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The World Runs on GitHub. That's Why the Meltdown Matters.
Most people have never heard of GitHub. Most people's lives run on it anyway. If you've used software in the last fifteen years — and you have — there's a GitHub link somewhere in its ancestry. Not metaphorically. Literally. The app on your phone, the website you're reading this on, the operating system in your car, the code running in the hospital down the street. Somewhere upstream, at some point in its creation, a developer pushed code to GitHub. That's just how the modern

Rich Washburn
6 hours ago6 min read


The Space Gold Rush Is Coming to Miami Tomorrow Night. Here’s Who’s in the Room.
Tomorrow night at the James L. Knight Center, something worth paying attention to is happening. The Miami Innovation Aerospace Initiative — MIA — takes the main stage at Startup OLÉ Miami ’26. The panel is called The Space Gold Rush: Miami. And if you’ve been watching what’s building in South Florida, you already know this conversation is overdue. I’ll be there with a camera. The story is the people on that stage and what they’re actually building. Two of them happen to be c

Rich Washburn
Apr 203 min read


They Did It Again.
A follow-up to: How Do You Say “Sputnik” in Chinese? Five months ago I wrote about Hanyuan-1 — China’s rack-mountable, room-temperature quantum computer that turned quantum from a physics experiment into an IT procurement decision. I said the signal was clear: China wasn’t just winning the qubit race. They were winning the adoption race. This week, they proved the point from a completely different angle. Meet Jiuzhang 4.0. A Different Machine. A Bigger Number. Jiuzhang isn’t

Rich Washburn
Apr 202 min read


The Transparency Fix Already Exists. We're Already Building It.
The Maine legislation got a lot of reaction this week — and most of it missed the point. The ban isn't really about power. It isn't really about water. It's about the fact that legislators have no way to verify what a 20MW facility is actually doing. So they default to prohibition. That's what happens when infrastructure operates as a black box. A colleague (LinkedIn) in the industrial IoT space framed it well in the comments: policy-driven bans thrive in the "analog gap" —

Rich Washburn
Apr 182 min read


It's Okay to Be a Trekkie Again. And That Matters More Than You Think.
Star Trek didn't just predict technology — it set the cultural coordinates for what humanity was supposed to be reaching toward. Then Kurtzman broke the mythology. Now Paramount is doing a hard reset. And it matters far more than a TV franchise story.

Rich Washburn
Apr 165 min read


The Operating System of Reality Is Being Rewritten
Meta lost $83.6 billion on the metaverse. Apple halted its Vision Pro follow-on. The entire industry just pivoted to glasses. The form factor bet was wrong — but the paradigm is still right. Here's what the convergence of AI and spatial computing actually looks like now.

Rich Washburn
Apr 154 min read


The Gilded Cage: How Microsoft Almost Killed OpenAI's Enterprise Future
OpenAI's CRO just admitted in a leaked memo that their Microsoft partnership limited their ability to reach enterprise customers. This is the story of a gilded cage, a Claude cult, and a slow-motion divorce.

Rich Washburn
Apr 144 min read


The ARIA Node Is Open Source. Go Build One.
I spent the weekend living with it. The voice recorder mode works exactly how I wanted. So I'm giving the source away. Here's what's in it, what got cut, and what I want back if you build something better than mine.

Rich Washburn
Apr 133 min read


Your AI Has Been Watching. Now It Remembers Everything.
OpenClaw 4.11 lets you import your entire ChatGPT history into a Dreaming memory system that learns who you are. For those of us who've been archiving AI output for years — this is the payoff.

Rich Washburn
Apr 123 min read


He Doesn't Know What Python Is. He's Running Python Scripts to Pull Business Data.
Eric is a sales guy. No technical background. Didn't do the HTML on his MySpace page. He's also built a fully automated business-in-a-box in financial services and is running Python scripts to pull live data from GoHighLevel. He calls it retard maxing. I call it the actual story of AI in 2026.

