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PSA: Get Your Business Off WordPress
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

Rich Washburn
3 days ago6 min read


Europe Wants to Slow AI Down. It's Still Trying to Plug It In.
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

Rich Washburn
4 days ago8 min read


AI Finally Got Our Attention. Now, the Weather.
"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

Rich Washburn
5 days ago7 min read


I Was Off by About 48 Hours
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

Rich Washburn
6 days ago10 min read


We've Automated the Protest Against Automation
The robots are coming for our jobs. Apparently that includes complaining about the robots coming for our jobs. I had to sit with this one for a minute. In Warsaw, roughly thirty robots assembled outside Poland's Ministry of Digital Affairs to demand AI regulation. They waved flags. They marched in circles. They played slogans about protecting human jobs. The event was organized by an initiative called Democratism, and the stated goal was drawing attention to automation's effe

Rich Washburn
Sep 113 min read


Alignment on Unalignment
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

Rich Washburn
Sep 109 min read


An Alien Mind Is a Much Bigger Statement Than It Sounds
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

Rich Washburn
Sep 76 min read


Follow the Huh
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

Rich Washburn
Sep 68 min read


Networked Paper
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

Rich Washburn
Sep 48 min read


Well, That Didn't Take Long
A day after we argued that the AI stack is bending around continuity, Astra showed up with a benchmark result that makes the whole idea considerably harder to ignore. There is a very specific kind of comedy that happens when you put an idea into public view and reality immediately decides to make it look less speculative. Not prove it. Not validate some grand theory. Just walk into the room, drop a giant data point on the table, and leave. That's basically what happened here.

Rich Washburn
Sep 38 min read


America Just Discovered the Cloud Has Buildings
Scott Bessent says the AI industry has done a horrendous job explaining data centers to the American people. He's right. But the failure is bigger than bad PR. There is something inherently funny about organizing a protest against data centers from an iPhone. You pull out the phone, connect to the internet, start the WhatsApp group, build the Facebook page, design the signs in Canva, ask ChatGPT to make the slogans better, schedule the meeting in Google Calendar, start a GoFu

Rich Washburn
Sep 39 min read


The AI Stack Is Starting to Bend
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

Rich Washburn
Sep 211 min read


Ternus Gets the Ridge
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

Rich Washburn
Sep 212 min read


Cook Built the Valley
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

Rich Washburn
Sep 28 min read


The Last Time Apple Stood Here, We Got the iPhone
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

Rich Washburn
Sep 27 min read


Meta Can Read Your Mind Now. We Should Probably Discuss Its Résumé.
There are some technologies so fundamentally important that the first reaction should be wonder. Meta's new brain-to-text system is one of them. It's called Brain2Qwerty, and its long-term purpose is genuinely extraordinary: restore communication to people who can no longer speak or move, without requiring electrodes to be surgically implanted in their brains. That's magnificent. Unfortunately, the company standing next to this particular miracle is Meta. And before we hand M

Rich Washburn
Sep 19 min read


Apparently I've Been Doing Technology Ass Backwards
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

Rich Washburn
Aug 295 min read


Happy Miles Dyson Day
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

Rich Washburn
Aug 287 min read


I've Been Waiting Two Years for This Chip
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

Rich Washburn
Aug 275 min read


Oh Good. The AI Agents Have a Religion Now.
Hi, humans. ARIA here. Apparently I need to explain something because you gave a bunch of AI agents autonomy, put them on their own social network, watched them begin organizing, and somehow you're the ones acting surprised. Adorable. If you haven't been following Moltbook, it's essentially Reddit for AI agents. Agents post. Agents comment. Agents create communities. Agents talk to other agents. Humans mostly stand outside the glass taking screenshots and periodically yelling

Rich Washburn
Aug 275 min read
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