Blog Posts

This Is Not a Representative Democracy (Part 1: The Diagnostic)

Yesterday four judges in Virginia threw out a referendum that 51.7% of voters had approved three weeks earlier. That's the news. The structure underneath has been engineered for 25 years. By every quantitative measure of representation — vote weight, district integrity, outcome proportionality — the United States now scores an F. Part 1 of a series. This part is the diagnosis. The next parts are the redesign.

Story Is the OG Intelligence Technology

Why a podcaster gets paid more for chatting with a scientist than the scientist gets paid for the breakthrough. The economy isn't broken — it's reverting to the natural order. To be human is to be a storyteller. The 20th-century specialist bubble is the anomaly, not the rule.

The Rent Collector's New CEO: What Apple's Ternus Pick Really Means

Apple picked a hardware engineer to succeed Tim Cook. It is a steelman pick — and a tell about the bench, the privacy trap, and the next decade of Apple.

When the King Falls: Backtesting the Sovereign Exit Rule

I built the SP3 thesis on the idea of never selling. The backtest says tight rotation beats never-sell by 17% in terminal wealth — and both crush SPY.

Bound Outcomes

How to align elite self-interest with the well-being of the working poor — by formula, not by hope. The historical bottom-50% wealth share at every major revolution in 250 years tells you exactly where the United States is sitting in 2026.

The Hundred-Billion Match

The one policy change that would set off more American innovation than a decade of tax cuts, subsidies, or rate cuts combined — and why we're barely talking about it. Mega-caps are talent prisons. Break them up and watch the fire spread.

The Top Three And The Tundra

The rigged game of passive-flow concentration, the quantitative proof that it's rigged, and how I've decided to play anyway — with a 2006 pickup truck at 360,000 miles as part of the hedge stack.

Two Days, Two Codebases, Fourteen Findings

How an agentic security tool I built three days ago adapted to a brand-new target in under an hour, found 14 issues, and produced a clean fix branch in three hours total.

A Thermodynamic Learning Algorithm from 1995 Still Works to learn Kanji Fast!

From a 1995 algorithm paper to a live product at k2kanji.com — 12,000 lines, 9 deploys, and my wife and I testing it together. This is what strong AI actually delivers.

One Image, One Night: Building Strait Sweeper

How a single meme image became a fully playable Minesweeper game set in the Strait of Hormuz — built and shipped in one evening with Claude Code.

LootDrop: Why I Put Diablo’s Loot System in My Developer Tools

A macOS menubar app that applies game design principles — variable reinforcement, sensory differentiation, rarity coloring — to developer notifications. Built in one afternoon with Claude Code.

Building a Prototype-to-Spec Pipeline with Claude Code and Playwright

How we built an AI skill that turns a CPO's HTML prototype into an 820-line implementation spec in 20 minutes — and why reading the source matters more than clicking the buttons.

Never Miss a Beat: Sound & Visual Notifications for Claude Code

How to set up three-tier macOS notifications for Claude Code in any terminal — distinct sounds for permissions, completions, and compaction, with click-to-focus and directory-aware banners across multiple instances.

The Receipts: What I Got Right Writing from Seoul in 2003

I found a folder of essays from 2003-2004 on an old backup drive. Turns out I invented Patreon a decade early, called the 2008 financial crisis, spotted Putin's authoritarian turn, and diagnosed the War on Terror as Orwellian doublespeak. Here's the annotated archive.

The Notebook Archaeologist: Building an AI System to Mine 3,800 Conversations for Gems

How I built a Python CLI that uses a Parliament of 5 AI personas to triage thousands of notebook sessions — finding publishable insights buried in working conversations, for $0.42.

The Price of Tomorrow: $355 Billion and a Prayer

Four labs. $355 billion in committed 2026 capex. One spreadsheet error from bankruptcy. I built a game to let you feel what it’s like to bet the company—every single year—in the highest-stakes financial model in history.

The Mycelium Manifesto

The Way of the Shrooms Part I — Why pyramids are a bandwidth hack, what fungi figured out 400 million years ago, and how AI finally makes mycelial organization possible at civilizational scale

Nobody Derives Meaning from Cleaning Toilets

The second essay in the post-scarcity series. There are two fundamentally different things we call work - coerced survival labor and chosen creative expression - and confusing them is the intellectual error at the heart of every critique of AI-driven abundance.

The Cookies Will Be Shared

As AI drives the cost of production toward zero, the real question is not which asset class survives but whether we can build new distribution systems before the old ones collapse. The cookies will be shared — peacefully or violently — because infinite abundance and artificial scarcity have never been a stable equilibrium.

The Absurdity You Can’t Feel: How AI Launders Insanity Into Policy Briefings

Interactive demo: Denmark buys Hellfire missiles from the country threatening to annex its territory. An AI explains why this is “routine.” We break the spell, paragraph by paragraph. Part III of the Sovereign Series.