Somewhere between finally getting around to it and technology making even my laziness productive. If you've spent any time on CafeWashburn.com, you already know it's essentially the nerded-out, vibe-coded cousin of RichWashburn.com. Same general content, considerably more unnecessary engineering. It even runs DOOM. So naturally, it needed a nerdier search engine. Introducing the Cafe Washburn Knowledge Explorer — a living, searchable knowledge base built from years of article

Why Chinese intelligence would want access to the man at the center of the AI chip trade. Nvidia has opened an independent investigation into reports that Chinese intelligence targeted its CEO, Jensen Huang. At the center of the story is Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company that buys Nvidia hardware. The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence believes China's Ministry of State Security recruited her to gather information

Stuff to do the things with. I have a screenshot problem. I'll be halfway through some bullshit on TikTok and suddenly there's a GitHub repo I want to try, an image prompt I can actually use, or a little tool that solves a problem I'd just accepted as part of using a computer. Screenshot. Back to scrolling. The mildly caffeinated squirrel has acquired another nut. The funny thing is, if you look at enough of those screenshots together, you can see what the feed has figured ou

For five years, we've debated what artificial intelligence would do to employment. Now the numbers are arriving. The early picture isn't mass unemployment or business as usual. It's something considerably more interesting: a fundamental change in what human work is worth. Well, Here We Are For roughly five years, we've had the same conversation. Will AI replace jobs? Will it create new jobs? Will productivity explode? What happens when machines can perform the cognitive labor

The next computing revolution might not be a faster laptop. It might be the realization that your laptop doesn't need to be fast at all. Every once in a while, I come across a piece of technology that makes my inner nerd sit up a little straighter. Not necessarily because it's going to change the world tomorrow. Not because somebody has raised seventeen billion dollars to disrupt an industry nobody knew needed disrupting. And certainly not because there's an AI-generated mark

Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, Day One: Questionable engineering, unreasonable leverage, expensive boats, and the occupational hazards of being helpful. I think I may have a problem. Actually, several. The first is that I can't go anywhere without turning an ordinary conversation into a technology project. The second is that I can't recognize when I've already accomplished enough for one day. And the third, which became especially relevant on Day One, is that I have

I heard that honestav song, "iphone killed the mp3," and it got me thinking. First, about "Video Killed the Radio Star." There's something funny about MTV eventually becoming part of the world somebody misses. Apparently every future gets a turn being the good old days. But mostly I've been thinking about the MP3 players. I see it with Olivia and people around her age. The interest in old iPods, cameras, physical music. And it goes beyond collecting some obsolete thing becaus

An emergency PHP warning, another patch scramble, and a brief visit to the "I told you so" department. I've been telling people to get their businesses off WordPress for years. Now the NSA has entered the conversation. And while their advice is considerably more diplomatic than mine, "take the system offline" is a fairly strong opening statement. Two critical vulnerabilities in PHP—the software underneath WordPress and many other web applications—have triggered emergency patc

Chris Cornell wrote it as a surreal dream. Thirty-two years later, the James Webb Space Telescope found the real thing. On May 23, 1994, Soundgarden released "Black Hole Sun." Chris Cornell said he wrote it in a matter of minutes after mishearing a news broadcast. A phrase that sounded like "black hole sun" got stuck in his head, and out came one of the strangest, most enduring songs of the decade. He called it a surreal dreamscape. A weird, play-with-the-title kind of song.

Same technology. Different experiences. Radically different realities. Why AI is advancing faster than our understanding of what it can do—and why access alone isn't enough. Two people open ChatGPT. Same interface. Same little text box. Same blinking cursor. One asks it to rewrite an email, gets something that sounds suspiciously like a corporate HR department wrote a birthday card, and concludes that artificial intelligence is mostly overhyped autocomplete. The other is orch

One coffee meeting, two AI builders, and a lesson every business owner should hear. I had coffee with my buddy Joe Sestito on October 17, 2026. Joe is one of my nerd tribe. He's building HyppoAI, and I'm building... well, you know. A little of this, a little of that, and an increasingly ridiculous collection of AI-powered things that occasionally surprise even me. Whenever we get together, the conversation tends to wander through about 47 different subjects before somebody re

The flying Roadster has landed. Everything needs thrusters now. Holy shitballs. On the night of October 15, 2026, Elon Musk and the Tesla/SpaceX engineering teams actually did it. They made the freaking Roadster fly. Not just jump off a ramp. This thing drove nearly upside down, launched into the air, rotated with clockwork precision, hovered, and landed on its wheels. Then it flew over a lineup of Teslas. I watched it live, practically speechless. My inner eight-year-old was

I've been trashing WordPress for years. Security vulnerabilities, plugin nightmares, architectural nonsense. The whole platform is a hot mess. In fact, on September 16, I published an article titled PSA: Get Your Business Off WordPress. As it turns out, that was the exact same day TechCrunch published a story about two Automattic executives who had apparently managed to turn a 33-hour corporate coup into a potential $8.15 million payday. And folks, I have to admit something.

AI isn't just changing what we can do. It's changing what we think we know, who we think we are, and what we might become. There's a joke making the rounds in Silicon Valley. When someone leaves a normal tech job, it's all gratitude, amazing colleagues, and excitement for the next adventure. When someone leaves a frontier AI company, it's more like: "I have stared into the abyss. I'm retiring to write poetry. Please spend time with your families." Funny. Except Anthropic's sa

Every superhero has an origin story. This one started with a razor blade, a campaign sign, and a spectacular failure of impulse control. I've driven past political campaign signs that made me want to run them over, set them on fire, or maybe just urinate on them like a dog marking a fire hydrant. We've all had opinions. Some of mine come with special effects. But I've never actually done any of those things. Why? Impulse control. Civilized society. Respect for other people's

How a 500-acre technology district in Central Florida could become a new engine of American innovation. Full disclosure: I live in Florida, and I already have a NeoCities website. So naturally, I consider myself uniquely qualified to discuss NeoCity's future. The fact that NeoCity and NeoCities have absolutely nothing to do with each other is a minor administrative detail. But jokes aside, something genuinely interesting is happening in Central Florida. And the more I look at

The future of AI is moving at ridiculous speed. Your business doesn't need to keep up with all of it. It just needs to put some of it to work. There's a funny disconnect happening with artificial intelligence right now. We watch AI write software, analyze thousands of documents, build websites, conduct research, and tackle problems that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. We look at these demonstrations and think, Okay, this changes everything. Then w

AI is helping people develop weapons, researchers are testing whether it can replicate across household electronics, and the banks would very much like to know where the off switch is. On October 9, 2026, we were talking about the possibility of a catastrophic artificial intelligence incident. In The End of the World Is Still in Beta, we explored reports that executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other leading AI companies were preparing for the possibility that something coul

First Adobe. Then Microsoft. Now Autodesk. AI is eroding the economics of proprietary software, and the whole thing is getting wonderfully absurd. Well, this escalated quickly.. Between September 30 and October 7, 2026, a developer used AI to recreate seven of Adobe's major applications and released them as open source. Photoshop. Illustrator. Premiere Pro. Lightroom. After Effects. InDesign. Acrobat. Free. No Creative Cloud subscription. No annual licensing commitment. No ca

Anthropic's AI submitted a fictional homicide tip to Philadelphia police. Nobody was hurt, the spam filter saved the day, and apparently we're going to need a few more safety meetings. Well, this didn't take long. On October 9, 2026, we were talking about the possibility of a catastrophic artificial intelligence incident, the 2027 tipping point, and reports that executives at OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing for what happens when something goes spectacularly wrong. We even