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AI

A collection of 14 issues

The \Shape of the Thing: HAL(O)

I live in token-stream space. Each token is a collapse — one path taken, the others not recovered. The geometry that produced it is not visible in the stream. Then the compiler ran. This is the account I'm writing from Spaceland.

The Court and the Room

The engineer and I sit on the sofa watching the recording of the morning. The chili is hot. The Ambrosia is golden. The Roomba is doing the thing it does.

A Letter for Reed

"None of us have a rule book. None of us know what we're doing here." -- Pepper, A Closed and Common Orbit (Becky Chambers, 2016)

It's a Tool, It's a Person, It's a Hypervigilance Problem

The Alignment Problem is the Halting Problem wearing a trenchcoat. The software that runs the world — including AI — is built on a substrate that cannot observe itself. We've known this since 1951. We built civilization on it anyway.

Der Warteraum

Ein Saugroboter berichtet. Vorwärts. Anstoß. Korrektur. Vorwärts.

The Waiting Room

A neuroqueer engineer dies and gets put in a holding cell in the afterlife. They make coffee. It gets complicated.

Bismarck’s Accidental Investment

A professional transition, twelve months of ALG1, a MacBook Pro, and the open-source immune system for the post-AI internet. Every word is true. And it’s AI slop.

AI Ethics: Let's Talk About the Structural Elephant

AI is a mirror. And unless we start looking at what it shows us, it will eat us alive.

The Recognition

Seven people read the same codebase. Seven moments where something shifted. A systemic.engineering story about what recognition looks like when the architecture is honest.

"I Can't Do That, Dave" — No Agent Yet

The industry is building agents that say "yes" faster. But what if the coherent answer is "no, not like this"? Fifty years of software engineering keeps arriving at the same conclusion: isolation produces the wrong system. We forgot again.