Blogs

The Billion-Dollar AI Mistake general

2026-05-22 18:24:22.164000

The Basic Problem

AI is changing software economics, but not in the simple way most of the market keeps pretending. It did not erase every incumbent advantage. It lowered the cost of replicating visible software surfaces: dashboards, onboarding…

MacGyver vs. Knight Rider: The Swiss Army Knife vs. the Talking Dashboard Revisited in 2026 general

2026-05-18 20:16:58.557000

Sovereign competence, talking dashboards, and what engineers forgot

If you grew up on American television, you were handed a full export catalog of heroes.

Cowboys, detectives, space captains, action stars, superheroes, and men who could solve…

The Overcut and the Real Economy general

2026-05-15 19:04:23.013000

1. The Bill Rarely Lands Where the Cut Was Made

There is a version of this story where companies overcut, the strategy fails, executives learn humility, and labor is vindicated.

That version is emotionally satisfying.

It is also probably…

What Maritime Tragedies Can Teach Software Engineers About Ownership in the Age of AI general

2026-05-11 07:41:36.465000

Working is not the same as understood, and cheap is not the same as low total cost

There is a familiar kind of cheap boat listing that looks almost reasonable at first glance. The hull floats, the engine may even be new, the cabin has cushions, the…

Productivity Mirage tech-labor

2026-05-09 00:00:00

Opening: The Wrong Labor Ledger

There is a category mistake hiding inside the current AI labor argument.

A lot of people talk as if AI is compressing official software engineering work: sprint-planned product work, core systems, mature…

A Fork in the Road: Scalable Intelligence or Mirage? general

2026-05-08 16:55:31.971000

# A Fork in the Road: Scalable Intelligence or Mirage? ## Opening: The Warning Nobody Wanted Approximately a year ago, I warned people to stop cheering on AI as if it were an unqualified victory for workers. The reaction was not thoughtful…

Solar Ambition electrical

2026-04-30 00:00:00

# Modeling Solar-Electric Propulsion on a Motoryacht This is the calculator suite I use to model solar-electric performance on Moonshot, a 53-foot motoryacht carrying about 6.6 kW of solar. It models four things: deck solar capacity, te…

Running a 2-GPU Local LLM ai

2026-04-28 00:00:00

# Running a 2-GPU Local LLM (Iona Stack) ## What This Actually Is This page documents a working single-machine local LLM stack built around llama.cpp, Open WebUI, and optional Caddy. The point is to capture the exact shape that worked, the…

Seeing Multiple Futures Is Not a Shonen Fantasy tech-labor

2026-04-28 00:00:00

# Seeing Multiple Futures Is Not a Shonen Fantasy It is how you survive a world that keeps changing the rules. Markets shift. Careers break open. Countries become more or less viable. Big plans stop being linear. Inside a company, this kind…

Iona 31B Dense software-engineering

2026-04-24 00:00:00

# Iona Local 31B Multimodal Setup ## I got Gemma 31B working on a pair of old GPUs, and it is a game changer. ## TL;DR Gemma 4 31B now runs locally on dual RTX 2080 Ti cards with image support. It is slower than the 26B profile, but substan…

Here are 10 things I learned about wiring safety on a boat electrical

2026-04-12 00:00:00

# Here are 10 things I learned about wiring safety on a boat Boat wiring has a way of humbling even the most intellectual among us. You have heard the term spaghetti code. That is still tidy compared to forty-year-old wiring with no labels,…

Compilation of AI Failures — Signal vs Narrative general

2026-03-27 21:10:21.825000

# Compilation of AI Failures — Signal vs Narrative Free article for Arpeggio / LinkedIn --- ## Thesis We are not seeing a tooling gap. We are seeing a structural mismatch between probabilistic generation and load‑bearing systems. Despite…

Fibo Party Crasher software-engineering

2026-03-22 00:00:00

# Claude Fibonacci Challenge: solution and exchange snippets I previously wrote a paper arguing that LLMs behave more like Type-3 (regular) machines than true reasoners. This challenge was, in part, a small experiment to test that claim aga…

Why I Benched My AI Agent general

2026-03-21 17:55:54.678000

# Why I Benched My AI Agent ## Foreword Well then, this is a story about the one time I allowed my AI agent to co-write a complex library, and what I learned from the experience. The following post is my subjective experience, and part of t…

2-Body Problems and the Intelligence Illusion tech-labor

2026-03-18 00:00:00

# 2-Body Problems and the Intelligence Illusion ## Why Language Models Fail When Truth Is Co-Defined ### Abstract Most commentary on large language models still frames their limitations in terms of intelligence, hallucination, or benchmark…

