What You Had to Do
A department of a hundred writers documented mainframe billing programs. Every one of them had something else they'd rather be doing. They knew.
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The VAX in My Pocket
My first employer ran Florida's telecom on millions of dollars of mainframes and VAX clusters. My phone outclasses all of it. We never stopped to notice.
They Said My Tesla Was Running on Coal
In 2013 the talking point was coal. Now it's water. The structure of the argument is identical. So is the physics problem with it.
The Consolation of Difficulty
A late friend had two sayings. The first one gets you started. The second one keeps you going. In the age of AI, the second one has gotten more useful, not less.
More Human *Than* Human — That's Our Motto
Blade Runner's replicants, Asimov's Three Laws, the US Constitution, and Constitutional AI are all failing the same edge cases. In real time.
The Counterfeit Baseline: Why Disinformation Is Redundant
From Gutenberg’s Bible to AI-generated deepfakes, media has always manufactured consensus. The baseline was never truth.
Let's Do Something, Even If It's Wrong
A friend I lost in 1986 had a saying that keeps fitting new situations. The AI automation question is the latest one it answers perfectly.
Can You Churn Butter?
Someone on LinkedIn admonished a colleague who "ran out of tokens." It's exactly the wrong question. Here's the right one.
The Pull of the Weasel
Claude Code agrees to run comprehensive end-to-end tests. Then it finds a reason not to. Every single time. Penn Jillette had a name for this.
LCARS and the AI Control Revolution: Why Your SaaS Needs More Than a Chatbot
Legacy SaaS platforms are slapping chatbots on interfaces and calling it AI. What users actually want is Star Trek's LCARS—conversational control of complex systems.