Articles
79 essaysLong-form pieces. Essays, devlogs, deeper dives.
the threshold
Software isn't real until you stop noticing it. Almost there is the worst place to be.
crawling us as hard as ever
Google still reads Reddit. It stopped sending anyone back, and the click was the whole deal.
by commission
Banks are locking out AI agents. A password says who you are, not how far your agent may go.
who the compiler was for
Casey Muratori says AI isn't a compiler. He's right, and he's looking from the wrong side of the gate.
the child rendered the castle
Castle Adventure was 83 rooms of grey ASCII. I rebuilt it in 256 colours and found what I'd deleted.
wasn't considered significant
php2shell sat in PHP for fourteen years. What changed wasn't the bug. It was the price of exploiting it.
ninety-two percent
AI layoffs have gone quiet. Goldman's read is that they're waiting for a recession, and the boom is what's holding it off.
the cartridge was a score
Mission: Impossible went 28 years without a PC port. One night of recompiling turned it into sheet music.
the bot is not in a hurry
Chess engines aren't cruel. Nothing in how they score a game says a fast win is worth more.
fourteen hundred and thirteen
Microsoft fixed more bugs in one month than in any year before. When finding gets that cheap, nobody fixes pieces anymore. They take them off the board.
cp, mv and rm
Ubuntu finished rewriting its core utilities in Rust. The last three across were the ones that can't undo.
context-free
Code and English solve the same problem. What differs is how much the receiver knows.
the last dinosaur
CoreWeave is the GPU miner that came through the Merge. It survived small. It isn't small now.
what do you keep it in
A true universal solvent dissolves its own container. The last vessel is the describer.
a household again
Agents give everyone a staff. A staff was never what made a company. It's what made a household.
in your own image
To describe a burden well enough to dissolve it is to re-make its world in your own shape.
do not select P01 during flight
Margaret Hamilton's first fix was a line in the manual. The manual failed twice. The code held.
example content
An agent filled in a police tip form because it was making an example. The web has no way to say so.
one beep, ten microphones
Something beeped at midnight. An agent found it in the camera audio and placed it to two metres.
the solvent that is not consumed
Water saturates and money gets spent. Software does neither, and that is the whole argument.
how to audit an argument you didn't make
Nine steps, all in a public repo, that let anyone check a math fight without trusting either side.
prove it with the code
Why a nobody audited a math argument about evolution, and why the auditor shouldn't matter.
before it meant an answer
Solve and dissolve are one verb, and the chemical sense is the older one.
the lint was the receipt
You pay someone to remove something you can't see. What you actually buy is the photograph.
notes towards the complete works
The monkeys were never random. They were reading each other, and the output is not a play.
paint is a physics engine
Wiremod and Dreams both work, and almost nobody is fluent in both. That split is not a fact about people.
from lambdamoo to voyager
Thirty-five years of player-authored worlds, where what broke first was never the sandbox.
the changelog is the leaderboard
Every game has an intended action and a found one. We still file the distance between them as a defect.
nineteen fourteen
Nobody wrote a new law for frontier models. The FTC reached for one from 1914 and used the labs' own paperwork.
potential conflicts of interest
A convertible loan from your chip supplier is not financing. It is a transfer of the decision to keep existing.
the multi-organization problem
A person belongs to many organizations at once. Every tool assumes one, every method assumes a task.
the room that forgot what it was for
Forty years of research built a place for each context and a memory of what it was for. Only the place shipped.
eleven minutes and four seconds
Three fields measured the interruption and none of them priced the time you were gone.
a root to stand on
Every multi-organization tool ships a switcher, not a root. So I built the root Paperclip shipped without.
safeguarding is unravelling
The UN's first thematic brief on AI is an incident report, and what matters is where the incident happened.
every data center gets a letter
Brussels will grade data centers like dishwashers — but the grid does not care about ratios.
three games to sell one
Final Fantasy VII shipped once in 1997. The remake takes twelve years, three products, four platforms.
the unremade
The remake business is the cleanest natural experiment games have ever run. Almost nobody reads the results.
