The Open Eyed Man

The Open Eyed Man

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Latest — 02 Dec 2025

The Blind Mans Arms

I just created my first website, The Blind Mans Arms, without code or help from a sighted person. It’s simple, but shows how easy it is to spin up the digital side of a business today. It even has a conversational voice agent. Running a great gastro pub, though, still takes real human skill.

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Brain the size of a planet and still cannot make the tea

Humanity’s Last Exam is a fiendishly hard benchmark for human like intelligence. But a good score at this benchmark does not correlate to simple tasks in the real world like making tea. Assistive tech for independent living in a visual world must handle such mundane tasks robustly.

The Double Edged Sword

Audio Narration0:00/410.3053061224491× A key measure of AI progress is the length of time a model can work on so called ‘long horizon tasks’ without going off the rails. Most high value real world jobs involve some ‘long horizon tasks’, i.e. tasks that take hours rather than

Managing inclusivity debt

My life is extraordinarily good—I feel lucky and hardly notice my blindness, though I love calling it an affliction. I can accept bad infrastructure, but not lazy digital inaccessibility. Conversational voice AI can finally repay the world’s vast inclusivity debt.

The Seductive Nature of the Chatbox

LLMs can be brilliant yet bafflingly bad. Often it’s faster, cheaper, and more reliable to just write code—or better still, skip the chat entirely and do things the old-fashioned way.

How Durable are Diamonds?

AI replacing junior roles risks creating unstable, inverted corporate pyramids unless leaders and policymakers act to preserve diamond-shaped structures in industries with traditional “up-or-out” cultures.

A Bad Prompt Wrangler Blames their Agent

Effective use of a Large Language Model requires effective prompting. Anthropic’s new Skills feature lets enterprises and users provide structured context that Claude loads dynamically, making prompting more reliable, consistent, and performant.

Inclusivity versus Privacy in the Age of Smart Glasses

Smart glasses have real utility for vision impaired users. These glasses are however disconcerting in public places for others with privacy concerns. How can we resolve this dilemma?

Swarms of agents in a financial house of cards

Stripe and Open AI have announced an open source platform for agentic shopping and payments. This will spawn a myriad of agents that can buy anything you need and everything you don't. With a global financial system that is already a house of cards, what could possibly go wrong?

Old MacDonald had A Farm, AI-AI-O

Last week’s OpenAI announcement of their Pulse Personal Assistant is significant and may usher in an era of ad supported agents. Meanwhile brands are considering Answer Engine Optimisation as the successor to Search Engine Optimisation.