Earlier this year as part of a transition from fulltime employment to a new entrepreneurial chapter in my career, Stuff is Parts was incorporated as the name of a Limited Liability Corporation in the state of Massachusetts. SiP LLC represents the banner under which I will explore business opportunities that I hope will form the next part of my career. The description of SiP LLC’s business in the LLC application was framed in the widest possible terms to allow maximum flexibility as the vision driving the form and function that the business may take takes shape.

Although I have more whacky ideas for business ventures than time to explore them, the top priority for me at the moment is to finish the book I’ve been working on since well before I started this blog as a means to explore its ideas. Although you wouldn’t know it from the blog and, admittedly, its moved forward very slowly in fits and spurts over the past few years, the book is very much alive. I have a publishing contract with Taylor & Francis, who have been very patient with me, under which I’m now steadily working more or less fulltime on finishing Navigating Possibility Space.

Writing a book is hard and the nature of both its execution and value are complicated in unprecedented ways these days by the emergence of AI. I’ve decided the ideas I’m writing about are important enough to me and have been developing for so long toward book form, however, that I would like to finish the book regardless of how it might hold up or be received in this new arena of computer-generated content. And so, although I suspect it will take me quite a few more months, I will continue to forge forward learning this complicated book writing craft and trying to get these ideas down in a clear and useful way. I believe the form that the SiP LLC business will ultimately take will be supported and informed by the ideas in the book and, perhaps, emerge in some way alongside opportunities the publication of the book may create.

All this brings me to the point of this post! Besides a long overdue check-in, proof of life so to speak, I’d like to create a little bridge from the past form of this blog, anemic though it has been, to a new form. In part I expect the new form will be bloggy posts of thoughts and observations that I now have more time and incentive to explore in the landscape of new business opportunities. Many of these bits of content that I’d like to share come up in the course of writing and researching for the book. This blog seems like the perfect place to do so, not only simply to share what I think are cool bits of content, but to create some degree of visibility into the evolving ideas that will hopefully develop into something with more business consequence through SiP LLC.

Some of the notable bits I’d like to share have come from interacting with AI, specifically, so far, with ChatGPT. I have every expectation that effective integration of AI is going to be an increasingly necessary part of all competitive businesses going forward, particularly content creation businesses. I’m both a little anxious and quite a bit excited about the opportunities it may provide when embraced with good intent. To be clear, to date I have not found ChatGPT to be a very good writer and have not been using ChatGPT generated content, apart from factual content, as part of the writing of the book. For myself personally, the expression of ideas in the book as an act of personal creation is the point, so I’m not particularly interested in AI assisted writing on that level. But I have found ChatGPT, although sometimes a frustrating source of circular hallucination-ridden interactions, to occasionally be a really effective sounding board and, when corroborated with some fact checking, a good way to do at least provisional research. I expect that will get better over time. Perhaps very, very quickly. And I look forward to experiencing that as a user.

I think that covers the key points! Gotta get back to thinking and writing. Enjoy!