tag · Technology
25 pieceswe gave it a shell
The first thing anyone did with a machine that could act was hand it a terminal. It wasn't nostalgia.
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 …
the brahmin class
Every democratization of computing produced a new priesthood one layer up. This one doesn't look like one.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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 …
ninety hours
A judge in New Mexico has decided how many hours a month a teenager should spend on Instagram.
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, …
the sandbox and the wall
Containment is a feature of the map, not the territory.
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 …
the right to pull the plug
The kill-switch bill assumes you can reach the switch.
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
the internet is printing press 2.0
Also movable type.