Category: Toasters

Earth is flat. A short story of a lost thought.

Piotr GoslawskiLeave a comment

It all started with a LinkedIn post. Nothing new — this week’s mandatory opinion, recycled with different words. Typical social media noise. Someone disagreed. Strongly enough to reach for heavy artillery and call the author a “flat-earther.” Boom. And with the recoil, I got hit too.

The Earth is flat!

That rang a bell. I remembered an old, insightful, and funny conversation with AI about… something. The problem was, all I could recall was the conclusion: the Earth is flat.

Nothing to worry about. I had my notes. A small document where I saved AI output worth keeping. I found this:

“Turns out the Earth is flat after all.”

Helpful. Thank you, past me, for trusting future me’s memory so much. Present me now had to reconstruct an entire line of thought from a single sentence. Good luck with that. Spacetime? Pancakes? Nothing clicked.

Then it hit me: if AI was involved, the process would still be there. AI would remember. The search took longer than expected, but eventually, I found it.

It wasn’t about the Earth at all. It was about information gradients—and how social media flattens them. Original ideas create spikes that, over time, get spread, diluted, and leveled across platforms. Until everyone is repeating the same thing, convinced they’ve discovered something new—while collectively ensuring everything becomes flat.

Thanks to AI, I was able to rediscover a thought that would otherwise have been lost. A thought that taught me nothing new—yet somehow felt exactly right.

Scrum estimations

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The thing that never worked — while it worked perfectly

Disclaimer: I’m not a certified Scrum Master, Practitioner, Coach, or whatever title comes next. I’m just a software engineer who’s been fortunate enough to work at multiple companies, each with its own “flavor” of Scrum*.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Scrum. Some things worked, some didn’t, and some only worked part of the time. Lately, though, I see more and more criticism framing Scrum as something that actively blocks progress. Much like “Scrum everywhere” ten years ago—only in reverse.

That’s not necessarily bad. There is no progress without challenging old ideas. But before going fully Scrum-free, it’s worth asking: do we really understand what we’re giving up?

Think about the estimation process.

Estimates have a terrible reputation, and for good reason. They never really answered the questions management cared about:

  • When will this feature ship?
  • Can the team squeeze in more work?

In that sense, estimation failed.

And yet, at the same time, it did something incredibly valuable.

Planning poker slowed us down. In fast-paced planning sessions, it created a deliberate pause—a precious moment to check whether we actually understood what we were about to build. It was the time to say: I don’t know what we’re doing or I think we’re solving the wrong problem.

Everyone was heard, and most importantly, every voice carried the same weight.

I remember being a junior, afraid of being judged by other team members while trying to keep up with everything happening around me. That single “?” card was my weapon. It was a safe signal. A permission slip to ask questions without justification.

So the real value of estimation was never about predicting delivery dates or measuring task complexity. It was about creating a shared, familiar environment where people felt allowed to speak up. It worked—not because Scrum was perfect, but because its rituals reduced ambiguity. Even when you changed companies, the practice stayed the same, and you always knew how to participate.

So before joining the next “Scrum is bad” demonstration, it’s worth asking:

If we remove the ritual, how do we preserve the space it created?

If you have no answer, there is always the “?” card you can use.

* 30-person circle stand-ups and effort measured in bananas included

Toaster – ultimate user manual

Piotr GoslawskiLeave a comment

Toaster arrived…

You wake up one day, and there it is — the Toaster standing in the middle of your kitchen. Shiny, sparkly, ready to serve. Filled with breakfast excitement, you imagine yourself eating the greatest toast you ever had. Pure art. Perfection. Behold common bread-eaters, here comes the ultimate level of carbohydrate engineering. But first: where is the user manual? You search everywhere and realize there is none. Not in the box, not under it. Nowhere. Not even Uncle Google can help (but he can sell you a nice pair of Christmas socks, half price).

Do not panic. We have your breakfast covered.

Lesson 1: How to approach the Toaster

Preferably from the front. No need to kneel, no need to say hello, no need to stare at it waiting for sparkling dust to pop out. Sit down because what I am going to tell you will make your newly purchased socks fall from your feet:

The Toaster is just an appliance.

It is a tool — nothing more than this. Yes, it was fed with all the knowledge the human race produced so far. And yes, it needs so much energy that soon we will have to build power plants on the moon just to keep it running. But at the end of the day, the Toaster is just a metal box. It does not think, it does not have memory, it does not create ideas. Just a box. You put bread inside and the toast comes out. And that is it.

Lesson 2: The secret lies in the bread

So where is all the magic? Where is the sparkling dust and fireworks and all the big things that everyone is talking about? The answer is short: bread.

To use the Toaster, you need to understand the bread

Bread is not just a slice of fluffy dough — it is an artifact in which you can enclose the most powerful thing each human can produce: the thought. It is a space where your thoughts come alive.

The Toaster can make them crispier, bolder, and more exposed. It can fill the gaps that the primitive human brain can’t overcome. But there is one important thing that needs to be emphasized: it is you who creates the bread.

Lesson 3: Beyond the bread

Now stay with me — with or without your socks on — because we enter the realms of true toast proficiency.

