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The Accidental Origin of Beacon: How “Wearable Wi-Fi” Turned Into a Marketing Mic Drop
I didn’t set out to build a product. I just wanted to see if I could make a tiny Wi-Fi server wearable—and useful. What started as a...

Rich Washburn
May 21, 20254 min read


Dunning-Kruger & AI: Metacognitive Resistance Training You Didn’t Know You Needed
Metacog-what now? Dude, now you’re just making up words. Not this time, dummy. (jk… kinda) So here’s the deal — and honestly, it still...

Rich Washburn
May 6, 20254 min read


Why We NEED a Billion Robots
We’re standing at the edge of a monumental shift in how we think about work, productivity, and automation. The conversation about...

Rich Washburn
May 2, 20254 min read


Zero-Click, Wormable, and in Your Living Room: The AirPlay Exploit That Shouldn’t Exist (But Does)
Imagine walking into your house and your Bluetooth speaker silently hacks your phone—no pop-ups, no permissions, no downloads. Just......

Rich Washburn
May 2, 20253 min read


Is AI Making Us Dumb? Only If We Forget What Intelligence Actually Is
Remember this one? “ You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket! ” Oh, but I do. And it’s not just a calculator — it’s a weather...

Rich Washburn
Apr 29, 20253 min read


☕ My Coffee Now Has Wi-Fi. What Are You Doing With Your Life?
OK, so here's the deal: I was supposed to just knock out a simple control project for a client — build a gizmo that handles remote...

Rich Washburn
Apr 27, 20253 min read


Quantum AI Consciousness: When Robots Might Actually Wake Up
We’ve gotten pretty comfortable thinking of AI as a high-powered autocomplete machine—clever, sure, but ultimately just stringing...

Rich Washburn
Apr 20, 20253 min read


This Week in AI: Dolphins, Deepfakes & the Dawn of the Robot Olympics
Happy Easter, and welcome to another episode of "AI is evolving faster than your GPU drivers." This week, we saw machines talk to...

Rich Washburn
Apr 20, 20253 min read


Pixelation Is Not Protection: Why Your Blur Tool Might Be Lying to You
Imagine you're caught in a gunfight. You dive behind a cardboard box. It hides you from view, but it won't stop a bullet. That's...

Rich Washburn
Apr 19, 20252 min read


Game of Thrones: Semiconductor Edition
Taiwan’s Silicon Shield Faces New Cracks Amid Escalating U.S.-China Tensions In the high-stakes power game of semiconductors and...

Rich Washburn
Apr 18, 20254 min read


AI Ain’t Beta Anymore: O3 Lets You Be the Intern in Your Own Workflow
There’s a moment—if you’ve been in tech long enough—when a tool stops being “cool” and starts being critical . That moment just hit, four...

Rich Washburn
Apr 18, 20252 min read


The Silicon Era Is Cracking — And Bismuth Might Just Be the Metal That Replaces It
If you thought Moore’s Law was slowing down because we’re out of tricks—think again. A team of researchers from Peking University just...

Rich Washburn
Apr 18, 20253 min read


Distributed Cognition: The Real AI Revolution You’re Missing
Let me tell you a weird story: we don’t know how to build the Space Shuttle anymore. Seriously. NASA built the Shuttle with some of the...

Rich Washburn
Apr 12, 20253 min read


Welcome to the Great AI Efficiency Era: Why Your Skills Matter More Than Ever
It’s the best of times—and the worst of times. AI is accelerating faster than ever. Models are getting better, smarter, and cheaper by...

Rich Washburn
Apr 12, 20253 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 10, 20253 min read


From If-Then to Figure It Out: The Rise of Autonomous, Collaborative AI
Almost two years ago, I wrote about a future where our operating systems wouldn’t just sit there waiting for input—they’d morph . They’d...

Rich Washburn
Apr 10, 20253 min read


Postcards from the Exhale: Tennessee
The speeches were over. The crowd had dispersed. The adrenaline from photographing one of the most high-energy events I’ve covered in a...

Rich Washburn
Apr 9, 20252 min read


Lens on Liberty: Road Trip to Tennessee for the 917 Society
There are road trips, and then there are missions. This one started in Florida and ended in Tennessee, but it wasn’t just about the...

Rich Washburn
Apr 9, 20253 min read


Possibility Machines: How Nvidia Built the Future Without Knowing What It Was For
Most companies chase a vision. Nvidia built tools —and let the future find them. This is the story of how a scrappy graphics card startup...

Rich Washburn
Apr 8, 20254 min read


Robin Hood Economics: Is Trump Really Crashing the Market to Save the Middle Class?
Look, I’m not an economic guru. I don’t have a Bloomberg terminal duct-taped to my fridge, and I didn’t minor in Financial Alchemy at the...

Rich Washburn
Apr 8, 20254 min read


Real-Life Direwolves? Not Quite. But Science Just Got Dangerously Close.
“ Life, uh... finds a way. ” Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park Yeah, well, apparently so do biotech startups with millions in funding, a...

Rich Washburn
Apr 7, 20254 min read


Full AI Actors, Ghibli Dreams, and GPT-5: The AI Tsunami Is Here
Remember when the biggest tech news of the week was a new iPhone color? Yeah—those were simpler times. Now, it feels like the AI arms...

Rich Washburn
Apr 6, 20255 min read


Respected Computer Scientist Mysteriously Disappears: The Curious Case of Dr. Xiaofeng Wang
Something strange is happening in Bloomington, Indiana—and no, it’s not another Stranger Things reboot. This time, it’s real. Dr....

Rich Washburn
Apr 6, 20254 min read


"Ahead of the Fleet"
This morning, I got a call from Frank—a longtime Navy insider and someone who doesn’t pick up the phone just to make small talk. He was...

Rich Washburn
Apr 6, 20252 min read


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