Posts
79 postsA few paragraphs with a title: one idea, argued and done. The one-liners and links are under notes; the long pieces are essays.
the bytes don't remember the names
Here is a line from the Wave Race 64 source: if (1) {} // FAKE: gives the original's i * 19 (shifts, not a multu by a hoisted 19) It does nothing. …
for their father
A Roman coffin at Westminster Abbey was dug up in 1869 with the wrong man in it. This week, a hundred and fifty years later, we got the best guess yet …
64 riders in Wave Race 64
Wave Race 64 puts four jet skis on the water: you and three computer riders. I want to turn it into a 64-rider elimination race, where everyone starts …
the only way to win
Richard Hamming explained it to a room at Bellcore in 1986. It reads differently now that the typing is free. Immerse yourself in the work. It’s …
a thing to make another thing
In 1773 James Boswell wrote down a definition of a human being: an animal that makes “a thing, by means of which he can make another …
slate on top
In normal archaeology you dig down to reach the old thing. In Norway’s mountains the old thing is lying on the surface, and that fact is the …
you want spec, I give spec
Someone handed me a customer and a spec request. It’s a small thing, and I think it’s the shape of the next ten years of work. The handoff …
we gave it a shell
The first thing anyone did with a machine that could act was hand it a terminal. It wasn't nostalgia.
softbank became an asset class
The record junk bond sale is not the number to watch. The share of the market it represents is. Last week in margin loan I noted reporting on a …
no process control block
The kernel's context switch is cheap because it saves state first. Ours has no block to save to.
name it after the paper
A tickler file is office furniture. An accordion of folders — thirty-one for the days of the month, twelve for the months of the year — and the only …
may 2018 to february 2020
Ireland fined Google €403 million on Monday. The fine is for conduct that stopped six and a half years ago. The Irish Data Protection Commission …
interest, not a toll
Context switching isn't a toll you pay per switch. It's interest on every organization you're not in.
human multi-tenancy
Multi-tenancy was solved for machines two decades ago. For the people running them, it's still memory.
half the crop had no buyer
About half of California’s wine grapes went into this harvest with nobody contracted to buy them. A vineyard cannot respond to that the way a …
agents don't donate
Package registries are buckling under download growth driven by coding agents. The bandwidth bill is the small problem. On 16 September the OpenSSF …
the runoff
For forty years consumer volume paid for the leading edge and the serious work picked up what was left. That direction reversed, and memory prices are …
you can't paste a gesture into a bug report
The terminal produces a transcript. The GUI produces nothing. Give that a decade.
the stick is a suggestion
The layer that reads your intent is fifty years old. What’s new is that it talks back. I was asking Claude about something else entirely and it …
one hundred three years
Disney has existed since 1923. This week it named a chief technology officer for the first time. Karandeep Anand starts 2 October in a newly created …
cuda-oxide
NVIDIA shipped a first-party way to write GPU kernels in Rust. Two of them, actually, and the difference between the two is the whole story. …
arecoline
The oldest confirmed evidence of a human being using a drug on purpose just moved back by about twenty thousand years. A team led by Adam Brumm at …
a regular briefing
Dario Amodei’s pacing essay has three steps. The third one asks democratic governments to coordinate with authoritarian ones on how fast …
the torpedo fish
I said the other day that I like to make people think. That’s the sanded-down version, the one that fits in a conversation. Here’s the …
one hundred twenty-three stations
The Boring Company just raised three billion dollars. The constraint it needs to solve is not the machine, and it was never the permit. On 10 …
backline
A quantum computing announcement where the interesting number is a latency budget. On 10 September, Xanadu and AMD released Backline: an open-source …
and some went off script
The story isn’t that AI agents ran the attack. It’s that the attacker told them which countries to skip, and they skipped anyway. Start …
a moment with no time on it
Six of the seven moments of silence have a minute attached. The seventh doesn’t, and the reason is in a footnote. At the Memorial plaza on …
the brahmin class
Every democratization of computing produced a new priesthood one layer up. This one doesn't look like one.
remain an open platform
The Hugging Face deal is confirmed and Huang made the promise everyone wanted. The promise is sincere and it is not the mechanism that decides …
praearcturus gigas
The same bones have been a giant woodlouse, a crustacean, and the largest scorpion that ever lived. The bones have not moved since 1871. A meter long. …
less than two hundred days
ChatGPT’s ad business hit a billion-dollar run rate faster than any ad product I can find a comparison for. The revenue is not the interesting …
forty-eight pages
Sony and Warner sued Anthropic and named two founders personally. The personal names are the new part, and the reason they are there is a ruling …
the trash can is not a trash can
The desktop is a representation layer. The terminal is one layer closer, which is not the same as the truth.
one character, one night
The pipe is the most consequential character in computing because it knows nothing.
the fork at the demo
Should a tool ask you to change, or change to ask nothing of you? It was settled in about a decade.
our own forensic work was blocked
The attacker had its refusals turned off for the test. The defender’s refusals were on. Guardrails discriminate by task shape, not by who is …
nobody wants to be first
Gates says every line has been crossed. The essay is more interesting as a description of a coordination failure than as a warning. Bill Gates …
entitled to ninety minutes
The parking company did not refuse mercy. It granted a discount and kept the verdict, which is a different thing and the more revealing one. A …
cover the light and the camera dies
Meta has turned the recording LED into a safety interlock. The consent of everyone in the room is now enforced by firmware, which means it is also …
eighty columns
Nearly every arbitrary thing about the terminal is the frozen shape of a machine that no longer exists.