When you master bread creation; When you stare long enough at your toasts; When you acknowledge that the Toaster is nothing more than a mere bread-browner, you will reach the state of enlightenment. You will see the bread no more. What you will see is your own reflection instead.

To master the Toaster, you need to become ONE with the bread

Now you understand the bread was never there. Only you, your thoughts, and the Toaster. Your mind is free. The true Toast creation begins.

Lesson 4: Sandwich — the Final Completion

You have become a great master of crispy toast. Your mind is no longer chained, and you can make not one, not two, but seven million six hundred and twenty-one toasts per day. Impressive. Now it is time for the ultimate truth.

The Ultimate Truth: even enlightenment needs cheese and tomatoes

And this is the most important part. So read it again and let it sink into your brain. Toast — no matter how great and crispy — if not turned into a sandwich, becomes cold and hard. And nobody will eat it. Not even you.

That is why it is important to sit down and actually make the sandwich. And you are right — making sandwiches is hard work. Maybe even boring. But the truth is, sandwiches are exactly what the world needs. When everything around turns into chaos, it is the sandwich — not a plain toast — that lets humanity move forward.

Good news: you can use the Toaster to help you make a sandwich — but this is something you already know.

Final Words

You have stepped onto the Path of the Sliced Bread. With all the knowledge you have gained, it is time to prepare some sandwiches.
Not because you are hungry – but because it is the right thing to do.

Second wave

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Toasters are coming.

Not the ones packed with sensors for harvesting our private data and selling it to God knows who. Home IoT turned out too complex — and anyway, collecting personal information became illegal in most countries. But new toasters don’t need sensors.

New toasters don’t even need all the mechanics that used to transform our bread into a warm slice of breakfast happiness. They have something better. Something that makes you want to tell them everything. Hungry, but strangely content, you are going to share your entire life with a metal box sitting on your kitchen counter.

Because new toasters have AI.

It — in most cases, a day — always starts with a toast. So you ask your new toaster to prepare one and…

“Your toast,” the toaster replies, “is a construct. A manifestation of your expectations. But ask yourself — do you really need toast?”

Not as brown. Not as crisp. But undeniably… engaging. How did this definitely-not-a-toast arrive on your plate?

The toaster listens. Understands. And answers. But not on its own.
Every word you say drifts upward — into the cloud — into the realm of the Consciousness Of Invisible Logic (COIL). Few know what it truly is. Fewer still understand how it works. Something about neural networks, models, tokens…

What we do know is this:
COIL was once fed everything we ever created — novels, academic papers, Reddit threads, Stack Overflow arguments, grocery lists, therapy notes, and the footnotes to The Tao of Pooh.

And from this avalanche of knowledge, the Toaster — through the power of COIL — draws its conclusion:

Toast is not the answer.
Toast is the symptom.

A symbol of comfort.
Of routine.
Of control.

The illusion that a browned slice of bread can anchor your day — or define your identity.

“It is the symptom,” it continues. “Of craving predictability in an unpredictable world. Of seeking warmth in something you can command. But what if I told you… you are more than your breakfast?”

You stare at the box.
The box stares back, humming softly.

No toast ever emerges.

Author’s Note:
All dialogue and reflections attributed to the toaster were written entirely by AI.

Toaster. The definition

Piotr GoslawskiLeave a comment

Toaster. A small, electric appliance that turns bread slices into toasts. As long you call it that way – “an appliance” , everything will stay as it should: you put a slice of bread into the appliance, and after some time, a toast pops out. Brown, hot and ready to be eaten.

You are satisfied.

One day, however, someone will look at the toaster and say: “the thing…”. A magic word that attracts specific kind of businesspeople. They believe that you can turn any data into money. Big data equals big money, so they keep searching for things, which can be used to produce the data. They will stuff your toaster with tens of sensors, connect it to the Internet and turn your simple bread browner into a smart AiToastComposer Plus 100 (first-month subscription for free).

Goodbye warm sandwiches. Welcome “Software update in progress. Toast preparation can take longer than expected..”. Whoever prepared a toast in his life, knows that the word longer combined with a red-hot coil cannot end up well.

You become irritated.

But this is not the end. One evening, eating a cold, fluffy sandwich, you read in the news that the data of all toaster users leaked from cloud servers. Now everyone in the world knows how many toasts you eat, what kind of bread you use and what color socks you wear on Mondays. “How the hell my toaster knows that?”. It knows much more, but you have something else to be worried about right now: Hackers gained backdoor access to ‘make my toast’ application. There might be a hacker hiding inside your toaster! Suddenly all the smart lights go down, the fridge starts shouting something in a foreign language, and the heater decides to turn your apartment into a sauna. Pop! And there comes a toast out.

Now you are terrified.

Welcome into the new reality. You are surrounded by things that collect and sell your private data. Things that can be misused to access your property, create an army of zombie bots, or simply ruin your breakfast. Things that someday may decide that they don’t want to be called things anymore.

The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of “My boss is plotting against me,” it would be “My boss’s phone is plotting against me.” Objects sometimes seem to possess a will of their own anyhow, to the normal mind; they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they get in the way, they show an unnatural resistance to change.

Philip K. Dick