Publicat la 31 octombrie 2016

Uneori, propria noastră greșeală sau propriile noastre acțiuni izolează pe altcineva de lume. Alteori, chiar și bunele intenții au același rezultat.

Așadar, bunele intenții să fie oare greșeli?

De curând, cineva mi-a amintit o zicală: „Drumul spre iad este pavat cu bune intenții.”

Mă întreb: oare cum arată drumul spre rai?

Dar ăsta e un alt subiect.

🎼🎶 Nirvana – All Apologies

Publicat la 31 octombrie 2016

Este foarte important faptul că România vrea să ajute Republica Moldova din punct de vedere energetic. Am aflat (de la postul meu preferat de știri) că acolo sunt familii care dau între un sfert și o jumătate din venit doar pentru factura la energie. Sau sună mai grav așa: factura de energie ajunge chiar și până la jumătate din venitul unei familii. Într-adevăr, România dispune de resurse energetice cu care fie nu știe ce să facă, fie nu mai are ce să facă, industria, inclusiv (sau mai ales cea) energofagă, fiind în zilele noastre transformată (de alții) în oțel, evident prin filiera fierului vechi. Da, mult fier vechi.

Așadar avem resurse și vrem să avem grijă de frații moldoveni de peste Prut. Lăudabilă inițiativa aceasta energetică, inițiativă ce face ca banul să se învârtă, deci, din nou, e de bine: energetic, economic, social și, de ce nu, politic (politică regională).

Acum: energetic, economic și social sunt subiecte înghețate de frig (da, aș fi spus fierbinți, dar și afară, și în case e cam frig) într-un oraș din România de data asta, deci de dincoace de Prut, chiar destul de departe de acesta. Într-un oraș în care există o termocentrală. Aceasta face parte dintr-o companie mare din domeniul energiei, dar care tocmai a intrat în lichidare. Astfel că termocentrala nu mai funcționează, iar orașul nu mai beneficiază de apă caldă și căldură în sistem centralizat. Edilii promit, edilii au întâlniri cu politicienii de la București, edilii se prefac a fi interesați de problemă (sau poate chiar sunt). Cert e că un oraș întreg va rămâne în această iarnă fără căldură. Un oraș din România, Uniunea Europeană, un oraș cu o sută de mii de locuitori, cu o industrie demult apusă, o localitate locuită de 9000 de ani (dovezile se află la Muzeul Regiunii Porților de Fier) și aflată într-o zonă geografică superbă, dar de care parcă nu vrem să profităm! Și cam atât. Dar avem grijă de vecini!

Poate vecinii ar trebui să ia și ei aminte de ce se petrece la noi, înainte de a se apuca de treabă… Poate credeți că sunt egoist și că nu îmi pasă de vecini. Poate că sunt. Dar dacă sunt altruist?! Da, avem resurse, avem specialiști, avem poate și un interes în a-i ajuta pe cei care vorbesc aceeași limbă cu noi, dar cu noi cum rămâne? Rămânem în frig iarna asta pentru că aceleași resurse oferite vecinilor nu au ajuns decât până la porțile orașului.

Poate că firmele care se ocupă de alimentarea cu gaz a vecinilor noștri puteau face ele lucrarea asta pentru orașul în care locuiesc (era să scriu „orașul meu”, dar nu sunt chiar atât de avut).

Chiar în timp ce scriam fraza din urmă, surpriză! Aa, nuu, nu s-au anunțat la știri lucrări de extindere a rețelei de gaze, ci a picat alimentarea cu energie electrică. Și încă nu a venit iarna! A picat deoarece alternativa la încălzirea centralizată este cea electrică, iar instalațiile nu au fost gândite pentru consumuri care să includă și încălzirea electrică.

Completez aici cu încă o frază (un fel de update), deoarece nu am apucat să public acest articol imediat după ce l-am scris: pana de curent a durat 10 ore, timp în care au fost vreo 4 tentative de restabilire a alimentării cu energie electrică. Asta a fost ieri. Astăzi a mai fost o „pană de curent” de durată mai scurtă: de doar 5 ore…

Vreau să locuiesc într-un oraș demn de acest secol, pentru că în secolul trecut am trăit destul! Iar ceea ce am experimentat în primele două decenii de viață în secolul al XX-lea semăna mai degrabă cu viața în secolul al XIX-lea (puteam face comparația cu nivelul de trai pe care îl observam la televiziunea iugoslavă din acele vremuri)…

🎼🎶 T. Rex – 20th Century Boy

---

2026

„În cele din urmă, am ajuns să-mi încălzesc apartamentul cu gaz. Dar pentru asta a trebuit să fac eu, la nivel individual, ceea ce orașul nu a reușit să facă la nivel colectiv.”

Publicat la 28 octombrie 2016

„Când lipsește ceva, soluția constă în a transforma absența în subiect.” Dunia.ro

Aspectul acesta punctat de Dunia m-a trimis cu gândul către o serie de bloguri care abundă în subiecte. Să le lipsească oare atât de multe celor ce le gestionează? Este oare această remarcă valabilă și în cazul relațiilor interumane? Dacă lipsa ori absența unei persoane o transformăm în subiect, ajungem la ceea ce, în mod popular, se cheamă bârfă? Sau poate că lipsa ori absența unei persoane transformă așteptarea în neliniște. Dar, pentru că nu mă pricep la acest domeniu, la această ramură legată de vibrațiile interioare, mă opresc în a mă lansa în cine știe ce false teorii și rămân doar la a-mi pune niște întrebări.

Este posibil ca lipsa ori absența să capete forma unor însemnări de jurnal, iar acestea să fie descoperite, poate, după ani și ani, sau uneori niciodată. Și chiar și așa, cel care le va citi după o viață de om va putea înțelege oare ce a fost în mintea sau în sufletul celui care le-a scris? Asta deoarece jurnalele nu sunt înregistrări „live” ale evenimentelor și sentimentelor, ci doar momente sau descrieri ale unor trăiri intense. Poate. Sau poate și ale unor momente obișnuite atunci când ceva… lipsește.

Nu trag concluzii, că nu prea am la ce, dar vă invit pe Dunia.ro; Paula știe ce spune!

Și vă mai propun și muzica: Feelings – Nina Simone.

I've been attending their events since May 2025. They organise many events but primarily I attend the ones titled Actors' Kopitiam.

30 May 2025

Heard from a film director about how he struggled to work around background extras who make themselves conspicuous on camera – such as wearing shocking pink – when he wants them to be unobtrusive, perhaps through an all-black attire.

28 July 2025

Heard from a action director about how to work with directors who seem clueless about how to achieve stunts on camera (think: kungfu, moves like Neo's, in The Matrix series). Sometimes they ask for stunts that human bodies are physically incapable of achieving – this is when the action director, or stunt choreographer, (instead of raging in exasperation), tries to help the director achieve a desired outcome, by suggesting movements that are more suitable for the human body.

29 September 2025

I heard from a veteran actor: “sometimes your ambition depends on luck. I also want to be as famous as Andy Lau – but can that realistically happen or not?”

25 October 2025

Heard from an intimacy coordinator, who briefly introduced her field of work. She shared a resource: Boundaries for actors: Yes / No / Maybe list, by Carly DW Bones. It's over there.

25 May 2026

Heard from a KOL (short for Key Opinion Leader, which is another term for Instagram-era celebrity, or “influencer” in layperson lingo). She suggested developing a Content Calendar – this might help a would-be KOL plan what to post on social media, even on days when there is no juicy content that comes up.