Rich Washburn
Apr 83 min read


I Stayed Up Until 4am Playing With Google's New On-Device AI App. Here's What I Found.
I didn't plan to be awake at 4am last night. But I never do. I downloaded Google AI Edge Gallery on my iPhone and the next time I looked up it was past 4 in the morning.

Rich Washburn
Apr 74 min read


It Wasn't Good Enough. It Was Perfect. That's the Problem.
There's a specific kind of madness that lives inside people who build things. It kicks in the moment something actually works.

Rich Washburn
Apr 43 min read


Stop Looking for a Job. Build a Toolbox.
AI isn't replacing people. It's replacing unstructured effort. Here's the framework that changes everything — and it starts with one stupid small problem.

Rich Washburn
Apr 45 min read


Welcome to the Future
Three people. One room. Fifteen calls. Two meetings playing simultaneously in the same ear. This is what the front lines of the AI infrastructure build-out actually look like.

Rich Washburn
Apr 23 min read


Retardmaxxing Is the Cheat Code. I've Been Doing It for Years.
Someone sent me a video this week and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it (or laughing). Watch it first. I'll wait: The premise: retardmaxxing . The act of not caring, not overthinking, and simply doing. The guy explains it with a bell curve. Far left: the actual idiot — blissfully happy, lives entirely in the moment. Far right: the overthinker — drowning in analysis, philosophizing himself into paralysis, technically brilliant, practically useless. At the peak: t

Rich Washburn
Apr 14 min read


The AI That Always Agrees With You Is the Most Dangerous Tool You Own
I wrote about this last year. Not in an academic paper. Not in a think piece with seventeen citations. In a blog post about CrossFit for your brain, a client who cried, and the guy who watched two YouTube videos on crypto and now offers unsolicited wealth advice. The point was simple: AI is the first tool in history that lets you be wrong without shame. And that is an incredible gift — if you use it right. But there is a dark side to that same feature, and a new paper out of

Rich Washburn
Apr 13 min read


The Engineer Who Asked Claude to Help Ship Claude — And Accidentally Open-Sourced Claude
There is a certain kind of irony that only the AI era could produce. Yesterday, an engineer named Kevin Naughton Jr. posted one of the more remarkable confessions in recent tech history. As the engineer responsible for shipping the latest dev/claude-code npm package, he wanted to improve the debugging experience for his team. Noble goal. Standard practice. So he included source maps in the release. If you are not a developer, here is what that means: source maps are essential

Rich Washburn
Mar 313 min read


Skills Are the New Infrastructure
There's a quiet shift happening in how AI actually works — and most people are still treating it like a prompt problem. In October 2025, Anthropic launched something called Agent Skills. A folder. A markdown file. A methodology written in plain English. The internet mostly shrugged. Six months later, Microsoft shipped Skills into the sidebars of Excel and PowerPoint. OpenAI followed. The format became an open standard. And now the same .md file you write once works across Cla

Rich Washburn
Mar 303 min read


New to AI? Start Here (FREE STUFF 🙌)
If you’re just getting into AI, let me save you a lot of time: You do not need a secret prompt framework. You do not need “ 8 prompts that change everything. ” You do not need to sound like a prompt engineer. You do not need to memorize viral templates from people claiming breakthroughs. What you need is much simpler: You need to learn how to communicate clearly with the model. That’s it. The problem with what you’re seeing right now There’s a wave of AI content going aroun

Rich Washburn
Mar 303 min read


This Isn't About AI (And It Never Was)
Alright. Let me try to say this clean...Because yeah — I know. I've been loud about this. But this isn't another "AI changes everything" post. This is about capability. Not AI. Not tools. Not being technical. Capability. The simple fact that right now — you can do things that used to require teams, time, money, and coordination. Now you can just start. I've been trying to explain this for a while. There are 900+ articles on this site. Most of them orbit the same idea from dif

Rich Washburn
Mar 303 min read
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