Technology is not ethical. It just is. A gun is not good or bad. It’s a gun. It does what guns do — puts a small piece of metal through whatever you point it at. The ethics live in the person hold...

I wrote recently (James, AI, and the Case for Works) that the useful thing to add to the conversation about AI isn’t another opinion. It’s a report — an account of what happened when you actually u...

The Bible’s Letter of James was written to people who had plenty of belief and not much to show for it. They could recite the creed. They could pass any test of doctrine you put in front of them. W...

For about two hundred years, we built our institutions around a particular kind of scarcity. The scarcity was skilled thinking — the kind that drafts a contract, diagnoses a sick machine, lays out ...

Wallstreet Journal article In response to: “Marc Benioff Says the Software Bears Are All Wrong About Salesforce” — The Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2026 When someone tells you their moat is com...

[This is a working paper.] People talk about Swift as if Apple’s great achievement was the language itself — the features, the syntax, the type system. Closures. Optionals. Value types. Protocols....

Download this essay as PDF Here’s something that has been bugging me for a while. Everyone talks about AI as if there were one kind. There’s “old AI” — the symbolic, rule-based, Lisp-powered kind...

Maybe one of the most consequential decisions in modern data engineering isn’t which database to choose — it’s which wire protocol to standardize on. PostgreSQL’s wire protocol has become the lingu...

Download this essay as PDF When a private equity firm is about to spend serious money acquiring a company, they hire consultants to spend time examining that company’s technology — its architectu...

[This is a working paper! I’ve learned much from John Seely Brown, and his influence here is felt, especially vis-a-vis learning in action or in situ, and abduction.] I’ve been learning Lisp. Not ...