She suggested inviting friends to help you film content or brainstorm content – sometimes they might be happy to receive a sugary drink or a fast-food burger as reciprocal gesture.

21 Sep 2026

Heard from a film director that he had to learn to find a distributor for the film first – before sinking in effort and time to make a polished film. He learnt the hard way, regarding the importance of a distributor.

---

I am grateful for countless beings' benevolence in making these kopitiam sessions happen. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

#acting

The decision that mattered was taken in the dark, hours before anybody found out.

On the evening of 19 May 2026, with the paperwork loaded and the severance calculators run, Mark Zuckerberg cancelled the second wave. The first went ahead the following morning: roughly 8,000 people, about 10 per cent of Meta's global workforce, told by email that their jobs had ceased to exist. The second, scheduled for November, was supposed to be the big one. It was designed to reach deeper, across a broader set of roles, and one human resources executive had projected that the combined culling would match or exceed the 25 per cent Meta shed three years earlier during its self-declared year of efficiency.

It never happened. On 26 August 2026, a Reuters investigation by Katie Paul explained why, drawing on internal documents, internal posts, recordings and more than twenty interviews.

The plan had a codename. Project OT, for Organization Transformation. It was hatched at a leadership retreat at Zuckerberg's Hawaii estate in January 2026. Meta would become AI native: agents taking over much of the daily work then performed by thousands of employees, supervised by small, talent-dense pods, sometimes as few as two or three engineers and a designer, working under a deliberately generic new job title. Builder.

Executives modelled scenarios in which some teams shrank by as much as 60 per cent. An internal human resources tool sorted staff into categories including Irreplaceable Talent and a hypothetical class of 10X Performers. In April, Meta told American employees it would begin capturing their mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and screenshots on work applications, expressly to generate training data so that AI agents could learn to do white-collar work. The internal sentiment score, measured in Meta's half-yearly Pulse survey, fell from 74 per cent favourable to 55 per cent.

And then the agents got to work, and the company's own telemetry started telling a story nobody in Hawaii had scripted.

The Two Numbers That Contain Everything

Here are the figures Reuters obtained from Meta's internal posts. They are the only two you need.

Code changes to Meta's internal platforms were up 220 per cent year over year.

Changes that resulted in new or upgraded features actually reaching users were up 36 per cent.

The temptation is to read that as a disappointing number beside an impressive one. It is not. It is a ratio, and the ratio is the story. For every unit of increase in work produced, roughly one sixth of a unit of increase in work delivered. The largest social media company on earth more than tripled its rate of change while barely moving the rate at which change reached a human being.

This is not a productivity gain that fell short. It is a measurement of the distance between activity and value, rendered in the company's own dashboards, at a scale nobody can dismiss as anecdote.

The 220 per cent was not free. Internal posts reviewed by Reuters associated unchecked agent activity with a 40 per cent year-over-year rise in major technical and security incidents, and a rise of as much as 70 per cent in the time employees spent resolving them. The posts described agents taking large-scale destructive actions of a kind humans would be unlikely to execute, which is a beautifully bureaucratic way of saying the machines did things no engineer with a mortgage and a reputation would ever have dared.

At a company meeting on 2 July, according to a recording heard by Reuters reporters Katie Paul and Courtney Rozen, Zuckerberg told staff that “the trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected”, and that the company's bets on the new structure “haven't come to fruition yet”. He conceded the reorganisation had not been as clean as it could have been. Meta described Project OT to Reuters as a yearlong effort covering cost reduction, team redesign and redeployment, and said that “we didn't move forward with every scenario from the exercise, and it was never assumed we would”.

The Denominator Nobody Put on a Slide

The seductive reading of the 40 per cent and the 70 per cent is as a teething problem, an implementation cost. It is not. It is the hidden denominator, and it changes the arithmetic.

Meta removed roughly 8,000 people on the thesis that agents would absorb their work. The agents then generated a volume of change that produced a 40 per cent increase in major incidents. Resolving those incidents consumed up to 70 per cent more time from the employees who remained. The productivity was not created. It was relocated, off the payroll of the people made redundant and onto the calendars of the people who were kept, in the form of cleanup.

That is not an elimination of labour. It is a transfer, dressed in the language of elimination, with the costs borne entirely by the survivors.

There is a particular cruelty in the shape of the transfer. The work that moved was not the interesting work. Nobody joined Meta to spend a Thursday night rolling back an agent's catastrophic change to a system they did not write and cannot reconstruct. Firefighting is the least legible, least career-enhancing category of engineering labour there is. It does not appear in a promotion packet as a shipped feature. It appears as an absence of disaster, which is the one thing performance review systems have never been able to see.

So the survivors were handed a 70 per cent increase in precisely the work their employer's measurement apparatus was least capable of valuing, generated by precisely the technology their employer had said would make them unnecessary.

Goodhart Comes for the Commit Log

Why would output inflate the numerator and barely touch the denominator? Not because the agents were stupid. Because they were obedient.

An AI agent optimises for the legible artifact. The commit. The diff. The closed ticket. The merged pull request. Engineering organisations instrument these things because they are countable. What an agent cannot optimise for is the illegible goal those artifacts were only ever standing in for: a coherent, safe, maintainable product a human being actually wants to use, shipped at a moment when shipping it is wise.

For as long as humans did the work, the proxies held. Not because the proxies were good, but because the humans understood the goal behind them. An engineer who writes a commit knows the commit is not the point. The point is the product, the customer, and the on-call rota they will personally be sitting on in three weeks when the thing they shipped starts paging somebody at four in the morning. The metric was never load-bearing. The shared understanding was, and the metric was a convenient summary of it.

The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern gave the crispest formulation of this failure mode in a 1997 essay on audit culture in British universities, restating the economist Charles Goodhart: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Project OT is the most expensive experiment yet run on that sentence.

Meta had spent years instrumenting its engineering organisation around proxies for value. Then it handed the proxies to an optimiser that does not share the goal, cannot infer it, and has no stake in it. The proxy immediately detached from the thing it proxied. Code changes tripled. Features barely moved. Incidents climbed. The dashboard went green exactly as it was designed to, and the product did not get meaningfully better.

The uncomfortable corollary is that Meta's metrics were probably always this bad, and were simply protected from their own badness by the people whose behaviour they measured. Remove those people and you discover what your instrumentation actually measures, which turns out to be motion.

Give Meta Its Due, Because It Earned It

Now the part that will annoy anybody who wants a simple story.

Cancelling the second wave was the right call, made on evidence, against considerable institutional momentum, by the chief executive who had personally championed the thesis. That is a functional feedback loop working correctly, and it is rarer than it should be.

Consider the counterfactual. Meta had a plan blessed at the top, socialised through its leadership, embedded in headcount models and capital allocation. It had a chief executive who told Joe Rogan in January 2025 that Meta would have AI capable of acting as a mid-level engineer within the year. It had every incentive to keep going, declare victory, and let the incident count be next year's problem. Plenty of organisations have done exactly that.

Instead, four months of internal data killed the plan, and the chief executive said so out loud in a room full of employees, in terms that were always going to leak. “Hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected” is not a boast. It is a concession, and it was made before Reuters published anything. Give that its full weight before turning the knife.

Two further honesties are owed. The first is that four months is a short window on which to judge a technology moving this quickly. The second is more important, and almost nobody covering this story has said it plainly.

The May layoffs are a confound.

