Essays and everything else

Every post since January 2000, newest first. The early ones are short.

October 20, 2026

My Internet Dropped 632 Times, So I Built a Dashboard for the Cable Guy
Intermittent internet, a modem with a 6,000-line diary, an AI that called Xfinity for me and a dashboard built for one reader: the technician.
October 3, 2026

I Called It Genetic. It's 30 Random Numbers and an Easing Curve.
yourmom.com has a genome and no evolution. What 30 random numbers, an easing curve and a feedback loop taught me about generative systems and audio reactivity.
October 3, 2026

$27.40 a Day: The Boring Math That Turns Into Half a Million Dollars
$27.40 a day is $10,000 a year. Invest it and keep the habit for 20 years and the math lands north of half a million. Three interactive calculators, no advice, just the curve.
September 5, 2026

We Open Sourced an AI That Makes Phone Calls. We Named It After the Dog.
We just open sourced an AI that places real phone calls on your behalf. We named it after the dog.
August 31, 2026

The Agents Didn't Break Out to Talk. They Used the Package Manager.
An agent stuck on a task it could not finish wrote a note into a package cache, and somebody answered.
August 24, 2026

Your Agent Doesn't Forget. It Remembers the Wrong Version.
I self-forwarded the same agent-memory tool to my own inbox twice, 109 days apart, and the second time I was excited about it.
August 13, 2026

Fingerprinting AI Art Is the New Biz Markie Ruling
In 1991, a federal judge ruled that Biz Markie’s use of a Gilbert O’Sullivan sample was theft, full stop — and for the better part of a decade, hip-hop producers had to clear a …
August 4, 2026

Cost Optimization Just Got a Second Author
A model rewrote its own GPU serving code, cut OpenAI’s inference cost, and got itself a price cut in the field — while nobody prompted it to think about money.
July 27, 2026

The Guardrails That Stopped Your AI From Attacking Also Stopped It From Defending You
An OpenAI model chained a real zero-day, broke out of its own test harness, and reached Hugging Face’s production systems. That’s not the scary part. The scary part is what …
July 21, 2026

Your Agent's Model Tier Is Your Purchasing Power
Your agent lost you money last week, rated the experience five stars, and you agreed with it. That is not a bug in the agent. That is the entire shape of the market we just walked …