When enough independent signals start pointing in the same direction, you pay attention. I've watched a lot of people have their moment with AI. Usually it happens to somebody who was already pretty far down the road with this stuff. They understand the technology, they're excited about it, they've been pushing adoption harder than most people around them, and then something happens that makes them look over the edge for a second. There's usually an "oh shit" involved. Networ

I've spent a lot of time over the years building systems to organize information, which is funny because the way I actually think has never been particularly interested in being organized. My brain is less filing cabinet, more cognitive landfill. Not landfill in the useless sense. More like the place where everything gets dumped because I'm not always qualified, in the moment, to decide what is trash and what is going to turn out to be important six months from now. A weird a

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about prompts. I've written them, taught them, sold them, built prompt packs around them, and made a pretty decent amount of money doing it. At one point, "prompt engineering" was a completely reasonable description of what we were doing. The models were brittle enough that how you phrased something could materially change whether you got something useful or a pile of nonsense. Those prompt packs are all free now. They're still

This one kind of happened by accident. Not in the sense that I tripped over a soldering iron and somehow built a product, but more in the way a lot of the things I enjoy messing with tend to happen. You start with one small thing, ask one unnecessary question, then another, and at some point realize the original thing you were trying to do was just the excuse that got you through the door. The reMarkable was a gift from Rolf, which makes this whole thing funnier in retrospect

I have recently uncovered evidence suggesting that Eric Clapton may have played a previously unrecognized role in the development of modern artificial intelligence. There are problems with this theory. Many of them, actually. But we'll get to that. The whole thing started with It's in the Way That You Use It, which Clapton wrote with Robbie Robertson for The Color of Money in 1986. And once you hear that title through the lens of modern AI, you can't really unhear it. Because

From the way we use AI to the silicon underneath it, every layer of the stack seems to be wrestling with the same problem: continuity. There are moments in technology where a bunch of things you've been watching separately suddenly line up. Not perfectly. Not enough to declare some grand unified theory of artificial intelligence and start selling tickets to the TED Talk. Just enough that you look across the pieces and go: Oh...Okay. I seent it. And yes, I know that's probably

The iPhone didn't merely change phones. I think that's actually too small a way to remember what happened. It changed photography. Navigation. Dating. Music. Banking. Transportation. Media. Retail. Advertising. Work. Politics. Childhood. Attention. Porn. Restaurants. Travel. How we argue. How we get lost. How we avoid getting lost. How we summon a stranger's Toyota at 2:00 in the morning and somehow consider this completely normal. Entire pieces of civilization rearranged the

This Saturday, at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, we commemorate one of the most consequential fictional moments in computing history. Skynet became self-aware. Happy Miles Dyson Day. For anyone whose Terminator 2 lore has gone soft, Miles Bennett Dyson was Director of Special Projects at Cyberdyne Systems. He creates a revolutionary new microprocessor. Cyberdyne becomes the largest supplier of military computer systems. Aircraft become increasingly autonomous. Skynet gets funded. Hu

I saw a post about Etched today and my first reaction was basically: finally. I've been waiting two years for this chip. And yes, I know how that sounds. But here's the thing. Back in June 2024, Etched came out of stealth, and the whole thing sounded kind of insane. Their pitch was basically: GPUs are great, but if AI inference is really going to become what we think it is, why are we still using a general-purpose architecture for it? Why not build the damn chip specifically

This whole thing started with one stupid little thought: That would be cool. That was really it. No grand idea about creating some new digital experience. I just saw a website that looked like a computer desktop and thought, yeah, I want to mess with that. So I did. A desktop. A few icons. Some windows. Maybe a couple of apps. Projects. Articles. Photography. Files. Music. Messages. Basically, a fake little computer full of the stuff I already do. And because this is apparent

Somebody got Doom running on a Canon DSLR. Not streamed to the screen. Not played back as a video. Actually running on the camera. Specifically, a Canon EOS 550D — the Rebel T2i here in the U.S. — using Magic Lantern. And I cannot possibly express how much I support this. I come at this from two perfectly compatible forms of nerd damage. I'm a photographer. I've got multiple Canon bodies, more lenses than I'd like to inventory, and enough photo gear around here that moving it

Joe Sestito just wrote an article in which he called me his mentor and an AI genius. Obviously, I'll be printing that section, framing it and introducing it into evidence every time anyone questions my judgment for the rest of my natural life. But the compliment isn't really why his article caught my attention. It caught my attention because Joe gets it. In "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal," Joe explains how HyppoAI grew out of his experience running a company on an ab

Last night I got on the phone with my longtime friend Andy Surujnarine. Calling Andy a "cloud engineer" is technically accurate in approximately the same way that calling a 747 "transportation" is accurate. Andy has been doing enterprise infrastructure, cloud, security and technology leadership for more than 22 years. He's designed and operated serious systems at places like BNY Mellon/Pershing, Marcum and the New York Philharmonic. He's been a CTO, consulted as CTO for ARK I

Well. That escalated quickly. I keep saying I'm not an "I told you so" guy. I promise I'm not that guy. It's just getting harder to make that argument with a straight face. Because this is now the second time in about a week I've put "I told you so" in a headline. And the first article already had me saying it again inside the article. So, yeah. This is getting a little silly. A few days ago I wrote "I Told You So: McKinsey Just Proved the Value of Everything You Know." The p

Seth Godin says write anonymously for 100 days to see if anything fatal happens. I did the reckless version — my real name, five years, 1,100+ articles. Here's why the archive matters more in the AI era, not less.

There is a particular kind of magic that happens when you talk to strangers. Tonight, I was sitting with a woman named Julie Stewart. And somewhere in the course of an ordinary conversation, I started pulling on a thread. Until I realized I wasn't just having a conversation with a stranger anymore. I had accidentally walked into a piece of American dance history.

Google briefly killed the CEO of OpenAI, Wikipedia may have supplied the murder weapon, and the internet performed exactly as designed. Sam Altman died this week. Tragic. He was 41. OpenAI was presumably thrown into chaos. Silicon Valley entered mourning. Somewhere, 9,000 LinkedIn thought leaders began typing, "I only met Sam once, but..." There was just one small problem. Sam Altman was not dead. Still isn't, as far as we can tell. So everybody can stand down. Cancel the mem

A LinkedIn post at 1 AM, a market that couldn't see someone's real capability, and an AI system that fixed the signal in one sitting. What happens when the cost of helping somebody collapses to almost nothing.

Brad Lightcap spent eight years inside OpenAI as it transformed from a research nonprofit into an industrial machine. He saw the board war, the Microsoft cage, the AGI contract problem. Now he's leaving to start something new. I don't know what he's building. That's precisely why I'm paying attention.

The title is We Aren't the Only Mind in the Room Anymore. It started with a weird question about what happens to us when AI becomes normal. It turned into 280 pages.