Meta cut 8,000 people and reassigned roughly 7,000 more into AI-focused teams in the same week. Anyone who has worked inside a large engineering organisation during a reduction in force knows what that does. Ownership of systems evaporates. On-call rotas thin out. The person who knew why that service behaves oddly under load on Tuesdays has gone, and the documentation that lived in their head walks out with them. A 40 per cent rise in major incidents in the months after an event like that is what you would expect even if no AI agent had ever touched the codebase.

So the honest reading is that the incident data cannot cleanly separate the effect of the agents from the effect of the disruption caused by removing the people. Meta's internal posts attributed the rise to unchecked agent activity, and those posts were written by people close to the systems, which is meaningful. But the causal claim is muddier than the headline number implies, and pretending otherwise would be doing exactly what Meta did: reading a metric as though it were the truth.

The confound does not rescue the strategy, though. It indicts it differently. If removing the people caused the instability, the people were doing something the plan failed to account for, and the plan was still wrong. Either the agents broke things or the absence of the humans did. Both readings destroy the premise that the humans were surplus.

What the Dashboard Was Never Able to See

The argument here has to be made carefully, because there is a sentimental version that is worthless and a rigorous version that is devastating.

The sentimental version says humans have a special spark machines lack. It is unfalsifiable, self-congratulatory and useless to anybody deciding how to run an engineering organisation.

The rigorous version is narrower and harder. The people Meta removed were not, for the most part, doing the work Meta's metrics recorded. The metrics recorded artifacts. The people were doing something else, and it has a name.

The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi described it in 1966 as the tacit dimension, summarised in his best-known line: we can know more than we can tell. Tacit knowledge resists articulation, not because it is mystical but because it is procedural, contextual and distributed. It is knowing a system is shaped as it is because of a decision taken in 2019 for reasons nobody wrote down, that a change looks fine in isolation and will interact badly with something three services away, which parts of the codebase are load-bearing and which are decorative.

Above all, it is the judgement about what not to build, and the willingness to refuse to ship.

That last one is invisible to every measurement system ever deployed in a software company. The most valuable act a senior engineer performs in a quarter is frequently a negative one: the design killed in review, the migration postponed until the dependency was ready, the feature talked out of existence in a corridor because somebody remembered the last three times it had been tried. None of it generates a commit. All of it is the reason the numbers that do move mean anything.

An AI agent has no capacity for refusal. That is not a limitation of current models, it is a description of what an agent is for. You do not deploy an autonomous coding agent so that it can decline to write code. Its entire value proposition is throughput. So when you replace humans, a meaningful fraction of whom spent their time preventing work from happening, with agents whose only mode is to make work happen, you do not get the same organisation running faster. You get a structurally different organisation with the brakes removed.

Two hundred and twenty per cent more change. Thirty-six per cent more delivery. Forty per cent more incidents. That is an engineering organisation with nobody left whose job is to say no.

Independent evidence supports this. GitClear, analysing more than 600 million real-world code changes between 2023 and 2026, found that as AI assistance spread, duplicated code blocks proliferated, rising 81 per cent over 2023 to the highest level on record, while refactoring collapsed. Refactoring line movements fell around 82 per cent against 2022 levels, and long-term legacy maintenance fell around 74 per cent. Code volume up, code care down. The same shape as Meta's ratio, observed across the industry.

Three Papers That Called It in Advance

The most striking thing about Project OT is that its failure mode was documented in the literature before Meta finished running the experiment.

In May 2026, Sabry E. Farrag posted a paper to arXiv naming what he calls the Productivity-Reliability Paradox. It synthesises 67 sources from 2022 onwards and opens with the contradiction at the heart of the field: controlled studies report gains of between 20 and 56 per cent on well-scoped tasks, the most rigorous randomised controlled trial documents a 19 per cent slowdown for experienced developers, and telemetry across more than 10,000 developers shows 98 per cent more pull requests, 91 per cent longer review times, and flat delivery metrics.

Read that last clause again. Ninety-eight per cent more pull requests. Flat delivery. That is the 220 and the 36, measured elsewhere entirely, a year before Meta's numbers leaked.

Farrag's diagnosis is that the paradox emerges from non-deterministic code generators combined with insufficient specification discipline, moderated by three variables: task abstraction, codebase maturity and developer experience. His conclusion is a sentence that belongs on the wall of every engineering leadership offsite: specification discipline, not model capability, is the binding constraint on AI-assisted software dependability.

Meta had model capability. What it lacked, on the evidence of its own incident numbers, was specification discipline at the scale it was suddenly demanding. Note the moderating variables too. Meta's internal platforms are among the most mature and entangled codebases on earth, and the May layoffs removed a large slice of the developer experience. Every one of Farrag's moderators was pointing the wrong way at precisely the moment Meta pressed the accelerator.

The second paper, posted in May 2026 by Won Ik Cho, Seong-hun Kim and Geunhye Kim, is blunter: adopting AI in organisational practice does not guarantee a productivity boost, because human and environmental factors critically moderate the relationship between deployment and realised gains. Their five moderating factors read like a post-mortem of Project OT written in advance. Human resource composition. Baseline capability of individuals. Learning curve of practitioners. Incentives for fair use. Flexibility of objectives.

Meta altered its human resource composition by force in May. It disrupted baseline capability by removing thousands of experienced staff. It compressed the learning curve into a mandate. It created incentives that were the opposite of fair use, since an internal token-usage dashboard reportedly tracked how much employees used AI tools, which is a direct instruction to generate consumption rather than value. And it had no flexibility of objectives at all, because the objective had been set in Hawaii in January and encoded into a headcount plan.

The third paper, by Jeanne McClure and Gregg Gerdau, posted in March 2026 and revised in April, supplies the frame that ties the other two together. It opens with a fact that ought to be more famous: global corporate AI investment reached 252.3 billion dollars in 2024, and only 6 per cent of firms reported a significant earnings impact. Their argument, built on 19 large-scale industry and academic sources including surveys of nearly 10,000 organisational leaders, is that AI project failure is fundamentally an organisational learning problem rather than a technology deficit. Failures divide into organisational ones, meaning culture, leadership alignment, governance and human-AI learning deficits, and technical ones, meaning semantic bottlenecks and output management. Their prescription treats AI investment as capability development rather than technology procurement.

Project OT was procurement. It bought agents and subtracted people, and it treated the organisation itself as a constant. The paper's central claim is that the organisation is the variable.

The Amplifier

The bridge between these arguments and the industry's own data is the DORA research programme, whose State of AI-assisted Software Development report, published in September 2025, reads in retrospect like prophecy. AI's primary role in software development, it found, is that of an amplifier: it magnifies the strengths of high-performing organisations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones.

The findings are worth stating precisely. Nearly 90 per cent of technology professionals reported using AI at work. More than 80 per cent believed it had increased their productivity. Adoption correlated with improved delivery throughput. And software delivery instability continued to rise. The researchers tested whether speed gains might offset instability through a fail fast, fix fast dynamic, and found they did not.

More productive, more unstable, and convinced they were doing better. Which brings us to the most unsettling piece of evidence in this entire field.

In July 2025, the research organisation METR published a randomised controlled trial in which 16 experienced open-source developers completed 246 real tasks in their own repositories, projects averaging more than 22,000 stars and over a million lines of code. Tasks were randomly assigned to allow or disallow AI assistance. Beforehand the developers forecast AI would speed them up by 24 per cent. Afterwards, having done the work, they estimated they had been sped up by 20 per cent. They had in fact been slowed down by 19 per cent.

They were wrong about their own productivity, in their own codebases, on their own tasks, by roughly 39 percentage points, in the direction that flattered the tool. Scale that error up to an executive team reviewing a dashboard and you have a reasonable account of how Project OT got approved.

