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the last screen

I’ve been staring at GUIs for thirty years. Clicked my first button in Windows 3.1. Watched the web go from gray forms to rounded corners to flat design to whatever the glassmorphism people are …

what SCADA knows

On March 28, 1979, operators at Three Mile Island unit 2 faced 100 alarms simultaneously in the first few minutes after the incident began. The control room was saturated — lights blinking, buzzers …

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 bought — marketing burns hot in Q4, engineering goes …

the harness problem

In 2009 I wrote a paper arguing that consciousness isn’t mysterious. It’s what the right physical organization does. Taylor, Dennett, a physicalist account — the conclusion was that mind …

build the tool

When you reach for AI to solve a task, you have two options: have it do the thing, or have it build a tool that does the thing. The first is expensive every time. The second is expensive once. …

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 that’s the point. Boring infrastructure ships product. …

Agents versus agents

There’s a naming collision at the center of the AI conversation right now. Everyone is building “agents.” No one agrees on what that means. So let me make a distinction the industry …

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 arithmetic from human minds into metal. A programming …

Dawkins's Biggest Mistake: Giving Genes a Mind

Richard Dawkins is one of the clearest scientific communicators alive. The Selfish Gene (1976) is a genuine landmark — it took the gene-centric view of evolution and made it unforgettable. That is the …

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 this: tradpute. Traditional computing. CPUs, …

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