Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Superhuman Hardware Design Is The Easy Part
a16z partner Christian Keil argues frontier AI models will soon become superhuman at hardware design, but that the lossy interface between digital designs and physical atoms means building, testing, measuring and iterating real hardware will lag, shifting the frontier to manufacturing, procurement, data capture and process knowledge held by technicians.
12 min · 2,770 words
I designed a nose guard for my dog and gave it away. Now 500 dogs wear one
Omri Hillel recounts designing a nose guard for his pitbull Billie after a sunburn scare, open-sourcing the pattern, and watching SnoutCover grow to about 500 dogs in a year—with lessons on giving product away and iterating with owners.
11 min · 2,493 words
Remote Attestation Should Not Be Tolerated
lumi argues that remote attestation—hardware proving software identity to a remote party—is harmful: it enables remote control over what users may run, undermines general-purpose computing, and should be objected to rather than normalized.
4 min · 956 words
Brian Potter of Construction Physics looks at whether robotics can repeat AI's scaling playbook, explaining what robot training data is, how it is gathered through teleoperation, simulation, and other sources, and how large today's robot datasets are compared with those behind language models.
16 min · 3,630 words
America Didn’t Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It.
Kirsten Asdal, Tom Koch and Tao Tan argue in Lawfare that the U.S. rare earth chokepoint was created by market logic, since China prices for control rather than profit, and that rebuilding American supply needs asymmetric financing where government absorbs downside risk and shares in the upside.
11 min · 2,592 words
The Lightbulb Computer: Reimagining Spatial & Ambient Computing with Projectors
Former Apple prototyper Guillaume Ardaud presents the Lightbulb Computer, a speculative device that pairs modern projectors with computer vision to put ambient, spatial information onto everyday surfaces, as an alternative to smart glasses and headsets, with prototype demos and a companion video.
7 min · 1,643 words
The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen
Brian Potter traces plasma displays from the University of Illinois PLATO terminals of the 1960s through their run as the premier flat-panel TV technology to their displacement by LCDs, and what the story says about how technologies win and lose.
8 min · 1,823 words
"Robot" Is A Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not A Robot
A roboticist and former industrial safety standards committee member rebuts the claim that a dishwasher is a robot, arguing that beyond the technical definition the word, born in Capek's 1920 play, is a social construct applied to automated machines that make us uneasy about what it means to be human.
4 min · 988 words
An essay comparing commodity and engineering plastics to literary character types—why “polymer” is often marketing spin, and how chemistry shapes toughness, clarity, heat tolerance, and reputation.
7 min · 1,565 words
Phase LockA manifesto on brain-computer interfaces and preserving human agency in the age of AI.
Executive summary of Saturnin Pugnet's manifesto arguing that a bandwidth gap between human cognition and AI threatens human agency, and that brain-computer interfaces offer alignment-by-integration. He contends AI scaling laws will carry over to brain decoding, that consumer non-invasive BCI is the fastest path to scale, and that a Phase Lock Window to shape the outcome is open now.
4 min · 861 words
David Buchanan explores how C2PA content credentials handle time, and what it takes to forge or bend timestamps in the provenance chain.
4 min · 919 words
The Inner Ring tours Shimano’s bicycle museum in Sakai—history of components, racing artifacts, and how the brand presents its industrial and sporting story to visitors.
5 min · 1,171 words
How Machines Learned Precision
Gary Linscott's illustrated history of how Industrial Revolution workshops learned to make accurate machines without accurate machines to copy. It follows Maudslay's screw-cutting lathe, the three-plate method for flat surfaces, straight edges and lead screws, and Joseph Whitworth's measuring machine that could detect a millionth of an inch, through to gauge blocks.
29 min · 6,560 words
Fernando Simões digs into when page tables stop being a rounding error: shared mappings across many processes, Linux kernel history from Arcangeli to Qi Zheng's empty-page-table fix, and the trade-offs of huge pages.
6 min · 1,309 words
The Rise of Overfit Inference Engines
A hands-on essay on how local LLM inference stacks are overfit to specific models and hardware—and what that means for anyone chasing reproducible homelab performance with llama.cpp and friends.
10 min · 2,324 words
A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal
Allison Marsh traces how Michael Bloomberg's Market Master grew from a monochrome Merrill Lynch terminal into the Bloomberg Terminal—keyboards, hot keys, private networks, and museum artifacts of financial computing.
7 min · 1,562 words
Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
Marcin Wichary photographs modular industrial control dashboards in German and Polish museums—air traffic, subway, railway, and power-plant panels as physical design systems that software later replaced.
1 min · 320 words
Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
In 2011, Apple released the Cards app. The app — which required iOS 5 — let you design custom letterpress cards, with your messages and photos printed upon them — which Apple would ship to your recipient on your behalf. I recently learned the origin story of Cards, and that it was specifically a Steve Jobs product. It also wasn’t smooth sailing. But first, some backstory, and inserting myself into the narrative, because it’s my site and I can do what I want here.
6 min · 1,445 words
Getting out of the way: my robotics crash course
Software engineer Rob Bercik documents a crash course with a desktop robot arm: why LLM-era builders should get out of the way, what broke first, and what physical loops taught him.
8 min · 1,842 words
C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
Gustavo Pezzi defends C’s platform-sized integers: how 12–60-bit machines shaped int, why minimum ranges beat fixed widths, and what Lua’s portable C still teaches.
2 min · 486 words