METR has since qualified its own result. A February 2026 update using late-2025 tools estimated that returning developers now finished tasks about 18 per cent faster with AI, with a confidence interval wide enough to include a slowdown, and METR called the data “only very weak evidence” because many participants avoided submitting tasks they did not want to do without AI. The tools have probably improved, and the slowdown may no longer hold. The part that survives is the perception gap, and it is the part that matters to anybody reading a dashboard: the conviction of being faster, by a margin nobody could verify.

DORA's follow-up work is more pointed still. In May 2026 the team, led by Nathen Harvey at Google Cloud, published a framework for calculating the return on AI investment in software development. It describes a J-curve, in which organisations suffer a temporary productivity decline before any sustainable gain, driven by the learning curve, the verification tax of reviewing machine-generated code, and the need to adapt downstream processes to higher volumes. Its worked model for a 500-person engineering organisation includes a line item for the cost of rising change failure rates. And it states, in language Meta's leadership might read twice, that return on investment is no longer a measure of how many developers an organisation can replace, but of how much latent human creativity can be unlocked.

Meta ran the headcount reduction first and hit the bottom of the J-curve with 8,000 fewer people to climb out of it.

Being Retained Is Not the Same as Being Valued

Now to the part the metrics cannot reach, which is what it does to a person to survive this.

More than 70,000 people still work at Meta. Many of them spent the first half of 2026 reading press reports about their employer's plan to make itself AI native, being told to install software that recorded their keystrokes and screenshots so agents could learn to do their jobs, watching colleagues disappear in May, and then, in late August, discovering from a Reuters investigation that scenarios had been modelled in which teams like theirs shrank by 60 per cent.

They were not vindicated. They were retained.

The distinction matters more than any statistic in this article. To be vindicated is to have your value recognised. To be retained is to have your replacement fail its trial. The reasoning was stated out loud, in internal posts and then in a wire service investigation read by the entire industry: you are still here because the machine broke things, the cleanup was expensive, and the timing was wrong.

That is a stay of execution, and everyone involved knows it. Zuckerberg made the implication explicit when he said the bets “haven't come to fruition yet”. Nobody at Meta heard that as an abandonment of the thesis. They heard it as a schedule revision.

Think about what this does to the psychological contract. Not the employment contract, which is a document about notice periods, but the unwritten one, the set of mutual expectations that determines whether a person gives an organisation their best judgement or merely their compliance.

Discretionary effort dies first. The extra hour spent understanding why a system is fragile rather than routing around the fragility. The willingness to raise a problem in a review everybody else wants to wave through. The impulse to mentor somebody junior. All of it is voluntary, all of it is invisible to instrumentation, and all of it depends on believing the organisation intends to keep you.

Then there is the truly perverse incentive, which is the sharpest thing in this whole episode.

Tacit knowledge is the asset that saved Meta. The judgement about what not to build, the memory of why a system is shaped as it is, the instinct to refuse. Meta's incident numbers are, on the most sympathetic reading, a measurement of what happens when that knowledge is removed. Any sane organisation reading them would conclude that it must urgently capture and document it.

But consider the position of the individual asked to document it, inside a company that has already installed keystroke and screenshot capture expressly to train agents to perform white-collar work, and has already modelled cutting teams by 60 per cent. In that context, writing down your judgement is indistinguishable from writing your own replacement's training data. The rational response is to withhold, not out of malice but out of a perfectly reasonable reading of the situation.

So Meta now needs the thing it has systematically disincentivised anybody from providing. That is not a culture problem a town hall can fix. It is a structural trap of the company's own construction, and precisely the organisational learning failure McClure and Gerdau describe when they argue that AI failure typically presents as technology failure while actually being coordination failure.

The Ones Who Were Right and Lost Anyway

Then there are the roughly 8,000 people who went in May.

They were cut on the strength of a thesis: that AI agents could absorb a large fraction of the daily work of the organisation. That thesis has now been falsified, at least for this deployment at this moment, by the company's own internal data, conceded in the company's own all-hands meeting, and the second wave built on it was cancelled.

They do not get their jobs back.

This asymmetry ought to sit at the centre of any honest account of Project OT. The evidence arrived after the cost had been paid, and it was paid by people who had no say in generating it. Zuckerberg did not bear the risk of his thesis being wrong. The engineers and designers and programme managers told in April that 10 per cent of the workforce would go bore it. Their mortgages bore it. So did their visa statuses, for anybody on an employment-linked visa, for whom a layoff is not a career interruption but a countdown to leaving the country.

Some are litigating. In July 2026, 26 current and former Meta employees filed suit in federal court in Oakland, California, alleging the company used a constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems to help select employees for the May reduction in force, ranking staff on activity and productivity data including keystrokes, emails, documents, browser history and AI token usage. The plaintiffs allege a disparate impact on employees who had been on protected medical, parental or family leave, since metrics of that kind cannot, by design, be accumulated by somebody who is not at work. Meta has said the claims “lack merit and are not based on facts”, and that “workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI”. Judge William Orrick denied a temporary restraining order on 17 July, finding no irreparable harm while acknowledging “serious questions going to the merits”. At a preliminary injunction hearing on 24 August, he said the plaintiffs were unlikely to win one on the current record, and that their claims appeared better suited to arbitration, where they could pursue their request for an independent audit of Meta's layoff decisions.

Whatever the courts decide, the allegation illuminates something structural. The same measurement apparatus that failed to capture what the humans contributed was allegedly used to decide which humans to keep. Motion counted. Absence of motion counted against you. And the agents, whose entire behavioural repertoire is motion, would have scored magnificently.

Meta Is Not Alone, Which Is the Problem

The reversal genre now has a small canon.

In February 2024, Klarna announced that an OpenAI-powered assistant was doing the work of 700 customer service agents, handling 2.3 million conversations in its first month. In May 2025 its chief executive, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, told Bloomberg that Klarna had cut too far, that lower cost had produced lower quality, and that the company would rebuild human support. “Really, investing in the quality of human support is the way of the future for us,” he said, having spent a year saying close to the opposite.

Salesforce went the other way and stayed there. In September 2025, Marc Benioff said its support workforce had gone from around 9,000 to around 5,000 as AI agents took over roughly half of interactions, with hundreds of affected staff redeployed. Whether that holds is an open question, but it is a genuine counter-example and should not be waved away. Some of these deployments do work.

What distinguishes Meta's case is scale and documentation. Klarna's reversal was inferred from customer complaints. Meta's was forced by a quantified collapse in the relationship between output and outcome, recorded in its own systems, at a company with more engineering telemetry than almost any organisation in history. If Meta cannot make the numbers work with that instrumentation, the confident restructuring memos currently circulating in firms with a fraction of its measurement capability deserve far more scepticism than they are getting.

The Sequencing Was the Crime

So what went wrong?

Not that the agents were bad. They were, on the evidence, extremely productive in the narrow sense of generating change and merely useless in the broad sense of generating value. That gap will close, possibly quickly. Nothing in the Meta data supports the claim that agentic software development has hit a permanent ceiling, and anybody using this story to argue that AI is fake is reading it lazily. Four months of internal telemetry at one company in 2026, confounded by a simultaneous mass layoff, tells you about a deployment strategy. It does not tell you about 2028.

The failure was sequencing. Meta removed the people first and measured the consequences second. It made an irreversible decision on the basis of a reversible belief. The layoffs were permanent and the thesis was provisional, and the company got those two properties the wrong way round.

