In December I wrote about the moment before the quantum acceleration — the glide phase, the pre-click hum, the sense that all the pieces were seating themselves. The tone was optimistic. New Legos on the table. The universe as a construction set. Five months later, the click isn't just closer. It has a specific, uncomfortable target: the encryption protecting everything you do online. and the timeline just collapsed. Three Papers in Three Months In December, "Q-Day" — the the

There's a story going around right now that the Trump administration is reversing course on AI — that after spending a year tearing down Biden-era oversight, the White House is quietly rebuilding it. The framing is irresistible: political hypocrisy, a made-for-TV U-turn, the deregulators becoming the regulators. But that framing misses the more important story. What's actually happening isn't a flip-flop. It's a collision — between the speed at which AI is developing and the

There's a 732-byte Python script floating around the internet right now that can give any unprivileged user full root access on virtually every Linux machine that's been updated since 2017. No race conditions. No kernel-specific offsets. No compiled payloads. Just run it, get root. This is CVE-2026-31431 — nicknamed CopyFail — and it's already on CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list and confirmed active in the wild by CrowdStrike. The story of how it was found might be

275 million users. 9,000 schools. One breach. That's the scale of what just happened to Canvas — the learning management platform built by Instructure. Student records, messages, user data — potentially exposed across nearly every major university and K-12 district in the country. And here's the part nobody wants to say out loud: this was predictable. We've spent the last three years racing to connect every platform, every tool, every AI feature to centralized identity system

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

I was in New York for a reason. A real one. But while that was happening, something else was running in the background. It always does.

I've written about this before. A few times, actually — from different angles, at different points in the AI curve. The latent space piece from late 2023. The "New to AI" post from March. The NOVA piece where I started unpacking what GPT-5 actually demands from you. But I want to bring it full circle, because a conversation I had this week crystallized something I've been circling for a while. We were talking about how the whole prompting obsession has basically become theate

The UBI debate is having the wrong argument. On one side, you have the tech right — Andreessen, Verdun, the Palantir crowd — insisting that technology always creates new jobs and that UBI flattens incentive gradients. On the other side, you have the progressives pointing out that basic income doesn't kill ambition, it enables it. Darwin needed financial security to develop the theory of evolution. The lost Einsteins problem is real. Both sides are correct about things that do

Sam Altman posted two sentences this morning and 650,000 people read them. "Feels like a good time to seriously rethink how operating systems and user interfaces are designed. Also the internet — there should be a protocol that is equally usable by people and agents." Two sentences. Enormous implications and I don't think most of the people who liked it understood what he was actually saying. I replied with two words: Polymorphic OS. Let me explain what I meant. The Assumptio

Everyone's treating Tim Cook stepping down like a leadership transition piece. Who's next, will the culture hold, is the supply chain safe. Fine. That's the surface read. I care about what the org chart is actually saying. Because org charts don't lie. They're where companies tell you the truth about what they believe — even when the press release says something nicer and what Apple's org chart just said is loud. The new CEO is a hardware engineer. His number two just got a b

We built AI while driving 80 miles an hour down the highway. Every model, every product, every platform — bolted onto the internet in real time, while the car was moving, while people were in it, while nobody had agreed on the speed limit or even which lane we were supposed to be in. And at no point during any of that did anyone pull over to explain what was happening. That's the real story behind the backlash. Not the Molotov cocktail through Sam Altman's window. Not the Sta

Let’s be precise about what happened here, because the headline undersells it. Amazon announced it will invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic — $5 billion immediately, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones. That brings Amazon’s total potential stake to $33 billion. In exchange, Anthropic commits to spending over $100 billion on AWS infrastructure over the next decade, including 5 gigawatts of compute powered by Amazon’s Trainium chips. Read that again. One

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

We spent the last three years watching AI models get bigger, stranger, and more capable in ways we couldn’t quite explain. First it was text. Then vision. Then audio. Then video. Then reasoning. Each one its own lane, its own model, its own interface. Then somebody asked: what if we stopped treating these as different tools and started treating them as different senses? That’s multimodality. And when it clicked — when a single model could see, read, hear, and reason simultane

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

Day fifteen with the glasses....First mod was a little plastic cover I bought off Amazon — snaps over the recording LED on the frame. The light is obnoxious. It flashes when you’re recording, which is the point, but it also changes the energy of whatever you’re filming and blinks in your peripheral vision like a tiny alarm clock you can’t turn off. Cover goes on, problem solved. There’s a sensor behind it that detects the cover and disables recording if you block it wrong, so

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" —

Last week Google quietly updated the post-quantum cryptography clock in a way that most security leaders haven't fully processed yet. Their announcement wasn't framed as a warning. It wasn't a white paper with a scary title. It was a technical update — the kind of thing that lands in an engineering blog and gets picked up by specialist press before it reaches the boardroom. But the business implication is straightforward: the timeline for quantum-capable computers to threaten

Meta just did something most Fortune 500 companies haven't done yet: they published exactly how they migrated their infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography — in detail, with real engineering lessons, for everyone to read. The document is dense. It's written for engineers. But the implications aren't technical. They're strategic. And if you run a company that handles sensitive data, stores long-lived records, or operates in a regulated industry, this playbook is a gift you

The state that invented the lobster trap just set one for itself. Last week, the Maine Legislature passed LD 307 — the first statewide moratorium on large data center development in the United States. Any facility drawing more than 20 megawatts of power is banned from receiving permits until November 2027. The stated reason: protect residents from rising electricity bills and water consumption. Noble instinct. Wrong diagnosis. And here's the part that keeps me up at night: th