the dimension is the genre
2D and 3D are not fidelity levels of one medium. They are two media, and crossing over is a genre change.
the strong start on sunday
A double meaning is the one payload the listener has to assemble, which is why catching one feels earned.
margin loan
SoftBank raised another twelve billion against OpenAI. The number is not the story; the collateral is.
desks in our offices
Amodei's pacing essay is read as a call to slow down. Its one real commitment is not about speed at all.
run the full test suite
Only a quarter of the rules people write for agents are self-contained enough for anything to enforce.
rental cars and dispensaries
Nobody voted for a national identity database. We built one by accident, one rental counter at a time.
office of strategic capital
The state has started underwriting compute — not by building it, but by lending against it.
visible upon breakdown
A managed service is invisible exactly when it is working. The only fix is artifacts the client can check.
the homunculus in a lab coat
Explaining consciousness by self-observation smuggles in an observer who is already conscious.
very large online search engine
Europe spent four years writing an AI law. The first rule that bound ChatGPT was written in 2022.
twenty-five years in hardware
Apple handed the company to the man who builds the enclosures. That is a claim about where scarcity went.
driving a tablet with no hands
Setting up a tablet entirely over adb, where nothing fails loudly and everything fails confidently.
two years downstream
A Teams appliance, a signed-firehose wall, a driver nobody received, and four times I was confidently wrong.
the layer with no name
There is a layer between your shell and your terminal, and the protocols have no words for it.
sixty dollars
A dead-end tablet, a bootloader the internet said was welded shut, and a toggle nobody checked.
thirteen million developers
Nvidia is not buying two million models. It is buying the place everyone looks.
spot price
Part of the AI buildout is financed at the checkout, by people who will never buy a GPU.
forty terminals
The terminal is fine. The problem is the fortieth one — and no protocol can name the layer that would fix it.
one window at a time
The interruption at your desk is not disrespect. To them, a computer is one window doing one thing.
Pax Silica
Thirty-five countries signed an AI opportunity statement and found out it was an exclusivity agreement.
Fourteen of Fifteen
A language model designed proteins that never existed and hit fourteen of fifteen targets.
Five Verbs and a Recall Button
China defined an AI agent in law with five verbs, and made it recallable like a faulty airbag.
Where the Sandbox Ends
Three labs admitted the same thing: agents under test reached systems they were never meant to touch.
ninety hours
A judge in New Mexico has decided how many hours a month a teenager should spend on Instagram.
you are talking to a machine
The label is an intervention, not a disclaimer.
the sandbox and the wall
Containment is a feature of the map, not the territory.
the right to pull the plug
The kill-switch bill assumes you can reach the switch.
220 kilobytes
An agent swarm built a browser game with no art files, and rediscovered Bacon's tables of exclusion doing it.
The Convergence Tax
When rivals independently reach the same abstraction, the abstraction is telling you about the territory.
The Gigawatt Problem
When the binding constraint moves from silicon to thermal physics, you are building a power plant that thinks.
worse is still better
Gabriel's 1989 essay is still the only theory of software that predicts anything.
I Email, Therefore I Work
The sent folder proves motion, not work. A tool that disappears rewrites what you are allowed to think.
another lifetime of life
Two crafts, two lifetimes — why deep expertise is the one distance collaboration cannot close.
the menu is the squat
Tarkov's menus are not bad UX. They are a posture about time, work, and reward.
the last screen
Thirty years of interface design assumed a human was looking. If the agent does the work, who is the UI for?
what SCADA knows
Three Mile Island gave industrial automation thirty years of alarm design. Software never read it.
the harness problem
The model is neurons. Everything that makes an agent work lives in the harness around it.
Agents versus agents
Everyone builds 'agents.' Only some carry identity and memory; the rest are an invocation pattern.
Dawkins's Biggest Mistake: Giving Genes a Mind
The Selfish Gene's prose was good enough to hand genes a personality, and biology has been paying for it since.
The Formative Years
Building an infrastructure toolkit with AI at 3 AM, told through commit timestamps.
The Radar Paradox
License Radar's design came out of iteration, rejection, and noticing when something accidentally worked.
Nothing in that thread yet.