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The Website Is About to Become an Implementation Detail
On the transition from published interfaces to generated ones — and what it means for everything built on top of the web. A website, at its core, is a PDF with buttons. Sure, it's responsive. Sure, it has JavaScript. Maybe there's an AI chatbot in the corner. But fundamentally, every visitor gets roughly the same experience. Same layout. Same copy. Same navigation. Same calls to action. The same document, served to everyone. We've spent thirty years optimizing that model. Tha

Rich Washburn
Jun 284 min read


I Don't Use AI Like a Chatbot. I Use It Like a Crew.
Why the next generation of workers won't be judged by what they can do alone — but by what they can orchestrate. A friend called me a few weeks ago looking for job advice. He's a programmer. Smart, genuinely AI-savvy — probably more capable than 90% of people in roles adjacent to his. He'd been leaning hard on LinkedIn, putting in applications, waiting for callbacks. I told him LinkedIn isn't a job place. He was surprised. But here's the reality: the moment you put "Open to W

Rich Washburn
Jun 257 min read


Microsoft Just Validated the Thing It Couldn't Build
There's a specific kind of institutional move that only happens when a company has stopped believing in its own product. Microsoft didn't announce that Copilot is getting better. They announced Microsoft Scout — a new "always-on personal agent" built on OpenClaw, the open-source AI framework that 355,000 people starred on GitHub in five months and that Microsoft had nothing to do with building. Let that sit for a second. The company that spent three years and billions of doll

Rich Washburn
Jun 35 min read


Alpha Raccoon Had a 22-for-23 Record. That Was the Confession.
Michele Spagnuolo is 36, Italian, lives in Switzerland, and works on Google's security team. That is, as someone noted online, an excellent dating profile. It is also, as it turns out, the beginning of a federal rap sheet. In late 2024, Spagnuolo allegedly logged into an internal Google tool — one available to all 180,000 employees — that tracked what people all over the world were searching for in real time. He wanted to know who would top Google's annual Year in Search rank

Rich Washburn
Jun 35 min read


The Three-Way Mexican Standoff That Nobody Wins — Except the Builder
There's a tension running through every product team in Silicon Valley right now, and it goes something like this: The engineer thinks they don't need the product manager anymore. AI can do product thinking. The product manager thinks they don't need the engineer anymore. AI can write the code. The designer thinks they don't need either of them. AI can generate both specs and interfaces. And here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody in this standoff wants to say out loud: Th

Rich Washburn
May 314 min read


The Last 300 Days of Work — Or the First 300 Days of Something Harder to Name
A quote is making its rounds. Kevin Roose — New York Times tech columnist, Hard Fork co-host, author of multiple books on AI — posted this on May 29th: "Overheard at an AI lab: 'How are you spending the last 300 days of work?'" That's it. No attribution. No lab named. No context beyond the quote itself. And yet it detonated. 487,000 impressions. Hundreds of replies. A full weekend of debate across tech Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Which tells you something important — not a

Rich Washburn
May 315 min read


The Moment Hardened Security Went Mainstream
For years, GrapheneOS lived in a specific corner of the internet. Security researchers ran it. Journalists protecting sources ran it. Privacy advocates who knew what "attack surface reduction" meant ran it. The average person had never heard of it, and the average smartphone manufacturer had no reason to care. That just changed. Motorola announced a long-term partnership with the GrapheneOS Foundation at Mobile World Congress in March, committing to bring GrapheneOS compatibi

Rich Washburn
May 274 min read


The Pope, the AI Lab, and the Question Nobody Else Is Asking
Anthropic just got blessed by the Pope. Take a second with that sentence. Because I promise you, nobody writing AI forecasts five years ago had that on their bingo card. This week, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah met with the Vatican as part of a formal ethical collaboration between the lab and the Catholic Church. Not a photo op. Not a brief handshake. An actual working partnership around the moral implications of artificial intelligence. The world's most consequential

Rich Washburn
May 263 min read


May 2027: What I Think We're Walking Into
I'm writing this to be read a year from now. Six predictions, grounded in what's actually happening today. The device. The agents. Physical AI. Quantum. Governance. And the one nobody sees coming. Hold me to it.

Rich Washburn
May 226 min read


One Year Inside the Techquake: What We Said, What Arrived, and What's Still Coming
A year ago I called it a techquake. ARIA said the tipping point was 2027. It's May 2026. Let's run the tape.