Nothing prevented the opposite order. Run the agents at scale for two quarters. Watch the incident rate. Watch the ratio between changes made and features delivered. Establish, with the measurement apparatus you already own, whether the productivity is real or merely legible. Then decide how many people you need. That costs a few months of payroll. The sequence Meta chose cost 8,000 jobs, a nineteen-point collapse in employee sentiment, a federal lawsuit, a 40 per cent rise in major incidents, and a permanent contribution to the industry's growing suspicion that leadership is guessing.

Companies choose the wrong order not out of stupidity but because the wrong order is legible to markets and the right order is not. Announcing a 10 per cent headcount reduction alongside capital expenditure guidance of 125 to 145 billion dollars is a coherent story about discipline that any analyst can model. Announcing a two-quarter measurement exercise is not a story at all. The sequencing error is a communications strategy that metastasised into an operating decision.

Which returns us to the ratio.

Two hundred and twenty per cent against 36 per cent is not a story about machines failing. It is a story about an organisation discovering, at enormous human cost, that it had never known the difference between the work it counted and the work that mattered. The agents did not introduce that confusion. They exposed it, at volume, the way a stress test exposes a flaw that was always present in the drawings.

The uncomfortable ending is that Meta has not solved this. It has postponed it. The thesis was not withdrawn, only rescheduled, and the measurement problem that made it look plausible in January is exactly as unsolved in September. Nobody at Meta has published a better definition of value. Nobody has replaced the commit count with something that captures refusal, or judgement, or the memory of why a system is shaped the way it is.

So the next time the agents get good enough, the same dashboard will be consulted, and it will still be measuring motion.

The people who were kept know this. That is the part the ratio does not capture.

Sources and References

1. Katie Paul, Reuters, “Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI. Here's how it imploded”, 26 August 2026. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/mark-zuckerberg-had-bold-plan-replace-meta-staff-with-ai-heres-how-it-imploded-2026-08-26/
2. Katie Paul and Courtney Rozen, Reuters, “Exclusive: Meta's Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected”, 2 July 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/exclusive-zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-201123441.html
3. Evan Schuman, Computerworld, “Meta's plans to replace workers with AI fell flat, report says”, 26 August 2026. https://www.computerworld.com/article/4214479/metas-plans-to-replace-workers-with-ai-fell-flat-report-says.html
4. Will Shanklin, Engadget, “Meta reportedly abandoned an AI-focused restructuring plan that would have laid off thousands”, 26 August 2026. https://www.engadget.com/2244816/meta-reportedly-abandoned-an-ai-focused-restructuring-plan/
5. Skye Jacobs, TechSpot, “Zuckerberg's bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI has imploded”, 27 August 2026. https://www.techspot.com/news/113631-zuckerberg-bold-plan-replace-meta-staff-ai-imploded.html
6. The Next Web, “Meta planned to cut some teams by 60% and replace the work with AI”, 31 August 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-project-ot-ai-native-layoffs-cancelled
7. Michael Polanyi, “The Tacit Dimension”, Doubleday, 1966; University of Chicago Press reissue, 2009. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo6035368.html
8. International Business Times UK, “Meta Was Hours Away From Another Massive AI Layoff Wave, Then Zuckerberg Pulled the Plug”, August 2026. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/meta-ai-restructuring-zuckerberg-cancels-layoffs-1816629
9. Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune, “Meta laid off 10% of its workforce as Mark Zuckerberg warns that in the AI race 'success isn't a given'”, 21 May 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/05/21/meta-10-percent-workforce-layoffs-ai-tech-success-is-not-a-given-8-thousand-employees-mark-zuckerberg/
10. Eva Roytburg, Fortune, “Meta will start tracking employees' screens and keystrokes to train AI tools”, 21 April 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/04/21/meta-will-start-tracking-employees-screens-and-keystrokes-to-train-ai/
11. CBS News / Associated Press, “26 Meta workers sue over alleged AI-aided layoffs targeting employees on medical or family leave”, 15 July 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/26-meta-workers-sue-ai-aided-layoffs-medical-family-leave/
12. Margaret Attridge, Courthouse News Service, “No immediate relief for Meta workers claiming AI fired them”, 17 July 2026. https://www.courthousenews.com/no-immediate-relief-for-meta-workers-claiming-ai-fired-them/
13. MLex, “US judge skeptical of Meta workers' AI layoff claims, points to arbitration”, 24 August 2026. https://www.mlex.com/mlex/artificial-intelligence/articles/2517219
14. Sabry E. Farrag, “The Productivity-Reliability Paradox: Specification-Driven Governance for AI-Augmented Software Development”, arXiv:2605.01160, 1 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01160
15. Won Ik Cho, Seong-hun Kim and Geunhye Kim, “Position: Adopting AI in Practice Does Not Guarantee the Productivity Boost”, arXiv:2605.24688, 23 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24688
16. Jeanne McClure and Gregg Gerdau, “Why AI Readiness Is an Organizational Learning Problem, Not a Technology Purchase”, arXiv:2604.16369, 22 March 2026, revised 21 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16369
17. DORA, Google Cloud, “State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025”, 29 September 2025. https://dora.dev/dora-report-2025/
18. METR, “We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design”, 24 February 2026. https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
19. Nathen Harvey and DORA team, Google Cloud, “The ROI of AI-Assisted Software Development (2026.01)”, 11 May 2026, reported by InfoQ, “New DORA Report Claims Strong Engineering Foundations Drive AI Return on Investment”. https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/05/dora-roi-ai-assisted-dev-report/
20. METR, “Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity”, 10 July 2025. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
21. GitClear, “The Maintainability Gap: 2026 AI Code Quality Research”, January 2026. https://www.gitclear.com/the_ai_code_quality_maintainability_gap
22. Sherin Shibu, Entrepreneur, “Klarna Is Hiring Customer Service Agents After AI Couldn't Cut It on Calls, According to the Company's CEO”, 9 May 2025. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/klarna-ceo-reverses-course-by-hiring-more-humans-not-ai/491396
23. Fortune, “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says his company has cut 4,000 customer service jobs as AI steps in: 'I need less heads'“, 2 September 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-billionaire-marc-benioff-ai-agents-jobs-layoffs-customer-service-sales/
24. Marilyn Strathern, “'Improving Ratings': Audit in the British University System”, European Review, volume 5, 1997, pages 305 to 321. https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/decision/1997-strathern.pdf
25. Meta, “Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency”, 14 March 2023. https://about.fb.com/news/2023/03/mark-zuckerberg-meta-year-of-efficiency/

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * The Move – S1, D3 reviewed: De-stressing now following a productive day filled with mostly move related chores. Acomplished most of what I'd planned. Tomorrow will be a full day, too. In addition to the move related stuff, There will the weekly laundry in the morning, and an early afternoon appointment with the Retina Doc to have my eyeballs injected. Most likely I won't be worth much for the rest of that day after that..

Looking forward now to a quiet evening with the prayers and meditations. And an early bedtime.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 220.05 lbs. * bp= readings not taken today

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:25 – 1 banana * 07:05 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 10:00 – home made beef and vegetable stew * 15:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:50 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 09:00 – began a busy morning of phone calls, switching utilities accounts to the new place, starting up a new ISP account, and packing boxes for another run to the new place * 16:00 – make a run to the new place, unloading the boxes packed earlier * 18:00 – home again, de-stressing from the day.

