Recent articles
May 24, 2026
What to Read This Weekend
I have been missing in action for a couple of weeks. I apologize for my tardiness, but I have been busy with personal matters. Both my heart and mind were not in it. Anyway, this week I have some g...
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May 21, 2026
The Rocket That Runs on Broadband
SpaceX is in the business of rockets — how often they fly and what they do. The rest is imagination. The SpaceX IPO is a masterpiece of financial engineering. The prospectus is a perfect blend of r...
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May 20, 2026
Snowcaps
I love my snowcaps, in landscape photos and pens. I have been using Montblanc pens for a long time, about three decades now. Slowly the numbers have piled up. The newest pens have a sharper, more s...
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May 15, 2026
AI in Everything, Everywhere
After I published AI is the New Netflix, Surj Patel, a former colleague, intellectual sparring partner, and long-time reader, asked a sharp question. Given my argument that AI will drive the next w...
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May 13, 2026
AI is the New Netflix
At my 2008 NewTeeVee conference, I asked Reed Hastings, then CEO of Netflix, whether streaming video would become the first killer app of broadband. It seemed obvious: video would consume capacity....
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May 12, 2026
Signing off in a world of what’s next
Before turning in last night, I saw a video by Pete from Just a Few Acres Farm YouTube channel. I have followed him for a while. Reflecting on his goodbye, I felt a tinge of sadness every time one ...
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May 4, 2026
How AI Is Changing the Network(s)
As is always the case, this started with a simple question: Will AI change how networks work? Will it impact the speeds we need at home and on our phones? My assumption was that AI would accelerate...
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May 4, 2026
Say Hello to the Internet of AI
Every so often, I would notice that our upstream bandwidth consumption was going up. Average upload usage is growing 21.7% year over year, more than twice the rate of downstream growth. The network...
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May 3, 2026
What to read this weekend
First, a short apology. I was unable to send the newsletter last weekend. Life and sniffles got in the way — OM As has been the case lately, I have been writing a bit too much about AI, and its two...
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May 1, 2026
What Microsoft’s 10-Q Says About OpenAI
Buried on page nine of Microsoft’s 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 is a paragraph worthy of attention. Why? What does it reveal? A lot. For starters, Microsoft now holds approximately 27 ...
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May 1, 2026
What I Learned about Hyperscalers’ AI Spend
The four biggest hyperscalers reported earnings this week. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet collectively told investors they will spend roughly $700 billion on capital expenditures in 2026. Th...
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April 30, 2026
With AI, Headline isn’t the story
Oh boy. Over the past few days, an article has been doing the rounds as a testimonial for the ludicrousness of AI versus human costs. From that piece, one specific quote (originally from another ar...
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April 30, 2026
What’s wrong in my thinking about Errors?
After my previous post about why we accept human errors but are harsher on machines, two longtime readers and pillars of the resilience engineering community reached out to point out the error of m...
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April 27, 2026
Gigabit First Nation by 2030
I have been writing about the growing need for uploads and how they are redefining the broadband landscape — first in We Are Now An Upload (Broadband) Nation and then in a quick follow-up. As a fol...
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April 27, 2026
Memory Is the Machine
It is late April 2026. If you want to get a Mac you want, you cannot go into any Apple Store and pick the Mac you want. A Mac mini with 64GB of RAM, ordered today, ships in sixteen to eighteen week...
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April 22, 2026
Software Eats Its Own
Another day another deal which makes you question the meaning of money itself. SpaceX said this morning it has an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay the coding startup $10...
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April 20, 2026
John Appleseed
Tim totally cooked as the seventh CEO of Apple. But effective September 1, the hot seat belongs to John Ternus, the company’s eighth chief executive. Also, a great day for being a John at Apple. Jo...
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April 18, 2026
What to Read This Weekend
I am sending this out a day early as I have a new mystery book I want to finish this weekend, uninterrupted. Priorities, people! Also, I have decided that this weekend’s reading list has to be deci...
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April 18, 2026
Wishes for Ron Conway
Ron Conway, the longtime Silicon Valley investor and founder of SV Angel, announced on X that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Conway declined to disclose the specific type of canc...
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April 16, 2026
Eat Your Words
The New Yorker articulated something that has been on my mind for a long time. AI’s self-inflicted messaging crisis. This is as clear an example of my long standing argument that words have consequ...
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April 15, 2026
Newbird.AI! Or Loony.AI
Every speculative era has its favorite suffix. In the 1960s it was “tronics.” In the 1990s it was “dot-com.” Today, of course, it is “AI.” Nothing typifies a crazy, gambling, speculative degenerate...
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April 14, 2026
Human Error is OK! Machine Madness is a No-No! Why?
We forgive human error as if it were weather. We treat machine error as if it were heresy. That thought has kept nagging at me as I read about three recent technology screw-ups. Anthropic exposed u...
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April 12, 2026
What To Read This Weekend,
It was a week of mostly quiet work, that involved focusing on some personal matters, whether it was paperwork (tax day is approaching) or some annual medical check ups, like keeping tabs on my visi...
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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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