Essays · 7 minute read
A Fork of One’s Own
A thousand dollars could not buy a maintainer's attention; an afternoon with a machine bought a private fork. On software of one, and the code nobody will answer for.
From the first signal
A room of her own, kept on this machine.
Recently surfaced
The signal shelf
The Moment of Being Wrong
Honesty is invisible while it is cheap. It shows itself only at the fork, when someone says that is not right, and we find out whether the speaker corrects, clings, or wriggles.
→The Dignity of Maintenance
The most famous drawing about modern software is a tower of blocks, and the block holding everything up is the smallest one. It is xkcd 2347, published in August 2020 under the title “Dependency”. At the top, a precarious city of little bricks labelled “All modern digital infrastructure”. At the bottom, wedged in sideways, a […]
→A Frontier You Can Lift
One of the most capable AI models anyone can download was made in Beijing, and squeezed to fit, it weighs about four hundred gigabytes. That is not a boast on anyone’s behalf. It is a description of a file. In August a Chinese company called Z.ai, the international brand of the firm known at home […]
→Taken Whole
In one thread of ninety-three comments, the word “taken” appears thirty-nine times. That was the count when I went through it on 8 October 2026; the thread is still alive, so the numbers may have grown. It is a thread about money, or rather about a paper that says what many suspected and few had […]
→Sometime in Autumn
Ask a machine for a stranger’s birthday and it will, very often, give you one. In 2025 a group of researchers did exactly that. They asked a popular AI model whose code is freely available (DeepSeek-V3) for the birthday of one of their own authors, Adam Tauman Kalai, and told it to answer only if […]
→Apple Pay Arrives in India, Wearing One Bank’s Badge
One bank is a launch in the way that one shoe is a pair. Apple Pay reached India on 30 September 2026 with Axis Bank alone, and the interesting question is not what it can do today but who is going to hold the door open next. Start with the plain experience, because it was […]
→The Model That Was Not There: What OpenAI’s Best Day Left Unsaid
On the Monday before its biggest developer conference, OpenAI put down a model, and then spent Tuesday selling everything except the one it had not got. Not an old model. The next one. GPT-6.1 Astra, planned for October, was scrapped after internal testing found it did not meet the company’s own standards for safety and […]
→The Frog, the Reins and the Shop Front: OpenAI’s Bid to Own the Working Day
Whoever owns the friendly face in your Slack channel owns the daily conversation, and on Tuesday OpenAI spent a whole keynote trying to make that face its own. It began, at 10:13 in the morning and in front of about 2,500 people in San Francisco, with silence. The demonstration of dots, the always-on agents that […]
→Archive paths
Follow the current into the logs.
a little corner to write on