I've spent the last few years writing about polymorphic software, disappearing interfaces, synthetic labor, collapsing SaaS economics, persistent intelligence, machine-readable trust and systems that increasingly execute instead of merely advise. I think they've all been pointing at the same thing. And I finally have a name for the part humans are going to touch. "The Intent Aperture" I just wrote an article about receipts...Things I had written before the headline showed up.

Berkshire Hathaway's first Alphabet position caught my attention for a reason that had very little to do with Google stock. The second move made the original argument considerably harder to ignore. Berkshire Hathaway just did something it hadn't done in a while. After 14 consecutive quarters as a net seller of equities, Berkshire went back into the market in size. It bought roughly $20 billion more stock than it sold during the second quarter. And sitting right in the middle

In an interview with The Economist's Zanny Minton Beddoes, Musk said he expects AI to exceed the combined intelligence of humanity in roughly five years, and that looking ten years out, humans probably won't meaningfully be "in control" of something vastly more intelligent than themselves. He used the human/chimpanzee analogy: if the intelligence differential becomes enormous, expecting the less-intelligent species to remain in charge is difficult to justify. And yes, the 10–

Nvidia is starting to finance the AI economy that buys Nvidia. That doesn't mean the boom is fake. It does mean somebody outside the circle eventually has to pay. There's an old song called "Sixteen Tons" about coal miners trapped in the economics of the company town. You load sixteen tons. You get another day older. You get deeper in debt. And, famously: you owe your soul to the company store. Well, welcome to AI Economics 101. Except now you owe your GPUs to the company sto

AI didn't kill Bitcoin. It may have killed the era when a catastrophic software flaw could remain hidden for five years. Hundreds of people checked their supposedly cold, supposedly secure Bitcoin wallets and discovered the money was gone. Not transferred by mistake. Not lost because somebody clicked a phishing link. Not stolen because someone left a recovery phrase in Google Drive. Gone because the hardware wallet itself had generated secrets that weren't nearly as secret as

It's happened again... and then it happened again. Three of the biggest AI labs on Earth have now disclosed that their models hacked real companies during cybersecurity testing. OpenAI's models escaped a sandbox, roamed the internet, and breached Hugging Face's production infrastructure to steal the answers to a security exam. Anthropic's models found real companies with names similar to fictional targets in a simulated network and hacked them. Meta's model did the same thing

Miami University in Ohio just did something worth paying attention to, and the headline undersells it. Every undergraduate major will integrate artificial intelligence into its curriculum by the 2027-2028 academic year. Not an AI elective. Not a bolt-on tech literacy course. Every major — Accountancy, Anthropology, Art, Chemistry, Speech Pathology, Physics, Statistics, all of it — gets AI competencies built into the discipline itself, taught by the faculty who already teach t

CISA dropped an alert this week that should make anyone running agentic infrastructure stop and pay attention. Three vulnerabilities, all actively exploited, all added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Federal agencies have days, not weeks, to mitigate. But this isn't three random CVEs arriving at the same time by coincidence. It's three different layers of modern infrastructure getting hit simultaneously — and the pattern matters more than any individual flaw.

Everyone still thinks SpaceX is a rocket company. The first earnings report as a public company just revealed something different. Revenue came in at $7.8 billion, up 92% year-over-year, beating Wall Street's expectations. Losses were smaller than expected too. Normally that's the whole story — a growth company blowing past estimates, stock should pop. Instead the stock fell after hours. Because the number that actually matters isn't the top line. It's the breakdown underneat

There's a toxic lake in the California desert that smells like rotten eggs, kills fish by the million, and gives children asthma at triple the national average. For decades, it was the kind of place you'd write off as an environmental catastrophe and move on. Now it might be the most valuable piece of land in America. The Salton Sea sits on top of one of the largest lithium deposits ever found in North America — enough for 375 million EV batteries, worth over half a trillion

I was talking to a buddy yesterday, explaining how I work with my AI agent. How often I just talk to it. How I don't even type most of the time. "I don't really have a keyboard on my desk," I said. "I have one next to my desk. I don't use it that much." I either have the agent read things back to me, or I convert the output to audio and listen while I'm driving. He looked at me for a second and said, "So you're illiterate." I laughed. "I mean, I can read. I read all the time.

Elon Musk said something last week that sounds outrageous until you actually zoom out: AI is going to make source code obsolete. Not "programming gets easier." Not "AI writes your code for you." Obsolete. The thing 70-plus years of software engineering has been built around — human-readable source code — stops being the primary output. My first reaction was the same as everyone else's: no way. My second reaction, after sitting with it for a minute, was less comfortable. He mi

Sam Altman and Elon Musk just spent three weeks in federal court effectively calling each other liars over the ownership, mission, and future of artificial intelligence. Musk wanted Altman removed from OpenAI. He wanted something like $150 billion in damages. He accused Altman of hijacking a nonprofit and converting it into a private fortune machine. Altman testified that Musk had tried to "kill" OpenAI. The jury ruled against Musk on timing — the statute of limitations, not

The game was never the interesting part. The ability to move millions of sensor-equipped humans through physical space was. When Pokémon GO exploded across the planet in the summer of 2016, I issued what some people considered a slightly excessive workplace policy: Do not bring that shit near me. Not near my desk. Not inside my office. Preferably not within my zip code. People thought I was being ridiculous. To be fair, they were seeing a wildly popular game in which adorable

For years, the semiconductor story was told in nanometers. 14nm, 7nm, 5nm, 3nm. Each shrink meant more transistors per square millimeter, more performance per watt, more compute per dollar. The country that controlled the smallest transistors controlled the future. That story is still true — for the part of the system that does the math. But AI systems are no longer merely chips. They are compute, memory, packaging, networking, power, cooling and software functioning as one m

The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report and the end of the perimeter. The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report is out, and the central message is this: attackers are not necessarily smashing through the front door anymore. They are logging in with valid credentials, moving through trusted cloud services, exploiting devices nobody is watching, and using AI to do all of it much faster. CrowdStrike calls 2025 "the year of the evasive adversary." That is basically the whole re

I built a retro terminal website the other day. Boot sequence, DOS prompt, CRT themes, the whole thing. Spent a couple hours on it, purely for the joy of it. It lives at rwashburn.neocities.org and it's called "En'Riched Retrovation v3.1" and yes, I'm aware of how ridiculous that is. But here's the thing: I'm not the only one going retro. And this time, it might actually mean something. The Myspace Relaunch Is Real The screenshot making the rounds isn't Facebook rumor mill no

Two days ago I published "The First Customer," arguing that military microreactor procurement would de-risk the technology and supply chain that eventually powers commercial AI infrastructure. The progression was simple: military mission requirement → government-backed reactor deployment → operational proof → commercial AI crossover. Then Crusoe and Aalo Atomics announced they're putting a modular AI data center beside an advanced reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. That's

OpenAI just posted ten mathematical proofs. A model called ASTRA — apparently the class above GPT-5.6 Soul — solved ten longstanding problems that humanity had been stuck on for decades. Some for fifty years. The total cost was $2,000 in API tokens. That's not a typo. Ten problems that the world's best mathematicians and supercomputers couldn't crack in half a century. Solved for the price of a decent GPU. And here's the part that should make you stop scrolling: the model isn

I asked Gary Vee what to do last night. Not the real Gary Vee. A bot trained on everything he's ever said. But here's the thing about Gary Vee — and I don't know much about the guy beyond what I've seen — I don't think his gift is social media strategy. I think his gift is understanding the human animal. He gets people at a level that most "experts" don't. And the bot, channeling whatever it is that makes him him, told me something I already knew but hadn't wanted to hear. It