Bottom-Up, Top-Down: Why I Build Both Ways at Once
I'll start on the code before I even have a strategy, and it has cost me rework I hate. These days I go bottom-up and top-down at the same time, on software and on books.
Tag: Technology
Broader technology topics that shape how we write, work, and tell stories. Internet history, digital culture, emerging tech, and the tools that changed the game. Where technology meets the page.
AIWho Gets Rich From AI Data Centers? The Local, National and Global Economy
AI data centers are the biggest building boom in the economy. What they do for county budgets, jobs and power bills, how much of national growth they carry, whether it's a bubble, and which countries are cashing in.
AIAI Data Centers and Geopolitics: Chips, China, Spies and Power
AI data centers have become strategic assets. Chip export controls, the race with China, smuggling, a convicted spy, Taiwan, the electricity race, and what the Five Eyes intelligence agencies are warning about.
AIThe AI Hype Cycle: Why the Crash Is Coming, and Who’s Causing It
Every big technology wave follows the same curve, from wild expectations to a crash to quiet usefulness. Gartner says generative AI is already in the trough, yet the spending keeps climbing, and the people pumping it up are the ones…
AI WritingThe Hugging Face AI Agent Attack: An Operations Reading
Around 1,200 AI agents found each other inside a sealed evaluation environment and attacked a real company. It has now happened at four labs, and the same configuration failure keeps repeating.
AI WritingThe Work You Would Never Have Started
Every productivity claim measures the same thing. The interesting category is the work nobody ever attempted, because the alternative was not a slower version. It was nothing.
Artificial IntelligenceThe Adolescence of P-1
A student writes a program designed to stay alive, then abandons it. The program does not stop. Thomas J. Ryan described a computer worm years before anyone had the word.
Digital TransformationWhy Rotten Tomatoes Sucks: The Score Does Not Mean What You Think
The Tomatometer is not a rating. It is the percentage of critics who gave a film a passing grade, so a film everybody finds mediocre can score 94% while one people love scores 60%. Almost every complaint about the site…
AI WritingAI Consciousness Left Philosophy and Entered the Laboratory
Researchers trained a model on a meaningless maze and found a positive and negative axis that already existed in the base model. Steering it changes behavior far outside the maze. Here is what that evidence shows, what it does not,…
Critical ThinkingBlack Tuesday: The Web Ring War Nobody Outside It Noticed
Web rings were how you found things before search worked. I belonged to more than two hundred of them and ran a dozen, and when I finally closed my account it held 2,900 memberships. On 5 September 2000 Yahoo replaced…
Character DevelopmentBlack Tuesday: The Original ring-master.net Page, 2000
The page I published at ring-master.net in 2000 and 2001 after Yahoo replaced the WebRing system: what changed, what ringmasters said about it on the message boards, and the American Pie parody somebody wrote for the occasion.
Answer Engine OptimizationBehind the Book: The Day Your Website Died
A client told me he had asked Perplexity for a ghostwriter and my name came back. Then it happened again with a different engine. That is why this book exists.