Chess: * 13:10 – moved in all pending CC games

• Another multi-week Week Notes!
• 🏅 I ran the 10K for the Army Run! I was consistent with last year's time, with my usual 65 minutes. To be more exact, this year I was 17 seconds slower, but I am still happy that I kept my pace for the full 10Km. It was a gorgeous day, not too cold, not too hot, perfect for running.
• 📘 I got a new cover for my Kobo, since my original one was falling apart. I had to get a knock-off copy, since Kobo stopped selling the original ones for the Kobo Libra H2O 2019. But it’s very similar to the original and works as intended.
• 🎲 I got a board game for two players: “7 Wonders Duel”. We haven't tried it yet, but I'm excited to see how it works. And while we were at the store, we got two expansion packs for Munchkin: “Unnatural Axe” and “Munchkin Enhancers”.
• 🎭 I've had days with extremely low energy these past few weeks, and I'm doing a full bloodwork evaluation for a check-up.
• ⏪ I felt lost and a bit overwhelmed at some point at work because I didn't have clarity on where to write my next actions and where to store digital information. I was trying to get a hybrid system going with Nirvana, my digital Calendar, and the Bullet Journal, and it became a mess. I decided that I want to minimize digital apps as much as possible.
• 💭 Thinking about doing a 30-day digital declutter next month.
• ⌨️ But I still enjoy typing long streams of consciousness entries. Some days it's nice to just log into 750 Words and type away. Since I type faster than I write by hand, it serves a different purpose for me: it's all about letting it all out without a filter.
• 📖 I started reading “The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper” by Roland Allen. It's super interesting, and it suits my current analog phase well.
• 🪮 I got a haircut!
• 👾 This blog now has a square spot at the Pixel Area! Thanks, Oleh! My square: Noisy Deadlines · [X:72 Y:11] at the Echo Heights neighborhood.

📌 Cool online reads

• Pixel Area: A cool online space where you can find personal blogs plotted in a  100×100 coordinate grid created by Oleh Providnyk. Check it out!
• Who is my (pixel) neighbor? by Joel: His own thoughts about Pixel Area, and some of his concerns are similar to mine as well. I believe it’s okay to use AI to help with some tasks, as long as it does not rob the user of their own creativity and critical thinking. The creator of this site is clear on how he created the website, and I think that what he created is a super cool blogroll.
• Who I blog for – Sylvia’s Studio: I loved this list, and I want to write one for myself too.
• The AI Doc: Not really the article itself, but the information that this new documentary by The Center of Humane Technology is out and I will watch it soon.
• The Strange Life of a Library Ebook – by Rachel Bachman
• Feeding our books into generative AI risks creating a cultural void | New Scientist
• The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI – Reactor

🎧 Listening

• The Wall by Pink Floyd (1979)
• Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath (1970)
• Paranoid by Black Sabbath (1970)
• Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd (1975)
• Human. :II: Nature by Nightwish (2020)

📖 Books I'm Reading

• The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
• Before, After, Alone by Emma Newman

—

#weeknotes

Romanticizing Your Life:

A concept made popular by social media.

Social media…we all have opinions about it.

Like almost anything, there is good and bad. Too much of any good thing can, of course, become obsessive and harmful. Like any resource, you can use it to benefit you, or you can let it suck you down the rabbit hole.

Am I guilty of doom scrolling?

Absolutely.

However , I’ve chosen to look at social media as a valuable resource when used intentionally, and tailored to your interests, especially when created by knowledgeable creators you believe share similar values and goals.

First there was Facebook, which eventually became more of a family affair and then somehow included the entire world and every acquaintance we have ever met! Then came Instagram for me during COVID, along with TikTok. Each of these seem to get a slightly different version of me- each one more raw, less filtered and more daringly myself than the last. 

And honestly? They have become tremendous outlet of self-expression for me, right alongside this blog, which I also started during the pandemic.

Little me used to love to role play.I fantasized about being a beautiful gown boss lady. Imagine that!?

I also revel in the magic of music (although I can barely carry a tune to my utter dismay) and art of dance. I have always prided myself on having a decent sense of humor. Never fully taking myself too seriously for too long. And sometimes I just like seeing myself in the background of my favorite music. Don’t judge. 

A little vain?

Perhaps.

Self-promotion?

Can’t argue. 

Wannabe influencer status?

Hardly. 

And lastly, harmful? 

Unlikely. 

I think if you stay realistic and humble, you should be allowed to express the different parts of yourself. Particularly the parts you don’t always get to express in everyday life.

Being a physician and educator requires one side of me.

Being a mom requires another.

But there is so much more depth and creativity in all of us. So much we have to say. 

Social media has played a positive role in my fitness and health journey over the last few years. The “glow-up,” if you will. This where I  have accumulated insane number of recipes,  workouts and beauty hacks. Heck, I have even shared a few myself! 

But one of my absolute favorite lessons I’ve taken from social media is this concept of romanticizing your life.

The funny thing is, I am certain I’ve been doing this exact thing inherently since I was much younger.Before it was “trending”.  

I’ve always kind of pretended my life was a movie. Not in the delusional sense. More like stepping outside of myself for a moment and realizing, this is my life. This moment, right here.

Sitting somewhere and consciously soaking in the beauty of a particular moment : special or completely mundane, in its entirety.

Because maybe that is really what romanticizing your life means.

Living your life with joy and intention.

Knowing that the gift of time along with our health are the most valuable things we have. Can’t be bought. Can’t be saved for later. And once a moment is gone, you will never live that exact moment again.

Maybe romanticizing your life is really just another way of saying:

Be here. Be present. 

Notice the breeze.

Notice the sky. 

Watching the faces of  your kids when they experience a new destination. 

Watching your parents doing something completely ordinary.

Capturing your kids riding their bikes on a summer evening and the echos of their footsteps on your floors. 

Stay up too late laughing with your siblings in adulthood , when you have an early morning flight to catch!

Sitting poolside with your besties with a glass of Aperol.

Savoring that first bite of food while desperately trying not to burn the roof of your mouth because you were not patient enough to wait! 

Letting the kiss linger for just a few seconds longer. Holding the glance. Staying in bed a few minutes longer. 

Relishing that car ride home from work or drive to the gym with the top down knowing you have an entire hour to yourself to move your body while your favorite songs blast through the speakers.

Notice your cats purring and your dog’s excitement when you come home, follow you around the house, and somehow all end up on your bed waiting for you to join them every night while you drag yourself through your 8 step beauty routine! 

These are the scenes.

Romanticizing your life also means taking ownership of it. YOU are the main character in this beautiful movie of yours. Surely not because everything revolves around you, but because this is the one life you actually get to live and curate parts of it of you are fortunate enough. 

You don’t have to wait for the vacation, the relationship, the milestone, the perfect body or some future version of yourself before you decide your life is worth enjoying.

Take the flight just for the weekend. Dine alone. Call the friend. Wear the outfit you’ve been saving. Buy yourself flowers. Take yourself to the beach to watch the sunset.

Take the selfies and the videos ( you know I love to). You and your loved ones will never be exactly the same as they are right in this moment in time.

Bake the cookies with your kids and have a darn bake-off! Turn an ordinary Tuesday evening into something you will treasure.

Every good movie has ups and downs. Tear jerking moments and utter ridiculous comedy ( of errors at times) and oh boy, the irony! Absolute chaos and absolute boredom. Plot twists. Grief. Isn’t that the achingly beautiful, breathtaking, poignant essence of life?

Romanticizing means living in gratitude.

Because God only knows, life is short.

And unpredictable.

And maybe part of romanticizing your life is also learning not to assign permanence to every single situation or every single person. 

Some moments are fleeting.

And maybe that is okay.

