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Story | January 25, 2026
This is a follow-up to "The Guardrail Problem." The guardrail problem is not really about guardrails. It's about what we do when we're uncertain about what a powerful system will do next. One response is to constrain it. Identify behaviors we already consider dangerous, build boundaries around them, test whether those boundaries hold and prevent the syste
Story | January 24, 2026
A recent Communications of the ACM article asks why Nietzsche might matter in the age of artificial intelligence. The connection initially sounds like the kind of thing that happens when we run out of contemporary metaphors and start recruiting dead philosophers. Nietzsche didn't know anything about language models, and I doubt much is gained by pretending
Story | January 24, 2026
When you take responsibility for a system you didn't build, the temptation is to begin by finding what's wrong with it. That usually isn't difficult. Every mature system contains things you wouldn't have designed yourself. There are old dependencies, strange naming conventions, permissions that seem broader than necessary, services nobody particularly like
Story | January 24, 2026
For a long time, publishing online mostly meant putting our work where people already were. That made sense. Facebook had the audience. Google helped people find things. Email reached subscribers directly. Other services handled jobs that would have been expensive or impractical for a small newspaper to reproduce ourselves. We still use outside services,
Story | January 24, 2026
"Network effects" is one of those phrases that can begin to sound explanatory merely because we've heard it often enough. A service gains users. More users make the service useful to more people. That attracts additional users. Eventually the network becomes difficult for a competitor to reproduce because the existing relationships are themselves part of wh
Story | January 24, 2026
There is a simple appeal to guardrails. Something can cause harm, so we put a boundary around the behavior we don't want. We do this everywhere. A permission system prevents someone from reading data they shouldn't see. A rate limit prevents a service from accepting more traffic than it can safely handle. A railing keeps someone from walking off the edge of
Story | January 24, 2026
There is a particular kind of sentence nobody wants to hear at the wrong moment. The data is inaccessible, but there's a backup. The account is frozen, but there's an appeal process. The shipment is gone, but it's insured. The service is unavailable, but the provider guarantees compensation under the agreement. None of those answers is necessarily bad. Depe
Story | January 24, 2026
There was a period when the cloud felt not just inevitable, but virtuous. Infrastructure could be abstracted away from place, capacity could appear when needed, and entire categories of operational work could be handed to organizations better equipped to perform them. Hardware failures, geographic redundancy and capacity planning didn't disappear, but increa
Story | January 24, 2026
When people talk about preparedness, the conversation tends to become tangible fairly quickly. Food, water, heat, backup power, medical supplies, communications and whatever else might become difficult to obtain if ordinary systems stop working for a while. I understand the appeal. These are problems you can do something about before the problem exists. You
Story | January 24, 2026
There is a strange experience that sometimes accompanies slow change. You can spend years watching something develop, talk about where it appears to be heading and even make decisions based on that expectation, yet when the thing you anticipated finally becomes concrete, it can still feel surprising. “I knew this was coming” and “I can't believe this happen
Story | January 23, 2026
Some systems appear considerably more complete than they really are. Everything works. Deployments happen. Customers get answers. Problems are resolved. Someone knows which configuration value matters, which procedure has an undocumented extra step and why the strange-looking piece of code nobody likes can't quite be removed yet. Then that person goes on v
Story | January 23, 2026
In the beginning, there was drift. Sand without memory. Wind without pattern. A desert where one step could disappear before the next was taken. Through it walked a figure without a name. It wasn't looking for a destination. It carried only the sense that something needed to survive the crossing. The figure found a broken ostrich egg, white and hollow, it
