Recent articles
April 9, 2026
Banksy, Satoshi & The Unmasking Impulse
First Banksy and then Satoshi. Something about their unmasking is not sitting right with me. I am bothered by it. I am annoyed by it. And even more annoyed with myself because as a former journalis...
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April 8, 2026
Upstream Speeds, Needs Up Again
Just a quick update to my earlier piece on upload speeds, fiber, and why municipal broadband was beating cable in the game of speeds and feeds. New data from OpenVault backs it up. Speaking on the ...
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April 6, 2026
“Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.” — @paulg Anytime anyone underestimates or tries to do an end run around ...
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April 5, 2026
What To Read This Weekend
Every few years a startup comes along that dominates the headlines and grabs all the attention. For all the right and wrong reasons. I have been following the industry long enough to see that patte...
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April 2, 2026
OpenAI: Masters of Agitprop 2.0
“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of it...
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April 1, 2026
OpenAI: The Fix Is In
An update to More Magic Math from OpenAI The final mad dash to IPO is on for the big AI companies. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all made their intentions clear. And nothing could be more obvi...
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March 31, 2026
Penimimal
“One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.” — Minor White I have not been out in the wild making landscapes for a while now. Almost a year. However, I hav...
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March 29, 2026
What To Read This Weekend
The news cycle has been moving at hyperspeed and sometimes it is really hard to keep up with so much information, most of it not much more than a drop in the bucket. So, I did what I usually do. Ta...
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March 29, 2026
Seeker
A few days ago, the Day One journal app gave me a prompt: what is the one word that would describe you. That made me think hard. I was thrown for a loop. I have always struggled to describe myself....
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March 27, 2026
‘Astound’ed. Google Flips Its Fiber To PE.
I have been a WebPass customer for years. Fast, reliable, founder-run. When there was a problem, you could reach someone who gave a damn. It was the kind of internet service that made you forget yo...
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March 26, 2026
Jargon Sucks
I have been a writer long enough to know this in my bones: jargon sucks. It is a crime against writing. It abuses your readers and your listeners. And it is a sure sign you do not know what the hec...
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March 26, 2026
Meta’s May Day
Pop some popcorn. Put some butter. Add some salt. Because opportunists (politicians) are pointing their muskets at villains (tech bros), using children’s welfare as the ammunition. In case you were...
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March 25, 2026
We Are Now An Upload (Broadband) Nation
For thirty-odd years, broadband has been sold as a one-way pipe. The download speed was all that mattered. Bigger the number, better. No one cared about the upload speeds, because the internet was ...
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March 25, 2026
23 years!
Rudyard Kipling was right! “San Francisco has only one drawback — ’tis hard to leave.” I thought I would be here for two years, maybe. And then go back to New York. And here I am, still here. The c...
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March 23, 2026
More Magic Math from OpenAI?
When it comes to OpenAI, smart money is starting to do the math out loud. And something doesn’t add up. On surface, today’s news that OpenAI is offering 17.5% guaranteed returns to private equity f...
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March 22, 2026
What To Read This Weekend
It has been a week of inference. I started the week writing about OpenClaw and its growing popularity. And I end the week with a recap of Nvidia’s GTC event. A lot has been written about the event,...
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March 21, 2026
Manufacturing Legitimacy in the AI era
Michael Smith used AI to create music, and then used AI to create bots to get the “plays” and took the smartest technology companies, including Spotify and Amazon, who should know better, for about...
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March 19, 2026
How Not to Interview (Interesting People)
As a photographer who is primarily a writer, I like reading about photography so I can learn from those who create. I do that by reading photo magazines and listening to podcasts. One such magazine...
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March 17, 2026
OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that leadership wants OpenAI, the company, to focus. Seems like a plain old business strategy story. Nope! First, in more prosaic terms, the all-hands and ...
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March 17, 2026
Lobster Boil
I had coffee this weekend with my good friend Michael Galpert, father to my godchildren. Too much coffee. We talked too much Claw. OpenClaw that is. Michael has been running around the country orga...
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March 15, 2026
What To Read This Weekend
As I sit here on Sunday morning, reflecting on what has been one of the most hectic writing weeks in a long time, I can’t help but ask, why? Of course, there was a lot of news and action. Not that ...
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March 14, 2026
The Return of Travis Kalanick: Fact & Fluff!
Travis is back. It was only a matter of time. Given his old compadres Emil Michael and Shervin Pishevar are back in the news, how could he, the king pooh-ba, stay in the shadows? To a lot of us who...
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March 14, 2026
Tanhā & Our Modern Consumerism
It was late into the evening. I wanted to take a break from everything digital. Relaxing by doodling in my notebook. Trying a new grind. Seeing how the metal tip felt on the billowy silky Tomoe Riv...
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March 13, 2026
Symbolic Capitalism
“There’s a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency: w...
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March 11, 2026
Life Has a Hex Code
We fountain pen people are weird. Every month, around the start of the month, we do a version of the same thing: we make lists. What inks to put in what pens. Rotation schemes, seasonal palettes, e...
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March 10, 2026
The Essence of a Machine
I didn’t really want to do a quick breezy review of something that has touched me at a deep emotional level. Yes, I am talking about the new MacBook Neo. I can’t remember when I used the words “cut...
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March 10, 2026
The Debt Beneath the Dream
Every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’ Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep ‘Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser And the best that you can hope for is t...
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March 10, 2026
The 2026 iPad Air M4: Early Impressions
I have been an iPad fanboy for a long time. I never leave my house without it (and the keyboard to go with it). I currently own an M4 iPad Pro (11-inch) which is really good for reading, writing, t...
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March 8, 2026
What To Read This Weekend
It was Apple week and unsurprisingly even I got carried away and wrote a lot about Apple’s launch week. While the big high-end items were new MacBook Pros, the real story to me was the Fusion Archi...
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March 5, 2026
The Great (ai) Game vs AI Theater
“The game is so large that one sees but a little at a time.” To understand AI, its stakes and its long-term impact, you have to step away from the cacophony of headlines. And instead take the time ...
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