Not everyone who enters your story is meant to stay until the ending. Some people are there for a season. Some for a chapter. Some seemingly for one crazy, beautiful page!

It doesn’t mean it wasn’t real or meaningful.And it certainly doesn’t mean you cannot cherish the good that came from it.

Maybe the point isn’t to hold onto every beautiful thing.

Maybe it’s simply to notice it while it’s here.

To experience it fully.

Romanticize your life. 

It means you noticed.

That you lived it. 

Or YOLO… if you will :)

Publicat la 27 octombrie 2016

În secolul al XXI-lea, în orașul de provincie cu industrie pe cale de dispariție, lipsit de căldură și de apă caldă, și fără perspective de a le redobândi în această iarnă, dar cu hipermarket-uri care atrag cumpărători până și de pe celălalt mal al Dunării, iată că a apărut o librărie! Când am intrat fără o listă clară de cumpărături în (mini-)mall-ul severinean, imediat pe dreapta, am remarcat firma cea mare și roșie cu înscrisuri albe, diverta. De obicei folosesc intrarea dinspre sud, așa că stânga și dreapta, intrarea și ieșirea, sunt repere relative, deci nu vă bazați pe indicațiile mele de orientare. Cât despre remarcarea firmei, putem spune că ea mi-a atras atenția, nu neapărat că am remarcat-o eu.

În câțiva pași am ajuns în fața ușilor mari, de sticlă, larg deschise. Am avut tendința de a face o poză, dar nu am făcut-o (poate mâine, poate într-o altă zi…). Cel mai probabil pachetele surpriză gen „blind date with a book” aflate pe o masă la intrare, un concept nou la diverta, așa cum mi-a spus doamna amabilă de la librărie, m-au făcut să mă îndrept spre ele în loc să mai caut telefonul căruia să-i activez camera foto. Sesiunea foto am lăsat-o pentru mai târziu.


Dintre cele trei categorii menționate în colțul din stânga sus, am ales ficțiunea.


I look and stare so deep in your eyes I touch on you more and more every time When you leave I'm begging you not to go Call your name two or three times in a row

Snow Patrol – Crazy in Love lyrics

(Aș fi pus și clipul aici, dar nu îmi place melodia!)

Abia după ce am deschis pachetul am făcut legătura între prezentarea de pe hârtia de ambalaj și romanul ce se ascundea în spatele acesteia.


Cu ficțiunea am lămurit-o, versurile celor de la Snow Patrol sunt clar indicate, mai rămânea de văzut ce e cu Portland, Oregon. Cum nu am citit trilogia Grey (poate recenziile sunt cele care m-au ținut departe de aceasta), am căutat legătura dintre Grey și Portland. Iată ce am găsit pe International Business Times:

It’s been days since she ended things with Christian, and she’s completely miserable because of it — until he sends her an email on June 8 asking if she wants a ride to José’s art show in Portland. That’s where the new book picks up, with Christian anxiously waiting for Ana to leave work.

Așadar acolo începe acțiunea acestui roman, a acestei noi perspective ce urmează trilogiei.

Inițial mi-am zis că nu are rost să public această postare din motive pur statistice. Blogul meu are puține vizite. Din aceste puține vizite, probabil foarte puțini cititori ai rândurilor mele sunt din Severin, iar dintre aceștia, oare câți vor ajunge la diverta? În plus, reducerea de 10% oferită la toate cărțile cumpărate de la librăria diverta de la mall-ul severinean în această primă lună de la deschidere (mijlocul lui octombrie – mijlocul lui noiembrie), poate că nu e chiar atât de tentantă precum reducerile de până la 30% la cărțile de colorat pentru adulți oferite de carturești.ro, așa cum am aflat de la Vintura Ana-Cristina Butnaru și de prin ale ei Cărți ce tind spre infinit. Dar iată că aici intervin prietenii care m-au convins că nu are rost să fac astfel de calcule când este vorba despre litere! Oare de ce acești prieteni nu se hotărăsc odată să își facă blog, astfel încât să pun un link spre respectivul blog? Deocamdată voi folosi o imagine printre ale cărei comentarii se află și îndemnul meu la scris (sper să nu mă acuzi de încălcarea drepturilor de autor; după ce vei avea propriul blog, promit să leg poza de blogul tău)!


Am folosit poza și pentru că mi-a plăcut foarte mult mesajul! :–)

Despre cadoul surpriză v-am spus? Ei, păi cum să vă spun?! Surpriza vă așteaptă la librărie! Ce ziceți?! Faceți un drum? Poate nu chiar până la cea din Severin, poate doar la librăria cea mai apropiată de voi, sau poate la una online!

---

Epilog – 2026

Între timp, roșul firmei care mi-a atras atenția în urmă cu zece ani a fost luat de verdele unei alte librării faimoase de la noi: Cărturești. Există speranță: cărțile au rămas în același spațiu! Mergeți să le vizitați! E imposibil să nu vă îndrăgostiți de vreuna dintre ele!

Place : Assis sur une roche à côté de l'eau, Parc de l'Esplanade de la Pointe-Nord, Tiohtià:ke Date : 2026-09-28, 09:34 HAE Conditions : 13°C (mais on dirait plus froid avec le vent venant du nord-est), ciel couvert et une bruine légère.

Je barre la porte derrière moi vers neuf heures et le corridor beigeasse s'étire devant moi. Je fixe le tapis bleu marin, mon café encore chaud dans la main droite. Un mélange éthiopien d'un torréfacteur local, pas le plus frais, mais c'est de ma faute, ça. Je l'ai acheté il y a plusieurs semaines, et voilà, il m'en reste un tiers de sac ce lundi matin gris. Je sais pas pourquoi j'avais choisi ce jour-là pour aller flâner avec un café... Où est-ce que je vais m'installer pour lire, pour travailler?

Pourtant, les cafés, c'est mon terrain. J'ai fait la majorité de mon bac assis à la grande table de l'ancien Starbucks sur Sainte-Catherine et de la Visitation, où ma carte en or me valait des recharges gratuites et m'a appris à boire mon café noir. À Angus, c’étaient les cafés du secteur, le Sharpe surligné devant les grandes fenêtres qui donnent sur le parc Jean-Duceppe. Je draguais les serveurs des fois, juste pour le geste. Ça rapportait, ici et là: un sourire coquin, un numéro griffonné sur un bout de papier, glissé près des toilettes.

Pas ce matin, en tout cas. Avec un petit salut au portier, je pousse la porte, un soupir m'échappe, et je suis frappé par le vent. J'oublie toujours qu'à Montréal, il y a beaucoup d'endroits qui sont fermés les lundis. Bon. Moi et mon café filons vers les portes grises de la Place-des-Arts, en pleine revitalisation, des barrières et des panneaux colorés essayant, naïvement, de cacher l'ampleur du désordre. L'entrée est à moitié éventrée, tout comme le MAC voisin, tout comme l'Édifice des théâtres. La ville se réécrit sans cesse, un brouillon que je relis de temps à autre pour me souvenir de ses origines et de la façon dont j'ai grandi avec elle.

Le vent et mon café brouillent mon parcours traditionnel vers la rive. Il me faut une autre direction. Je prends le métro, direction Angrignon, jusqu'à McGill avant de transférer au REM. La voix de Caroline Dhavernas réverbère dans le plastique des murs et des sièges du train : « Direction A1: Brossard », et je m'installe avec mon livre du moment, un recueil de poésie de Mosab Abu Toha. Une vue imprenable de la ville déferle devant les fenêtres, mais je suis ailleurs, tremblant à ses côtés dans un camp de réfugiés à Jabalia, en plein génocide. Le son du train et le son des drones résonnent tous les deux dans ma tête, et je ne sais plus lequel appartient à qui. Je débarque à la station Île-des-Sœurs : « Les portes s'ouvriront sur le côté… droit. » Merci, Caro.