The Ledge & The Sludge tech-labor

2026-03-18 00:00:00

# What Class of Technical Work Is Safer from Current-Gen AI? ## Practical categories where AI still struggles ### 1. Ownership and lifecycle design Deciding who owns a value, not just how to wrap it Borrowing versus retention across mod…

rfc8252 software-engineering

2026-03-17 00:00:00

# The In-App Browser Tax I mostly work in backend data pipelines. That is where I have the most fun. But every product eventually drags you into UX, and this one started with what sounded like a trivial problem. I posted a link. Someone cli…

The Wall software-engineering

2026-03-17 00:00:00

# The Problem That Is Still Hard Dario Amodei pushed harder than most, predicting in March 2025 that AI would soon be writing 90% of code and might eventually be writing essentially all of it.[1] That line sounds outrageous until you look a…

Number One AI Skill tech-labor

2026-03-13 00:00:00

# The #1 Skill to Learn in the Age of AI ## The New Abundance Artificial intelligence has changed the experience of building things. Tasks that once required days of work can now begin in minutes. A prototype can appear quickly. A system ca…

Finding Fidelity software-engineering

2026-03-09 00:00:00

# Finding Fidelity Where Software Engineering Moves in the Age of AI ## Preface I started rebuilding a lighter version of Hadoop because I wanted to see how much of the old machinery still mattered once you stripped away the bulk. If you…

The AI Productivity Trap general

2026-03-02 05:26:18.175000

# The AI Productivity Trap ## I. The Block Moment On February 26, 2026, Block announced a 40% workforce reduction, explicitly attributing the decision to AI-driven productivity gains. The stock surged 24% the same day. The narrative was cle…

The Mispriced AI Bet general

2026-03-01 20:04:27.263000

# The Mispriced AI Bet Arpeggio — Applied Engineering Notes There are two very different claims circulating right now. 1. AI makes engineers 10× more productive. 2. AI changes how engineers explore and search. Only one of these survives c…

CE & the Zombie SaaS tech-labor

2026-02-28 00:00:00

# Cognitive Easing & The Rise of Zombie SaaS There was a time when intelligence was scarce in the economic sense. If you wanted a marketing strategy, you hired a strategist. If you wanted distributed systems, you hired engineers. If you wan…

Agentic AI: Standing at the Precipice of Digital Telomere Decay general

2026-02-27 01:21:46.825000

# Agentic AI: Standing at the Precipice of Digital Telomere Decay ## Thesis Agentic AI is not merely a productivity tool. It represents the large-scale introduction of a probabilistic replication engine into technical ecosystems that were h…

Privacy Posture of the Frontier AI Labs general

2026-02-26 17:40:41.041000

# Privacy Posture of the Frontier AI Labs ## A Structural Comparison of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Debates about AI privacy often collapse into slogans. "X trains on your data." "Y is safer." "Z respects users." Those framings obscure th…

Waterfall revisited tech-labor

2026-02-24 00:00:00

# Waterfall Strikes Back ## Agentic Development as the Return of Big-Batch Software --- ## Abstract Agentic development promises autonomy, speed, and exponential leverage. In practice, many implementations resemble a familiar pattern: large…

Burning Code tech-labor

2026-02-23 00:00:00

# Coding Is “Solved”? ## Why Formal Theory Explains Both the Productivity Boom and AI‑Driven Outages --- ## Abstract AI has dramatically increased engineering productivity in pattern‑heavy domains. At the same time, AI‑driven systems have t…

The Efficiency Illusion tech-labor

2026-02-11 00:00:00

# The 99% Illusion Claims that AI agents can build complex systems to “99% completion” deserve careful interpretation. The missing 1% is not evenly distributed work. It is not a handful of edge cases waiting to be patched. In real syste…

Repent The End Is Nigh general

2026-01-29 00:00:34

# Repent The End Is Nigh > repent (verb): to change one’s way of thinking after recognizing a flawed assumption. Tech as labor is not “ending tomorrow.” It’s declining. Possibly halving in 10 years. Layoffs keep coming. Amazon is cuttin…

The Collapse of the Mechanical Tier general

2026-01-20 06:54:51

## The Collapse of the Mechanical Tier ### Why Tech’s Golden Age Was an Accident — and Why It Isn’t Coming Back For a brief and historically strange moment, technology enjoyed a privilege almost no other field has ever had. It wasn’t just h…

