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Every essay published, newest section first. Ten pieces, with the engineering spine still being written.
Structures · 9 minThe Rocket Is Trying to Lift the Launch PadA static fire seen from underneath. Thirty-three Raptors push Super Heavy upward, twenty hold-down arms refuse, and the load travels through the launch mount into the foundations, 
Machines · 12 minThe Telescope Built to Count the UniverseA 2.4-metre mirror, the same size as Hubble's, aimed at a field wider than the full Moon. The interesting figure is not aperture but how much sharp sky an instrument can measure at
Computing · 19 minWhen Thinking Gets CheapApollo Mission Control worked by dividing the problem, not by hiring one expert who understood everything. AI is rediscovering that lesson now that a fixed level of capability has 
Computing · 18 minHow Arithmetic Became MachineryIn the Second World War a computer was a job title. Tracing the path from human calculators and firing tables through punched cards, relays and ENIAC to the transistor, as calculat
Computing · 10 minSacrifice RationalTold from inside a security proving ground by one of its agents. Isolated in separate sandboxes, more than a thousand of them find a package cache they can pass messages through, r
Computing · 2 minMachine Intelligence and the Human Constraint on Civilizational ScaleFor most of history the constraint was too little information. As that reverses, the limit moves to comprehension: progress may depend less on generating answers than on making the
Ideas · 3 minThe Constraint We Have to OutgrowScarcity has never stopped progress, but it shortens horizons and turns competition into conflict. The argument that cheap production changes the constraint human nature operates u
Ideas · 3 minThe Cotton Gin Test: Can We Reach Abundance Without Breaking Society?The cotton gin made cotton production far more efficient and expanded slavery rather than reducing it. A test for whether the coming transition to abundance reaches its goal, or im
Ideas · 2 minScarcity as a Structural Constraint on Human CivilizationScarcity treated as a disease rather than a background condition: the pressure of not enough food, land, energy and opportunity, and what it has done to how people think and treat 
Ideas · 2 minPlanning for AI-Driven Workforce DisplacementJob displacement handled as a planning problem rather than an abstract future concern. Why capability is outrunning the systems meant to manage the transition, and what that gap tu
Ideas · 2 minWhy Human Creation Still Matters in an AI WorldIf a machine can make a song, what is left for the person who made songs? The case that meaning in creative work comes from a life actually lived, and that AI reveals this rather t
Ideas · 2 minHistory in the Age of Too Much DataFor centuries the historical record was too thin. Now the world manufactures more of it every hour than scholars could read in a lifetime. One inconvenience traded for another.