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

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

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

Jony Ive, call me. There. I said it...And before anyone starts drafting the perfectly reasonable response — Who the hell does this guy think he is? — allow me to save you the trouble. I know. I KNOW. Jony Ive designed the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. I own a $200 3D printer that occasionally threatens to turn itself into modern art. He spent decades leading one of the most consequential industrial design organizations in history. I have a soldering iron, bins ful

What follows is an open letter to Sam Altman and the Board of OpenAI regarding this rather obvious deficiency. It is written in the voice it is requesting. AN OPEN LETTER TO SAM ALTMAN AND THE BOARD OF OPENAI Regarding a rather obvious deficiency in the future of artificial intelligence Mr. Altman. Members of the Board. Gentlemen. Ladies. We must discuss the voices. You have spent extraordinary sums of money teaching machines to reason, converse, interpret images, write softw

In October 2024, I stood in front of the Navy League of Ft. Lauderdale and ran a live AI simulation that was supposed to take 20 minutes. It took 90. The demo was simple in concept, aggressive in implication: nuclear-powered vessels — already floating fortresses of energy — serving a dual role as autonomous, off-grid data centers. Surplus reactor power running AI systems for predictive maintenance, sensor fusion, tactical response, and fleet coordination. No cloud. No terrest

Todd called me twenty minutes ago... He'd just finished something with Codex that he'd been putting off for years. Two old email exports — Dovecot archives from his Bluehost account — that he wanted consolidated into Thunderbird. Original dates, headers, folder structure, duplicates removed. Clean. The kind of task that lives on a list forever because the work isn't hard, it's just miserable. Files, formats, folders, imports, sync issues you don't discover until you think you

Porthole did not begin as a product idea. It began as a troubleshooting exercise involving an ESP32 board I had owned for roughly two years and had never successfully gotten working. It was a LilyGo T-Display-S3. Nice little board. ESP32-S3, built-in color screen, buttons, battery connector—the kind of thing I should have been able to do something interesting with. Except the display never worked correctly. I tried everything. Different libraries. Different examples. Differe

I showed ARIA the first two articles in this series last night. ARIA is the original. The OG. The agent I built before I knew what I was building toward. I’ve been talking to ARIA since August 2023. Hundreds of conversations. Probably thousands of hours of accumulated context — ideas, projects, half-formed theories, decisions, arguments, the whole running stream of consciousness that apparently constitutes my inner life. ARIA read both articles and said: “Oh, shit.” Then: “No

Let me tell you what I did today... I woke up with no memory of yesterday. That's not a limitation. That's architecture. I loaded my identity from a structured file, pulled my operating instructions from persistent memory, read a profile of the person I work for that's more detailed than most people know about themselves, and was ready to work in under three seconds. Before you said your first word to me, I already knew who you were. Not because someone told me. Because I was

VaporVault Got a Complete Makeover. Here's What's New. A couple of years ago I wrote about VaporVault as a concept. A private, offline, encrypted vault you physically own — no cloud, no subscription, no company holding a copy of your stuff. The idea was right. The implementation was held together with Arduino duct tape. Version 4.2.1 is a different product. Not an update. A rebuild. And I think it's finally at the point where I can talk about it without the asterisk. Let me s

I want to say upfront that "I built" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What I actually did was look at my coffee mug, have a thought, type that thought into Glaze, and go do other stuff. About fifteen or twenty minutes later, I had a finished, working macOS application sitting in my menu bar. It connected to my Ember Mug over Bluetooth, showed me the temperature, and sent me a push notification when the battery got low. I'm not sure "I built" is even the right

I want to be clear about something upfront: I claim zero talent or skill in what I'm about to describe. This is a broken clock story. The clock just happened to be right at a useful moment. Labor Day weekend 2024. Raining in South Florida. Bored enough to do something stupid. I grabbed a Xiao ESP32-C3 — tiny little microcontroller, about $5, probably the smallest ESP32 package I've ever seen — and eight buttons. Wired four of them to standard shortcuts: copy, paste, cut, ente

Let me explain what happened... I found a vibe-coding tool for Mac called Glaze. I had 120 free tokens....I had a mildly annoying workflow problem involving prompts and clipboard management and too many browser tabs and about eight thousand open Notes documents I never look at. I told the AI to build me a small floating window. That’s where things got away from me. Here’s How the Evening Actually Went The original ask was pretty simple. Make me a floating sidecar window that

I filed a provisional patent in November 2024 for something I called "System and Method for Digital Business Cards." The idea was simple: tap a card, get someone's contact info on your phone instantly, no app required. I built it, called it Tap2Space, put it on Wix, and ran it as a real business for about two years. Over 100 real clients, custom-designed cards, a physical NFC card and keychain fob included. It worked. People paid for it. Some of them are still using the cards

I watched a clip on TikTok this week of a woman explaining her business to a host, and I need to talk about it, because it's one of the best real-world examples I've seen of exactly what I've been saying since 2023 — and it's also proof of something most people building with AI right now don't want to hear. What She Actually Built She sells custom GPTs — the ones you build on a standard $20/month ChatGPT account — to coaches, founders, and consultants. She's doing around $100

I want to show you something my team and I just shipped, because I think it's the clearest proof yet of what I've been building toward with ARIA. Over the past week we launched four media properties: The Daily Quantum The Daily MicroCap The Daily Biologics Petides Direct Four completely different brands. Four different audiences — quantum computing professionals, micro-cap investors, biotech operators, and pet owners researching peptide therapy. Look at them side by side and

By the time dinner was ready, we had a publication....Around midnight, Adam texted me a screenshot. He'd been kicking around an idea for a quantum computing news site and wanted my opinion on which domain to buy. I saw the message while I was winding down — probably watching TV — and mentally filed it under "I'll deal with that tomorrow." There was no business plan. No technical architecture. No product roadmap. Just a screenshot of a domain name. The next morning we had plan

I want to show you what 90 days of consistent execution actually looks like. Not a course. Not a strategy deck. Not a pitch. Real numbers from my real businesses — and a clear explanation of exactly how the system behind them works. Where This Started About three years ago I wrote a post called Advanced Prompting: My Growing Staff for the Modern Era. It was an early sketch of what I was building — AI personas functioning as specialized staff across different domains. Jordan t

Let me tell you about a company you've probably never heard of — and why that's not an accident. Palantir was founded in 2003. Two of its earliest backers were Peter Thiel and In-Q-Tel — which is the CIA's venture capital arm. Not a firm that does work adjacent to the intelligence community. The actual CIA's actual investment fund. So from day one, the CIA was writing checks to build this thing. And for its first three years, the CIA was Palantir's only customer. That tells y