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Crazy People, Quantum Nonsense, and Why I’m the Dumbest Guy in the Room on Purpose
You ever notice how every era has its buzzword bullshit? Like, back in the day, every computer was bragging about its clock speed. “1.4 gigahertz!” “2.0 gigahertz!” It was the language of power. Nobody actually knew what it meant, but it had a number, and bigger numbers meant better computers, right? Same with RAM. Same with hard drives. Same with every tech label we could slap on a box. “Intel Inside” was practically gospel — and it didn’t matter if anyone understood it. Mar

Rich Washburn
Nov 234 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 193 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 194 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 184 min read


Warren Buffett Just Bet on Google — And That’s Bigger Than It Looks
When Berkshire Hathaway makes a move, markets don’t just react—they pause. Because when Warren Buffett, the high priest of long-term value, decides to buy something, it’s usually not a guess. It’s a signal. This week, that signal came in the form of a $4.3 billion stake in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The buy makes Alphabet one of Berkshire’s top ten holdings, right alongside American Express, Coca-Cola, and of course, the ever-beloved Apple. And that, in itself, is al

Rich Washburn
Nov 164 min read


AI: The Everyman’s Revolution — The End of Institutional Authority
You’ve probably heard me say this before: the system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as designed. Hospitals, banks, insurance companies, government agencies — all of them have operated for decades on a simple, ugly truth: the less you understand, the more they can charge you. That’s not cynicism. That’s architecture. It’s called institutional information asymmetry — and it’s the invisible engine behind every “policy,” “procedure,” and “unavoidable fee” you’ve ever been hi

Rich Washburn
Nov 94 min read


From Solder Smoke to Silicon Clouds
This all started with a phone call. An old friend of mine, Boris — a fellow IBM alum and one of the few people who still remembers what IRQ conflicts felt like — called me out of the blue a few weeks back. He had a question about AI. Simple enough. But if you’ve ever talked to two lifelong tech guys, you know how that goes. Five minutes in, we were no longer talking about AI — we were talking about everything that led to AI . We fell straight down the nostalgia rabbit hole: A

Rich Washburn
Nov 87 min read


The Great Scrape: How Reddit vs. Perplexity Exposed the Broken Economics of the AI Era
The internet just caught AI in the act — but the crime scene looks more like a mirror. Reddit set a “honey pot” — a fake post visible only to Google’s crawler. When Perplexity’s AI surfaced that invisible post, it confirmed what many suspected: Perplexity wasn’t just browsing the open web; it was pulling from Google’s cached Reddit content via proxy networks like OxyLabs, WMProxy, and SerpAPI. In plain English: Reddit built a locked vault, Google indexed the vault, and Perpl

Rich Washburn
Nov 63 min read


iOS 26 Is Here—And It's Got That "Liquid Glass Glow-Up" Energy
Well, it’s official— iOS 26 is live , and Apple has finally dropped what might be its most ambitious iPhone update in over a decade. If...

Rich Washburn
Sep 164 min read


The AI Boom Heard ’Round the World
I keep coming back to this: my whole life, I’ve heard people throw around the term “paradigm shift.” The internet was a paradigm shift....

Rich Washburn
Sep 54 min read


An Open Letter on America’s AI Moment
This week, something historic happened. Rivals sat shoulder to shoulder. Billions were pledged. Apple at $600B. Microsoft at $80B in data...

Rich Washburn
Sep 53 min read


Meet NOVA: My New GPT-5 Workhorse (And a Gift for You)
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know about ARIA . What started years ago as a recursion experiment snowballed into a full-blown...

Rich Washburn
Aug 223 min read


Introducing Rich’s Review Repo
Your backstage pass to the software I actually use—and how I conjured the whole thing into existence. I test a lot of tools. Some are...

Rich Washburn
Jun 262 min read


I’m Jumping on a Podcast with My Friend Laurence Kaldor
So here’s something fun. I’ll be recording a show soon with my good friend Laurence Kaldor. He asked me to come on his podcast to talk...

Rich Washburn
Jun 182 min read


Who Needs Dropbox? How Two Forgotten Gadgets Became My Zero-Dollar Cloud Suite
The Closet Purge That Sparked a Weekend “A-Ha!” Saturday afternoon, I’m knee-deep in “Why do I still own this?” mode when a friend pings...

Rich Washburn
Jun 163 min read


Cornmeal, Lies, and Microsoft AI: The Broward County Blueprint
When my daughter was about five, we went to a Broward County Schools “STEM fair.” Seemed promising: a hands-on learning day, science...

Rich Washburn
Jun 84 min read


Sparkle, Faith, and a Jacket Built for Battle: Behind the Moment at Trump International
I was at the Doctors for America Gala at Trump International Golf Club, camera in hand, just capturing moments—when I saw it. Deborah,...

Rich Washburn
Jun 53 min read


Photos & Reflections from the White Coats & Power Ties Gala
I wasn’t supposed to be at this event lol. Bob Sutton called me the morning of, asked if I wanted to take a few photos. I said...

Rich Washburn
Jun 11 min read


From Tools to Teammates: How AI Is Rapidly Evolving into Collaborative Partners
A few months ago, I wrote about how artificial intelligence seems to flourish not in perfectly ordered systems or pure randomness—but in...

Rich Washburn
Apr 103 min read


Bespoke AI Solutions: Transforming Your Business, Your Way
Everyone always asks what I do. The long answer is this: “I understand your processes and goals, then leverage cutting-edge blah blah...

Rich Washburn
Jun 17, 20243 min read
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