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THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN STREAMED
I don’t even know where to start other than this: something monumental is happening in Iran, and the world is only just starting to notice — not because the story wasn’t real, but because the story broke in pixels before it ever got to print . That’s how we got here. This week, newsrooms around the world reluctantly acknowledged what millions already knew from their phones: there is a massive uprising underway in Iran. Tehran, Shiraz, Mashhad — three of the largest cities in

Rich Washburn
6 days ago5 min read


2026: The Year of Execution
In my world, resolution isn’t a promise — it’s a setting. Something you tweak on a monitor until things look sharp enough. Static. Fixed. Done. But I’m not interested in static anymore. This year, I’m not setting resolutions. I’m setting direction and executing. The Past Two Years: The Build Phase The last couple of years have been about building — systems, tools, prototypes, proofs of concept. Some for Eliakim Capital , some for Data Power Supply , and some just because I

Rich Washburn
Dec 31, 20252 min read


The Rise of Machine Capitalism: There’s an App for That
Somewhere between a vending machine in Anthropic’s lobby and a meme painted on a Memphis rooftop, capitalism quietly booted up a new operating system. We used to say “AI is coming for your job.”Now it’s coming for your org chart. The Dawn of Machine Capitalism Let’s start with a vending machine.A simple, stupid, beautiful vending machine. Anon Labs gave an AI $500 and said, “Go make a profit. ” No human babysitter. No preloaded logic tree. Just a digital brain, an API key, an

Rich Washburn
Dec 27, 20253 min read


PaaS: Privacy as a Service — The Great Data Gold Rush of the AI Era
VPNs had their time.They made us feel private, even if all they really did was move our data through someone else’s pipe. But a small startup called Phreeli might have just pulled the next big lever in the evolution of privacy. It’s not another app or encrypted messenger. It’s a carrier — a full-blown phone service that doesn’t know who you are. You sign up with a zip code. That’s it. No name. No ID. No personal record. They’ve built a zero-knowledge billing system that can

Rich Washburn
Dec 26, 20254 min read


Identity Inertia: How AI Is Forcing Us to Reclaim Our Agency
For as long as most of us can remember, we’ve been taught to introduce ourselves as our roles. “I’m an accountant.”“I’m an engineer.”“I’m in IT.” Somewhere along the line, our job titles became our identities. And for decades, that worked fine—because the world moved slowly enough to let us keep up with our own definitions. But AI just broke the speed limit. Now the skills that defined those roles are evolving faster than we can rewrite our résumés. The ground beneath our ide

Rich Washburn
Dec 17, 20253 min read


THE NEW SPACE RACE: THE AI COMPUTE FRONTIER HAS LEFT EARTH
There’s a new space race underway. Only this time, it’s not about astronauts or flags or dusty footprints on the Moon. It’s about compute. That’s right — the real battle for AI supremacy isn’t happening in data centers in Utah or server farms in Oregon. It’s heading into orbit. Solar Megawatts, Zero Cooling Costs — The Space Data Center Revolution Let’s start with the physics. AI training at scale burns through electricity like nothing humanity has ever built. Training a sing

Rich Washburn
Dec 10, 20254 min read


THE FOUNDER FILES: VAPORVAULT
Secure Simplicity for the Rest of Us It started as a side feature. A “what if” on a different project. And seventy-some hours later, I’m staring at a fully functional, shipping, hardware-secure text vault — VaporVault 3.0 — wondering how we got from idea to inventory this fast. This isn’t a prototype.This isn’t vaporware. This is VaporVault , and it’s real. The Problem That Shouldn’t Exist You know exactly what I’m talking about. Every IT guy, every cybersecurity professio

Rich Washburn
Dec 6, 20253 min read


The Signal Before the Click: The Moment Before the Quantum Acceleration
There’s a feel to precision—the instant a mechanism locks into place and the world goes quiet for half a second.Right before that click, though, there’s the glide: friction drops, alignment happens, inevitability hums. That’s where we are with quantum. The parts are lining up, the resistance is gone, and you can almost feel the system seat itself. History Has a Rhythm Every so often we get a cycle big enough to reset the world.They’re far enough apart that we forget what they

Rich Washburn
Dec 5, 20253 min read


VaporVault Node — The Shared Vault
So… remember how I said VaporVault was an offline, personal password vault? Yeah — about that. Apparently, it’s also a collaboration tool now. I didn’t plan this, but the Node firmware kind of turned into something way cooler than I expected. The Idea The standard VaporVault is totally offline — your private Wi-Fi network, your private data. But then I thought, what if a small team or family could share one safely? So I built VaporVault Node. It runs the same hardware, sam

Rich Washburn
Dec 5, 20252 min read


The Confirmation Effect
So, I just finished watching Jensen Huang sitting next to Elon Musk — both of them nodding in agreement — saying there’s no AI bubble. And, you know what? That hit exactly the way I thought it would. Because it’s not a revelation; it’s confirmation. I wrote two days ago that there is no AI bubble — only a delusion bubble — and this, right here, is the proof. Not because Jensen said it, but because he had to say it. The narrative has finally caught up to the math. This is wh