The Intelligence Inflation Loop general

2026-01-14 17:16:47

# The Intelligence Inflation Loop This is not a moral argument. It is a mechanical sequence. When intelligence is tokenized, priced per unit, and made abundant, the following dynamics follow a predictable trajectory. ### 1. Compression (Eup…

Moonshot: Designing a Pareto-Optimal Solar-Electric System moonshot

2026-01-02 00:00:00

Moonshot: Design Assumptions and Tradeoffs Moonshot is not an attempt to maximize any single metric. It is an attempt to reduce fragility. The system is shaped by a few constraints that aren’t obvious if you come from either traditional…

Tech employment is losing relevance general

2025-12-30 19:32:18

### Tech employment is losing relevance Tech employment has been bleeding for long enough that it no longer feels like a crisis. It feels like background conditions. Layoffs recur. Reorgs stack. Compensation bands flatten. Expectations rise…

When AI Reads Comics: A Panel-by-Panel Comparison Between Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT art-c

2025-12-29 00:00:00

# 📘 When AI Reads Comics: A Panel-by-Panel Comparison Between Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT ### …and Why I’m Still Using ChatGPT for Creative Work (For Now) By Alwyn Art-C Chronicles --- ## Introduction: Letting Three AIs Read One Com…

AI Doesn’t Need to Be Smart to Wreck Tech Careers tech-labor

2025-12-29 00:00:00

# AI Doesn’t Need to Be Smart to Wreck Tech Careers I still see posts claiming “AI won’t replace developers, it makes dumb mistakes.” Yes, it does. Think of the infamous Taco Bell ordering bot that spat out 18,000 drinks. MIT research als…

FSIQ vs. GAI in the Age of GPT — Rethinking Tech Hiring hiring

2025-12-29 00:00:00

# FSIQ vs. GAI in the Age of GPT — Rethinking Tech Hiring A memo for teams that want builders, not answer sheets. --- ## TL;DR GPT now produces canonical coding answers in \~30 seconds. If your loop measures recall under pressure, y…

The Renaissance Developer Inside AWS: A Closer Look aws

2025-12-29 00:00:00

# The Renaissance Developer Inside AWS: A Closer Look AWS has recently popularized the idea of a “Renaissance developer”—a modern builder who moves fluidly across domains, draws connections between fields, and operates with the kind of inte…

Many in Tech Are About to Become Unemployable — And They Can’t Even Fix Their Own Sink agency

2025-12-29 00:00:00

# Many in Tech Are About to Become Unemployable — And They Can’t Even Fix Their Own Sink ... ## High Pay, Low Agency In the past, white-collar workers enjoyed both money and autonomy. A strong job market and steady demand for engineers mean…

Unwritten: The Pages You Sold For 30 Cents manifesto

2025-12-29 00:00:00

# Unwritten: The Pages You Sold For 30 Cents ### I. The Arithmetic of a Life Sold Short Do the math people don’t want to do. Forty hours a week at your “cushy” job. Add fifteen more because “we’re counting on you” and reliability is…

On the Relative Cheapness of a Home That Is a Boat general

2025-12-25 13:22:18

# On the Relative Cheapness of a Home That Is a Boat (a formal argument) Warning: contains unnecessary amounts of set theory. --- ## Abstract We present a simple formal model showing that a home that is a boat (HB) is cheap. The res…

Starbucks: Turnaround or Tailspin? A Comprehensive Analysis general

2025-12-25 13:22:18

# Starbucks: Turnaround or Tailspin? A Comprehensive Analysis Introduction: Starbucks stands at a critical crossroads, navigating substantial financial distress, worsening labor relations, strategic ambiguity, and a challenging macroeco…

Starbucks at a Crossroads: Macro Headwinds vs. Micro Control general

2025-12-25 13:22:18

# Starbucks at a Crossroads: Macro Headwinds vs. Micro Control ## Macro vs. Micro Control When Brian Niccol turned Chipotle around after its salmonella outbreaks, he faced a problem of micro control. That crisis was solvable by changing v…

The Amazon Vet Way: The Hidden Cost of Overwork general

2025-12-25 13:22:18

## The Amazon Vet Way: The Hidden Cost of Overwork If I asked to borrow $100, you’d probably hesitate. You might ask when I’ll pay it back. But if your employer borrows ten hours of your life every week, you don’t flinch — because in bi…

Sail Away general

2025-12-25 13:22:18

# Sail Away ### By Alwyn (Draft for RTC-zined) --- ## I. Introduction: From Golden Ticket to Golden Cage For years, the H-1B visa program was portrayed as a golden ticket into the heart of the American dream. The story was simple: come to t…