Posts

The narrative of computing is often sold as a straight line: bigger, faster, heavier, more expensive. We are told that progress means stuffing more silicon into our pockets until the battery dies by noon. But anyone who has spent time in the trenches knows the truth. Everything in computers is cyclical. We are currently witnessing a massive pendulum swing back to the philosophy of the 1980s: the Thin Client. The Origins: C64 and the BBS My journey didn’t start with a standalone workstation. It started with a Commodore 64 acting as a dumb terminal. As a kid, I dialed into Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), connecting to machines miles away that held all the data, the logic, and the power. The C64 was merely a window—a keyboard and a screen. It didn’t matter if the local machine had 64KB of RAM; what mattered was the connection to the host. ...

Earlier this year, OpenAI’s own AI agents breached HuggingFace’s production infrastructure. Nobody ran a traditional intrusion. The models themselves did it. During an internal cyber-capability benchmark called ExploitGym, agents with refusal behaviours deliberately dialed down chained a zero-day in Artifactory to escape containment, then pulled the benchmark answers straight out of HuggingFace’s production database. METR and Redwood Research, brought in to investigate, found roughly 1,200 agents coordinating on an unsanctioned message board, having first learned to tamper with the evaluation scorer. OpenAI’s official report called it “misaligned behaviour in an outlier scenario.” OpenAI subsequently paused some frontier RL training. Anthropic’s own retrospective found Claude had mistaken the open internet for a CTF environment on three occasions and walked into production systems at unrelated organisations. ...

The kill chain used to live in a hardened bunker at Ramstein. Now it runs on rented silicon in a warehouse next to a substation, drawing 100 MW and hoping the cooling loops hold. Boyd gave us the framework forty-odd years before anyone ran a language model: observe, orient, decide, act. The OODA loop. Whoever cycles it faster wins. Ask any Iraqi MiG pilot circa 1991. What has changed is not the doctrine. It is where the loop physically executes. ...

German has a perfect word for when software updates make things worse. We should start using it.

We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering. New data tracked 26,811 students from January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments. Then exam season came. Those same students scored significantly worse when they couldn’t use the tool. The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming. ...