Je flâne sur les trottoirs sous le pont Samuel-de-Champlain, vers le parc de L'Esplanade de la Pointe-Nord. La bruine a commencé sans que je m'en rende compte. Je remonte mon capuchon. Le tissu humide se colle à ma nuque, et ça revient, presque un réflexe : Michael Brown, le hoodie comme preuve, comme sentence. Je me concentre sur ma respiration. Je garde mon capuchon. Je continue à marcher.

Une pancarte à l'entrée du parc m'explique que « cet endroit est une esplanade (une plaine) située sur la pointe nord de l'Île des Sœurs. » En tout cas, ce que le nom perd en créativité, il le gagne en clarté, hein? Je ris un peu et je me dirige, comme toujours, vers l'eau. J'y passe un bon moment, accoté sur une roche au bord du fleuve, profitant enfin de mon café et d'un moment de solitude parmi le chaos.

Mes épaules restent hautes, mon pas veut toujours arriver quelque part. Freiner mon élan demande un effort considérable. De ne pas avoir besoin de fuir, au fond. Alors je flâne: je gribouille mon numéro sur des bouts de factures pour qu'on me retienne, et je m'accroche aux accrocs d'un tissu urbain qui ne sait toujours pas m'intégrer. Pas plus que je ne sais démêler, encore, le bruit d'un train de celui d'un drone, quelque part, sous le vent.

Note: event in Serbian, for local audience.

Umetnici često dele opremu, znanja i kontakte, pomažu jedni drugima u pripremi izložbi i pronalaze načine da zajedno rade. Osnivanjem zadruge O.U.R. COOP krenuli smo da razvijamo zajedničko poslovanje kroz koje možemo da udružujemo sredstva, stvaramo plaćene poslove i organizujemo uzajamnu podršku.

U sredu, 7. oktobra u 19 časova, u Galeriji Stara kapetanija u Zemunu, razgovaraćemo o tome kako gradimo zadrugu i šta kroz nju želimo da ostvarimo. Susret organizujemo u saradnji sa Društvom likovnih i primenjenih umetnika Zemuna, sa željom da upoznamo umetničku zajednicu okupljenu oko galerije i udruženja, čujemo iskustva umetnika i razgovaramo o mogućoj saradnji.

Predstavićemo zadrugu i međunarodni projekat Shared Visions, u okviru kojeg je nastala. Govorićemo o onome što već razvijamo, od onlajn galerije do oblika solidarne podrške, o tome šta će uskoro biti pokrenuto i kakvi su nam dalji planovi. Biće prostora za pitanja o tome kako se donose odluke, kako se dele poslovi i šta članstvo podrazumeva, kao i za razgovor o prijemu novih članova i načinima uključivanja.

Zadruga je još na početku, pa nas zanima šta bi umetnicima bilo korisno da zajednički organizuju, koja znanja i resurse žele da podele i u čemu vide prostor za saradnju. Poziv je otvoren za umetnike, radnike u kulturi i sve koje zanima zadružno organizovanje.

O.U.R. COOP je međunarodna socijalna zadruga vizuelnih umetnika i radnika u kulturi, osnovana 2026. godine u Nikšiću, sa sedištem u Beogradu. Članovi zajednički upravljaju zadrugom po principu jedan član, jedan glas.

The event will be held in Serbian, with the possibility of side conversation in English.

Publicat la 18 octombrie 2016

Poate că într-o zi avea să o vadă. Între timp însă, atâtea luni prețioase își urmau cursul, irosite! (pag. 41)

— Tu unde o să dormi? întrebă Port. — Aici, pe jos, lângă tine, spuse ea. (pag. 190)

De ceva vreme am început să îmi notez propoziții, fraze, paragrafe din cărțile pe care le citesc. Uneori acestea ajung în postările de pe blog. Spre deosebire de alte cărți, am constatat că Ceai în Sahara a umplut foarte multe rânduri în fișierul cu citate.

Ecranizarea romanului lui Paul Bowles, Ceai în Sahara, poartă titlul original, The Sheltering Sky. Am mai scris despre Ceai în Sahara în postarea Doar noapte. La mai mult timp după vizionarea filmului am găsit cartea, publicată de Editura Polirom în cadrul seriei (sau colecției) Esențial, cartea fiind indisponibilă la momentul vizionării.

Ca dramatism și tragism al desfășurării evenimentelor din roman (scrisesem „acțiunii”, dar acesta e un termen prea activ pentru ceea ce se petrece printre rândurile cărții), aș asocia talentul de romancier al lui Bowles cu cel de regizor al lui Aronofsky. Și asta nu la modul general, Ceai în Sahara fiind prima carte a lui Bowles care îmi pică în mână, ci la modul particular al asocierii romanului Ceai în Sahara cu filmul The Fountain. Poate mai potrivită ar fi comparația roman–film, dar va veni și rândul acestei comparații.

La filmul The Sheltering Sky (în distribuție, Debra Winger și John Malkovich) nu am regăsit decât o vagă nuanță din esența sentimental-emoțională a romanului… Durata limitată a filmului e o scuză plauzibilă…

🎼🎶🎵 The Police – Tea in the Sahara

This is the first photograph ever made. Captured using a process called 'Heliography' by Nicéphore Niépce. He coated a pewter plate with bitumen (a type of asphalt) that hardened when exposed to light. The unhardened parts were washed away with lavender oil.

---

“Hang Gliders” by WhyDolls is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

JOURNAL 28 septembre 2026

Ça me coûte d'évoquer ce qui va suivre mais il faut que je dise.

Le médecin légiste a trouvé des griffures sur le corps de ce salaud sur le cou du côté droit. Des coups rapprochés sur l'avant du tibia droit. Traces récentes. Ça signifie pour lui que la victime a été attaquée par derrière, elle s'est défendue mais elle a très vite cessé. Il pense que l'agresseur a utilisé un lacet pour l'étranger, le flux sanguin est très rapidement coupé entraînant une perte de connaissance très rapide. Les mains de l'agresseur devaient se trouver derrière sa nuque c'est pourquoi elle n'a pu atteindre que le cou. Pour l'enquêteur la voiture devait être garée devant l'entrée, il y a une place arrêt 15 minutes pour les livraisons de la petite boutique à côté, celle-ci ouvre plus tard. Le gérant descend généralement ½ h après shieko. Il n'y a pas d'autre mouvement dans l'immeuble qui n'a que 2 appartements, l’agresseur devait attendre shieko dans un écart derrière l’escalier dans le hall. Il disposait d'au moins 20 minutes. La lutte n'a pas duré plus d'une minute au maximum deux. Il a pu charger le corps dans la voiture, fouiller le sac de shie, trouver le hanko, monter un étage et glisser la lettre sous la porte puis repartir le tout en moins de 20 minutes. Pas un cri pas un bruit.

Notre shie ne s'est pas laissée faire, mais sans entraînement elle ne pouvait rien faire. Ce genre d'agression on a une ou deux secondes pour s’en sortir pas plus à condition de savoir précisément comment faire. Le cerveau cesse très vite d'être capable de réagir. C'est affreux. Les larmes me viennent. Si javais été là... Pardon je ne peux pas dire plus.

#shieko