AI may be the greatest metacognitive training wheel humanity has ever accidentally invented. There is something deeply unfair about awareness. You spend your life learning things, connecting things, trying to understand how the world works, and eventually your reward is discovering how much shit you don't understand. Then you get a little better at thinking and discover something worse: you don't completely understand how you're doing the thinking either. Metacognition is a b

Unless you're a teenager blogging about your goldfish, we really need to have a talk. This one is Andy's fault. My longtime friend Andy sent me an article this morning about another massive WordPress vulnerability with a note that essentially said: I know how much you love WordPress. Andy knows. He has personally been on the receiving end of my WordPress rant for years. A long time ago, before anybody was seriously talking about AI building entire websites for you, Andy was c

Brussels is calling for the frontier to slow down while Europe is simultaneously warning that it doesn't have enough compute, enough data centers, or cheap enough electricity to keep up. This is going well. The AI slowdown conversation has officially arrived in Europe. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen came out today supporting calls to slow frontier AI development and says she plans to bring the major labs together to talk about risk, evaluation, verificatio

"Recursive self-improvement" was frontier-lab vocabulary about five minutes ago. This morning Congress explained it on Fox & Friends and then cut to the forecast. Something happened to the AI conversation this week. Actually, everything happened to the AI conversation this week. We've had new models, ridiculous benchmarks, autonomous agents doing increasingly interesting things, cybersecurity incidents, researchers leaving frontier labs and issuing warnings on the way out, CE

A couple of days ago, we were talking about what might turn out to be the harder AI alignment problem. Not aligning the machines. Aligning us. The labs can see the risks. Researchers can raise alarms. CEOs can agree that the frontier may be moving faster than our ability to understand or control everything we're creating. And then somebody eventually asks the question that breaks the whole thing: what happens if we slow down and China doesn't? I said the national-security con

On September 6, 2026, OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki published an essay called An Alien Mind. That title alone is worth sitting with for a minute. Not because AI came from another planet. It's one of the most aggressively terrestrial things we've ever built: silicon, electricity, mathematics, human language, institutional capital, and an absurd amount of computation. But Pachocki isn't using alien as science-fiction decoration. He's trying to describe a problem. We've

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

Yesterday, John Ternus became CEO of Apple. That is one hell of a first day to inherit the future. Over the first two parts of this story, we've been looking at Apple less as a sequence of CEOs and more as a sequence of terrains. Steve Jobs got the ridge. He arrived at moments when the map was unreliable, climbed high enough to see where several different technological trajectories were converging, and somehow collapsed the mess into objects the rest of us immediately underst

In the first part of this story, Steve Jobs was standing on the ridge. The mobile-phone world was fragmented almost beyond parody. Flip phones, sliders, BlackBerrys, Sidekicks, tiny keyboards, styluses, hinges going in every conceivable direction. Everybody was experimenting because nobody had really settled the underlying question of what a phone was supposed to become. Then Jobs walked onto a stage and collapsed the whole argument into a slab of glass. That was the gift we

Apparently we're getting AGI for Christmas. Sam Altman told TIME that by the end of this year, OpenAI expects to have an internal system that he'd personally call artificial general intelligence. OpenAI's chief research officer says they're roughly 80% of the way there. Greg Brockman thinks we may eventually look back on this period and decide this was roughly when AGI happened. So, naturally, everyone lost their minds. I get it. I did too, a little. But the more I sit with i

I've been screwing around lately with a Mudra Link, some browser code, a local WebSocket, and a little project I called the "Neuro/Bio Interface Lab". That description probably makes this sound much more sophisticated than it is. It isn't. This is a hobby experiment. I'm basically poking at a weird wrist computer, looking at signals, drawing graphs, making noises, and asking increasingly unreasonable questions about what else it might be able to do. Which is pretty much how I

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

Nvidia reportedly just agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. And the more I sit with it, the more familiar it feels. Like GitHub familiar. I live in Hugging Face now. But I've certainly spent my share of time on GitHub too. Not casually. I use this stuff daily. That's why this deal immediately made me think of Microsoft buying GitHub. GitHub Was Never Just GitHub When Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018, a lot of people looked at the deal and saw code repos

A few years ago, this was bourbon-and-nerd-shit conversation. You know the kind. A few technically inclined people sitting around, talking about where AI might go if you just kept pushing the line forward. Dude, what if AI could actually design chips? Not autocomplete some Verilog. Not help an engineer find a bug. Actually get deep enough into the problem to meaningfully participate in designing the silicon itself. Then somebody takes it another step. What if the AI helped de

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