Meanderings, Opinions, and Articles

Ideas, opinions, and things I’m building. These posts are mine — not peer-reviewed, and not a reflection of the university I work for.

• October 2026 Time for the Young to Knock Down the Gates – It’s a Revolution

  Before the Arduino, engineers gatekept embedded systems and the artists built their own community. Machine intelligence is that moment again at a much larger scale, and the real gate is the community, not the technology.

• October 2026 A Partnership in Culture: AI, Evolution, and the Fitness Function We Keep

  Von Neumann worked out how a machine can copy itself before we knew what DNA looked like. The merging of humans and AI is happening in culture, not biology, and the fitness function and the copier are still ours.

• October 2026 It’s Not AI Slop, It’s a Curation Problem

  Writing, software, and now math have all changed because of LLMs, and they are all language. We are going to make far more of everything; the hard problem is not slop, it is finding the good stuff.

• October 2026 Games…What Are They Good For? It’s All Systems Thinking, All the Way Down

  Games are models of systems, and playing them is a way into systems thinking — a better target than “critical thinking,” especially now that AI can win the grades game for you.

• September 2026 Get Off My Lawn: Is That Our Real Problem with AI?

  Old and young alike are upset with AI, just about different sides of the same fence. I think the answer to both fears is semantic knowledge — built the hard way, through first-principles exercises — and it’s the path to the superpower.

• September 2026 Learning Produces Judgment, and Other Things I Took From the Cornell Report

  Reading Cornell’s Future of the American University report with two questions: how an Ivy is thinking about AI as a disruptor, and whether the institution’s economics are actually linked to its mission.

• August 2026 Hello, Ether…

  Why this exists: not peer-reviewed, not the university talking — a place to explore ideas, advertise what I’m building, and find people to build with.