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jesse.blog

Official Blog of Jesse Friedman

Jesse Friedman

Writer. Speaker. Innovator. Leader.

Writer. Speaker. Innovator. Leader.

NY — MA — RI

Projects

These are the projects I am working on openly. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them in the comments. I am going to be posting old-style-blog posts on these projects. These updates aren’t in-depth articles, they are quick, off the cuff updates.

ARC

ARC came from Automattic’s first RSM (radical speed month) where my friend and colleague Derek Smart and I paired up to change the way we consume content from a website. For the entirty of the Internet, we have been viewing paintings in a dark cave with a flash light. You can only “consume” what you shine the light on and really have no idea whether the button you click is going to reap the results you’re looking for. ARC sets out to switch the paradigm. Instead of “pulling” content into your browser, ARC “pushes” personalized, but human-crafted content to you in real-time.

  • Human Authored; AI Inferred

    I cover how a month of building human-centered AI taught me less about machines than about the work only I can do. Twenty years of sales instinct, finally written down because a machine couldn’t run on the same instinct. And how this fed my ideas for a talk in Chicago about what happens when the…

  • Accepted to the AI World’s Fair

    I am very proud to announce that Derek Smart and I will be presenting ARC at the AI World’s Fair in San Francisco. Woven In: Building AI Around the Human Work It Should Not Replace Speakers: Jesse Friedman & Derek Smart Talk: How Automattic separated human-authored judgment from AI-inferred context and built ARC around the…

Secret Color Garden

Updates to the project: Secret Color Garden is a website — not unlike csszengarden.com — but instead of having static HTML and modifying the CSS to showcase what is possible with CSS, the Secret Color Garden is a way of showcasing color palette’s found in real-life. I started collecting colors by taking photographs of things I found in nature, on the street, on a dinner plate, or at a museum.  I wanted a way to source those colors and put them on display.

  • Real world colors

    I love collecting colors I find in the real world. There is no competition, Nature is the best designer in the universe. But great colors schemes can be found on the plate at your favorite restaurant, on graffiti on the street, and in a ton of other places. Secret Color Garden is a project I’m…

Day Two

Day Two is an experiment in allowing me to focus my time on journaling and writing in Day One the fully end-to-end encrypted journaling app. I chose Day One, not only because it’s made by Automattic, but it’s also a beautiful journaling app that I feel completely safe pouring my heart into. Using Claude Code I am able to digest, metabolize, organize, and then feedback to me my own content.

  • Why

    AI should be empowering, not fear inducing. Period. Are we there yet? No, I don’t think so. One of my core philosophies around the use of AI is that it should empower me to focus on what makes me special, what skills I can cultivate, what talents I can enhance. For example, I want AI…