and I touched at Suds: the people who build ahead of the curve rarely get to see who ends up using what they made, and that is probably fine.