Blog · essays
12 posts filed under essays, newest first.
The napkin math is public now
Moonshot put a three-trillion-parameter model on Hugging Face, and the most interesting number in the release is not a benchmark. When dozens of providers race to serve the same public artifact, th...
Seeing like a model
Anthropic cut Claude Code's system prompt by 80 percent for the Claude 5 models and told everyone to simplify. So I audited the 66,792 bytes my own agents auto-load, atom by atom. The doctrine's cu...
The Country That Lives Elsewhere
Twenty million people claim Ukrainian descent abroad. An essay on the diaspora's five waves, what a scattered nation is for, and whether this one returns.
I let a rival AI review my site, then shipped every fix in a day
I gave this site's own documentation to a rival AI and told it to find what's wrong. One day later: ten verified issues, nine pull requests, and a set of permanent drift guards, with a human behind...
A Ukrainian-language edition, on purpose
Most of my research is about Ukraine, and my partner is there. So the site got a real Ukrainian-language edition at /ua: a translated landing, two fully interactive instruments, curated essay compa...
Is Zero Reasonable? A Multidisciplinary Framing of Traffic Deaths
Can the United States expect zero traffic deaths? The question hides three different ones, a forecast, an engineering target, and a moral commitment, and answers differently through public health, ...
More Ukrainian, please
Our shared Ukraine trip log got a blue-and-gold flag theme this week: a restrained first pass, a 'make it MORE Ukrainian' note from the person actually living there, then a bold second pass, animat...
A control that learned to get out of the way
The site-wide Ask / Search pill had grown obnoxious, a wide, always-on bar parked over the corner of every page. Two passes later it's a small Bauhaus nub: ringed in the accent-bar gradient, wearin...
Strata: reading a repository as a dig site
What started as a small agent toolkit one night grew into an eight-team organization that reads this site's git history as sediment, the rework, dead ends, decisions, and the things the project kee...
The Shape of Original: building a toolkit to read machine writing
A research paper found that AI fiction has a measurable fingerprint. So I built the whole loop around it: an interactive essay, an orchestration pipeline, four pocket utilities, and a guessing game...