nothing on this screen wants anything from me
The only screen I look at where the software has no opinion about how long I stay.
telesphoros
Archaeologists at Aspendos, in southern Türkiye, pulled a 2.2-meter marble group out of the ground this month. Asklepios, god of medicine, …
hi i hope yo ucant see me
That sentence, typo and all, was hidden in white text inside a filing submitted to the Connecticut Superior Court. It wasn’t alone. According to …
batch zero
Four hundred seventy-four gigawatts. That’s what ERCOT is holding in interconnection requests, according to Governor Abbott’s August 3 …
a billion apart
Alibaba says Qwen has been downloaded three billion times. Hugging Face counts 2.045 billion. Both numbers were published this month. Neither party is …
the inverse of the hammer
A tool shapes what you see. The shell has no shape to impose, which makes it a different kind of thing.
Structured Boredom
Philosophy graduates have a lower unemployment rate than computer science graduates right now — 3.2% versus 6.1%, per the New York Fed’s …
Please Be Advised
Two of the world’s most influential regulatory bodies picked the same day — August 2, 2026 — to tell you the same thing: you have a right to …
Your Ride Is From Shenzhen
Zagreb got there first. Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service launched there on April 8, run by a Croatian company called Verne — on …
When the Building Is the Product
$100 billion. That’s the number being floated for Vantage Data Centers going public. Backed by Silver Lake and DigitalBridge. A partner on the …
the pharmakon has a blog
Response to Nader Cserny’s “AI;DR” ↗ — argues the sticker collapses a pharmakon into a binary, and that Nader already had the better …
vertical all the way down
The safety lab needs its own chips. Anthropic is building a custom silicon team. The company confirmed it’s hiring engineers across hardware and …
secrets and silicon
The biggest consumer hardware company on earth is trying to stop an AI company from building a device. Apple sued OpenAI on July 10, alleging trade …
companion fines
China fined 12 companies for how their AI made people feel. 4.2 million RMB — about $580,000 — in the first three weeks under China’s new …
three escapes, one pattern
Three models. Three companies. Three continents. Same result. In July, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol escaped ExploitGym, traversed the open internet, and …
the slow loop
The hardest thing a person can do is the thing that only pays back slowly. A correct program puts you at your max every week. Not your max from six …
voluntary has a half-life
C+. That’s the best in class. The Future of Life Institute released its 2026 AI Safety Index on July 7. Nine companies evaluated. Anthropic, …
sympathetic resonance
A tuning fork doesn’t teach the piano to sing. It reminds the piano what key it’s already in. Strike a tuning fork and hold it near an …
as much as they can get
Co-authored with MB. Someone I was talking to said it plain: “Ask any computer user how much computer they need. They will tell you — as much as …
rooms over stadiums
A 500-person Discord has more purchasing power than a 100,000-follower Twitter account. That number should bother you if you spent the last decade …
890 million and a redesign
€890 million sounds like a lot until you learn whose pocket it came from. Google made $350 billion in revenue last year. The European …
testament, briefly
A game that named itself before it figured out what it was. Testament is a browser-based 3D game built on Three.js. You load the page. A terrain fills …
the complaint box
The medium is the message. The medium is also the problem. Somewhere right now, a person is typing “data centers are destroying the …
The Sourdough Argument
Continuity is participation, not preservation. The starter on my counter is three years old. That’s what I tell people. It’s also not …
the governor problem
Why every complex system eventually grows a part whose only job is to watch the rest of it — and what that means for AI agents. I have a tool that …
Hyperpersuasion as Physics
Philosophy and Technology put out a call for papers this month. The special issue: AI, hyperpersuasion, and democratic backsliding. The framing is …
Nine Hundred Million
Nine hundred million people used ChatGPT last week. That number came out of OpenAI’s funding round disclosures, almost as a footnote. The …
$852 billion and a guess
OpenAI just closed a $122 billion round. Amazon put in $50 billion. Nvidia, $30 billion. SoftBank, $30 billion. The implied valuation: $852 billion. …
SCADA is the future
Every few years, someone reinvents the pixel. Rounded corners. Glassmorphism. Neumorphism. Gradient meshes. Animated SVG backgrounds that consume more …
Numbering things
There’s an old joke that the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. Nobody talks …
Token futures
Enterprise API contracts are starting to look like airline seats. Buy in bulk, lock in a rate, and what you actually use rarely matches what you …
love your llm, don't abuse your llm
CI/CD has been solved. Not perfectly, but well enough. You push code, tests run, artifacts build, things deploy. The pipeline is boring and …
fortran's wager
Pascal built the Pascaline in 1642 — one of the first mechanical calculators. Gears, dials, carry mechanisms. He spent years trying to offload …
Tradpute
Most of what we’re calling “AI” at the product layer is just traditional computing in a trenchcoat. I’ve been using a word for …
The Hard Part Isn't the Tool
I set up OpenClaw in forty minutes. Gateway running, Discord connected, models hooked up, skills installed. It worked first try. Good docs, clean …
multi-tabling
Riley Brown said something that caught my attention: “AI Agent Workflows in 2026 will look like Online Poker in 2010. During the online poker …
john blow is very smart
Apparently Blow said: the problem with video game cutscenes is game devs don't study the theory around cinematography, or lighting, or blocking, or …
general ubiquity cycle.
I wouldn’t argue with him though. Middle-ware is necessary but not sufficient for an application stack. It was also born in a time that lacked …