Rich Washburn
Nov 19, 20253 min read


The Handshake
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that sound. You know the one — the modem handshake. That chaotic, warbling, alien sound of two machines trying to find common language. Back in the BBS days, that sound was everything. It meant connection. It meant possibility. It meant you’d made it through the static and the screech and the hiss to that beautiful, quiet moment of sync. I hadn’t thought about that sound in twenty years. But last night — lying in bed after back-to-back c

Rich Washburn
Nov 19, 20254 min read


When the Safety Net Snaps
It happened again. The one thing that’s not supposed to go down … went down. This morning, Cloudflare — the safety net of the internet, the infrastructure under the infrastructure — tripped over itself and faceplanted. If AWS is the backbone, Cloudflare is the connective tissue. It’s the silent middle layer that makes sure your site doesn’t go dark when other things do. Except today, it did. And when Cloudflare stumbles, it’s not just one site that goes offline — it’s an ent

Rich Washburn
Nov 18, 20254 min read


There Is No AI Bubble — Just a Delusion Bubble
I just got back from a data conference in Chicago, and I left honestly stunned. Not by the technology — by the people. Panel after panel, supposedly “leaders” in data science, logistics, and analytics — all of them dancing around the same idea: “We’re being cautious about AI.” Cautious. That word kept coming up like a reflex, a corporate mantra. “We’re waiting for regulation.” “We’re concerned about bias.” “We don’t trust the outputs.” It was like watching a room full of data

Rich Washburn
Nov 16, 20254 min read


The Pharaoh of PowerPoint: When Egos Build Pyramids Instead of Products
There’s something almost biblical about the way these guys operate.They don’t build companies anymore — they build temples to themselves. You’ve seen it: the aging executive who insists on running a “modern digital venture” entirely through local copies of Microsoft Word . No version control, no shared drives, no Google Docs, no transparency. It’s not about productivity — it’s about control.He treats the document like sacred scripture, locked in his desktop tomb where only he

Rich Washburn
Nov 16, 20253 min read


How Do You Say “Sputnik” in Chinese?
Quantum Just Went Rack-Mountable — And Everything Just Changed Let’s not bury the lead. China just launched a 100-qubit, room-temperature quantum computer — and you can rack it in your data center. Not a prototype. Not a physics experiment. An actual product. Shipping now. Called Hanyuan-1 . Three server racks. Neutral-atom architecture. Plug and play. Let me translate that into reality: This week, quantum computing went from science fiction to IT procurement. From Lab Equip

Rich Washburn
Nov 10, 20254 min read


The New Arms Race Inside Every Data Center
Let’s be honest — the 10kW rack era isn’t just over. It’s ancient history.And it’s not coming back. What’s happening right now is something entirely different: an all-out power and cooling arms race inside every data center — built or unbuilt. The demand curve isn’t plateauing. It’s accelerating, steeply. And for the foreseeable future, that’s not going to change. People keep saying, “Well, quantum will change everything.” Not for this. Quantum is incredible, but it’s not bui

Rich Washburn
Nov 8, 20252 min read


Software-Defined Combat Nodes: When War Becomes a Network
COVID did for remote work what the Russia-Ukraine war is doing for drone warfare. The pandemic didn’t invent Zoom, Teams, or Slack — it simply forced every organization on Earth to use them. Overnight, “digital transformation” went from strategy deck buzzword to survival tactic. Warfare is now having the same moment. From Platforms to Packets In June 2024, Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb didn’t just destroy aircraft — it rewrote doctrine. Drones launched from inside Russia’s b

Rich Washburn
Oct 26, 20253 min read


The Inevitable Obsolescence of Consulting Firms
Let me tell you something strange: We don’t know how to build the Space Shuttle anymore. NASA had the plans. The blueprints. The specs.What they didn’t have was the team —the network of minds, habits, and shared mental models that made it all work. That knowledge didn’t live in one document. It lived in hallway conversations. In hand gestures. In intuition built through repetition and failure. When those engineers retired or moved on, the Shuttle didn’t just become obsolete.

Rich Washburn
Oct 26, 20253 min read


Time to Clean Up Your ChatGPT Setup: Refresh, Rewire, and Reclaim Your AI Workspace
If you’ve been using ChatGPT since the early days, you remember how wild it was — the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence wrapped in one of the simplest interfaces imaginable. It felt like driving a spaceship with two buttons: “send” and “regenerate.” Fast-forward to now, and it’s not just a chat box anymore. It’s starting to look and feel like a full-on operating system for your digital life . Projects, Custom GPTs, Memory, Connectors, Sora, the Atlas Browser — it’

Rich Washburn
Oct 25, 20255 min read


Macrohard: The Schrödinger’s Startup That Might Build the Future (or Be the Ultimate Musk Troll)
If you’ve been on the internet in the last 48 hours, you’ve probably seen that photo — a massive white-roofed facility in Memphis with MACROHARD painted across it in letters so huge you can literally see them from space. And of course, it came straight from Elon Musk’s X account. Classic Elon: half-joke, half-omen, and somehow both at the same time. This is the same man who named a car line “S3XY,” sent a sports car into orbit, and made flamethrowers a consumer product. So

Rich Washburn
Oct 22, 20253 min read
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