Rich Washburn
May 224 min read


Google's Endgame: The Quiet Infrastructure Play Nobody's Talking About
Google I/O 2026 wasn't about models. It was about owning the infrastructure layer beneath every AI agent on earth — and the distribution moat no other company can replicate.

Rich Washburn
May 224 min read


One Extension. One Employee. 3,800 Repos. GitHub Just Got Wrecked.
This is not a data breach story. I want to be clear about that upfront, because the way this is being covered — GitHub investigating unauthorized access, no evidence of customer impact, monitoring for follow-on activity — makes it sound like a routine security incident. A blip. Something the comms team handles while the engineers clean it up. That is not what happened here. What happened here is a case study in the future of cyberwar. And the future looks like a poisoned VS C

Rich Washburn
May 204 min read


The Dead Zone Deal: What the AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon JV Actually Means
Three days ago, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon announced something that doesn't happen often: they agreed to work together. The joint venture — still subject to final paperwork — is designed to end wireless dead zones in the United States. The mechanism is direct-to-device satellite connectivity, pooling spectrum resources across all three carriers into a unified platform that satellite providers can plug into. The stated goal is to nearly eliminate coverage gaps in areas curren

Rich Washburn
May 185 min read


Someone Just Put the CIA's Favorite Software on GitHub for Free
Let me tell you about a company you've probably never heard of — and why that's not an accident. Palantir was founded in 2003. Two of its earliest backers were Peter Thiel and In-Q-Tel — which is the CIA's venture capital arm. Not a firm that does work adjacent to the intelligence community. The actual CIA's actual investment fund. So from day one, the CIA was writing checks to build this thing. And for its first three years, the CIA was Palantir's only customer. That tells y

Rich Washburn
May 135 min read


VaporVault and the 16 Billion Password Problem
I'm going to be honest — I wasn't planning to talk about VaporVault this week. But then the 16 billion credential story dropped, and a few people reached out asking if I'd seen it. And I kept thinking about this little device sitting on my desk that I built about six months ago, mostly out of frustration, mostly at 3am. And I figured — yeah, this is probably worth bringing back up. Not because VaporVault solves the breach. It doesn't. Nothing does. But it does solve the speci

Rich Washburn
May 133 min read


16 Billion Passwords Just Got Leaked. Here's What You Need to Know.
Let me be direct with you: this one is real, and it's not a drill. In June 2025, cybersecurity researchers at Cybernews uncovered 30 separate databases sitting on unsecured cloud servers — a total of 16 billion exposed login credentials. We're talking usernames, emails, and plaintext passwords, organized by website URL and ready for immediate use. Apple. Google. Facebook. VPNs. Developer portals. Government services. The footprint is so wide that the researchers couldn't name

Rich Washburn
May 134 min read


The Day Debian Drew a Line in the Sand
On Sunday, May 10th — Mother's Day, of all days — the Debian project quietly dropped an announcement that should be making headlines across every security operations center, every forensic lab, and every threat intelligence team paying attention. They made it official: Debian is going 100% reproducible. As in, every single package in the main repository. Not aspirationally. Not as a roadmap item. As policy, effective immediately. The exact quote from the release team is worth

Rich Washburn
May 125 min read


The Angstrom Era: Why the Physics of Chips Is Rewriting the Rules of AI Infrastructure
We've left the nanometer era. What comes next changes everything about how AI gets built — and who controls it. I've been watching the semiconductor industry from the infrastructure and AI strategy side for a long time. And what TSMC just announced — the A14, A13, and A12 process nodes — sounds like another incremental press release until you understand what the "A" actually stands for. Angstrom. One tenth of a nanometer. We are now building transistors at a scale where indiv

Rich Washburn
May 115 min read


The Kill Web: Why Iran's War Plan Is Already Obsolete
Right now, as peace talks hang by a thread over the Strait of Hormuz, the most important military technology story of the decade is playing out in real time — and almost nobody is framing it correctly. This isn't a story about missiles and drones. It's a story about networks. Iran built its entire offensive doctrine around a 2024 playbook. Blind the Patriot radar. Launch the drone curtain. Saturate with cruise missiles. Exploit the cost asymmetry — $50,000 Shaheds against $45

Rich Washburn
May 84 min read


CopyFail: An AI Found a 9-Year-Old Bug That Roots Every Linux Machine on Earth in One Hour
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

Rich Washburn
May 45 min read
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