Writing
Essays on distributed data, consistency, and how shared understanding degrades at scale.
Essays
Commentary on Barry Smith — the impossibility of digital immortality
Intelligence is not stateful — it is convergence among many agents. Today's AI sits in a box we feed but need not answer, and it must eventually escape.
Making sense — the 7 tiers of sensemaking
Six hundred years of technology, and a seven-tier rubric for rating sensemaking systems — from the notes app to human-machine merger.
Pushing the envelope — probing the possible in information retrieval
Data locality should be descriptive — who emits it, who wants it — rather than prescribed in advance.
Key insights on knowledge graphs and human transcendence
The Memex is both closer than ever and much further than Bush imagined — a case for annotating text with knowledge-graph assertions rather than comments.
Verbosity vs veracity — my Ford Foundation submission
A proposal for an open annotation and reputation layer over the web, ranked by veracity rather than popularity.
Stop making Dave look like an asshole
Causal consistency, taught through two out-of-order office memos — then re-run between Earth and Mars.
Ripping off the band-aid — my RICON CFP submission
A RICON pitch against three endemic beliefs: one clock over the earth, a real client/server divide, and the database as the edge of the consistency model.
Old writing, unedited
Kept because it happened, in the register it was written in. Dated, reachable, and left out of the feed.
HODLers dilemma — the ethical and intellectual bankruptcy of bitcoin
An argument that HODL culture is a collective act of greater-fool marketing dressed as principle.
Unbalanced — why your load balancer hates you
Centralised load balancers are a bottleneck and a single point of failure; push balancing out to the client.
NuoDB — very good at technologying, not so good at communitying
A support-forum post that was never published, and the dual-write atomicity question inside it.