About 20 minutes
The Quiet Governor
Unix, Linux, AI, and the Infrastructure of Interpretation
A machine felt naturally authoritative to someone with every reason to question it. When did we decide that was only good news?
Home
Insights
Essays, thoughts and other stuff (aka my “junk” drawer).
Essays
About 12 minutes
Can Someone Tell Me Where I Can Find a Real Magic Wand?
A specification described the cable rather than the drive, and the mistake led somewhere: memory and computation are roles a physical state plays, not kinds of object. What it costs when the name for a thing arrives before you have looked at the thing.
About 4 minutes
Delete with Extreme Prejudice
Deleting one feature meant understanding half the codebase. So I wrote down the rule I actually needed: architecture follows what is consumed, not what might be reused.
About 6 minutes
I tried to hack my own app and failed
Because I had accidentally built a four-gate zero-trust chain — which I did not know was a thing until after I had built it.
About 3 minutes
final_v1_FINAL.doc — can I just automate this?
I worked out what a version number would have to mean to be worth printing. Then I found out it had a name.
Operating documents
Redacted copies of documents the work actually runs on
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01
Redacted · 25 min read, or under a second
Working Agreement
The contract every AI agent reads at the start of a session — what is immutable, what is open to judgment, and what each rule cost to learn.
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02
Redacted · 6 min read, hours to learn
What you wished were available
What I wished we had already recorded when something broke at 3am. Every layer logged; the answer was still one log line away, and cost hours.
LinkedIn series
12 posts + an epilogue
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01
ACH · Part I
Adoption of money systems is driven less by technical superiority and more by operational survivability
If a money system can’t tolerate human error, it won’t be adopted — no matter how elegant it is.
- 02
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03
ACH · Part III
Speed Isn’t the Enemy. Irreversibility Is.
There’s a common belief that legacy payment systems survive because institutions are slow to change.
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04
Execution
Working hard doesn’t have to mean hard work.
Most organizations say they reward outcomes. What they actually reward is visible effort.
- 05
- 06
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07
Mergers & acquisitions
When the Math Is Right but the Deal Isn’t
I’ve been in rooms where the model cleared but the deal didn’t.
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08
Preparedness
Confidence, Indifference, or Preparedness?
In high-stress rooms, calm gets interpreted in three different ways.
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09
Discovery
Creativity didn’t disappear. It just stopped clearing the budget process.
Markets and large organizations are shaped by business school logic for a reason.
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10
Incentives
Fear and asymmetric incentives kill more upside than bad ideas ever will.
If last week was about how the system filters ideas, this is about why people inside it behave the way they do.
- 11
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12
Wrap-up
The Lessons That Stick
Over the last 12 weeks, I’ve written about systems, incentives, handoffs, recoverability, and the messy reality of how work actually gets done.
- Epilogue