In October 2024, I stood in front of the Navy League of Ft. Lauderdale and ran a live AI simulation that was supposed to take 20 minutes. It took 90. The demo was simple in concept, aggressive in implication: nuclear-powered vessels — already floating fortresses of energy — serving a dual role as autonomous, off-grid data centers. Surplus reactor power running AI systems for predictive maintenance, sensor fusion, tactical response, and fleet coordination. No cloud. No terrest

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.

Before the hype, before the agents, before the data centers and the AI strategy — I gave an early version of ChatGPT a Sublime song and asked it to write humanity a warning. Years later, I realized I never stopped writing the same article. I don't remember who sent me the link. It was a former coworker. He said he had limited access and was allowed to share it with a few people. I have no idea if that was true. It didn't matter. What mattered was that I now had access to Chat

Somewhere between the research lab and the corporate boardroom, artificial intelligence entered a room with an unmade bed, a long-haired man and absolutely no remaining tolerance for bullshit. I have to admit something. Until very recently, I did not really know much about Asmongold. I knew the face. You know the face. The long hair. The thousand-yard stare. The general appearance of a man who has been awake since the Bush administration and has developed a deep personal dist

There's a GitHub repo called NIGHTRUN that's worth paying attention to, and not because it's a product. Because it's a sign. NIGHTRUN is an AI appliance operating system with the operating system removed. You boot from a USB stick or a Raspberry Pi SD card. Firmware loads the model directly into RAM. No Linux userspace, no browser, no network stack, no cloud account, no host application. The machine becomes a dedicated device whose single job is talk to the model. After loadi

Starting in the 1940s, American codebreakers collected Soviet cables they had no way to read. They filed them away and waited. The messages were protected by one-time-pad encryption — OTP — the one system that's genuinely unbreakable when it's used correctly. Perfect randomness, never reused, kept secret. That's not a marketing claim. It's mathematically true. But under the strain of the war, the Soviets duplicated their OTP key material instead of generating it fresh. Pages

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

This is getting ridiculous. Yesterday I wrote about what happens when AI makes the search space of physical reality economically explorable. The basic argument: almost every major engineering bottleneck eventually becomes a materials-science problem, and AI combined with simulation and automated laboratories is starting to let us search for new materials instead of waiting decades for someone to stumble across them. Today I watched a video about the Salton Sea. There may be a

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

A package showed up from Base44 today. Inside: a hoodie that says SPECIALIST across the chest, a Builder hat, stickers, a tumbler, and a card that reads, "You built it. You earned it. Now show it off to the world." Officially a Base44 Specialist. And honestly? It landed. Why It Mattered I've spent decades building software the hard way. Architecture diagrams at 2 AM. Integration bugs that took three days to trace. Deployment pipelines that required four people and a prayer. I

My 16-year-old daughter reacted to the possible return of MySpace like people once reacted to a new iPhone launch. She has no MySpace nostalgia. She never had a Top 8, never broke a profile with bad HTML, never waited for somebody's page song to load over dial-up. Yet she is genuinely excited to "go OG" on it. And the fact that OG is literally Olivia Grace is just too perfect. That tells me this may be bigger than millennials trying to resurrect their adolescence. Younger pe

I had no idea today was TRS-80 Day. I found out the same way we are apparently required to learn about history now: through one of the only genuinely useful things social media still does, which is randomly placing something in front of you that unlocks a 40-year-old memory. The post said that on August 3, 1977, Tandy announced the original TRS-80, one of the first mass-produced personal computers. I saw "TRS-80" and immediately thought: I had one of those. Mine was a TRS-80

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

We built the rocket ships. We never built flight school. Now education is firing students toward a target that has already disappeared. Sam Altman said something during his recent appearance at Stanford that hit me harder than anything else in the conversation. It was not his claim that one capable person, armed with enough AI, can now attempt work that would once have required an exceptional 100-person engineering team. It was not the discussion about Codex, scaling laws, co

Sam Altman said something in a Stanford class this spring that I have not been able to stop thinking about. He was talking about what AI changes for startups, and he said it the way people say things when they've said them a few times and the words have worn smooth: "With an affordable amount of spend on tokens, you can do what a hundred-person, incredibly great engineering team would do as a startup. And that was just totally impossible. That was like not in the set of optio

Todd called me twenty minutes ago... He'd just finished something with Codex that he'd been putting off for years. Two old email exports — Dovecot archives from his Bluehost account — that he wanted consolidated into Thunderbird. Original dates, headers, folder structure, duplicates removed. Clean. The kind of task that lives on a list forever because the work isn't hard, it's just miserable. Files, formats, folders, imports, sync issues you don't discover until you think you

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