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 economy like our present moment than what happened to Allbirds today. The San Francisco maker of wool sneakers, once valued at more than …

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 unreleased files. Anthropic then shipped 512,000 lines of internal code, roadmap and all, to the public npm registry. Axios got …

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 vision. Life was mundane. And that was reflected in my writing this week as well. Just a solitary essay and two …

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 journalist I should understand, but I don’t. I am referring to Reuters’s meticulous investigation and unmasking of Banksy, and John …

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 Fiber for Breakfast podcast, OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau pointed out that during the first quarter of 2026, the fiber …

“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 @sama, I remind myself of this golden nugget from PG, the man who knew him best before …

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 pattern repeat itself. Netscape, Amazon, Facebook, and more recently, OpenAI. The headlines are driven by the curiosity of the masses. And …

“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 its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian. “The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. …

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 obvious about OpenAI’s intent than today’s new funding announcement. A few things have changed since I wrote that piece. …

“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 have found new subjects to explore. San Francisco, obviously, remains my favorite muse. California is my darling. …

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. Take a step back from it all, and decided to just slow down the cycle …

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. Not sure how others see me versus how I see myself. This is not the …

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 you were dealing with a utility. Then Google bought it. That should have been the warning sign. Google buys things …

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 heck you are talking about. If you cannot explain something in plain terms to your …

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 wondering, I am talking about the battle between New Mexico AG and Silicon Valley’s villain in chief. The next bout is on May 4. So …

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 mostly something you consumed. Streaming video, loading pages, pulling files from the cloud. Upload was an afterthought. All that changed when the …

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 city has given me more than I have given it. The rush of a modern gold …

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 firms looks like a shot at the Anthropic threat. Scratch the surface, and you start to see the story behind the …

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, especially about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s big claims of quadrupling his revenues to above a trillion dollars, …

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 $8 million. He is going to jail for his crimes. It is easy to dismiss this as one-and-done fraud. It is …

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 is Aperture. They take me out of the noise and bring me right into the core of the work. Photographers …

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 what was said was indicative of need for focus and urgency. I read it as mild panic stations. Second, step back enough and a …

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 organizing ClawCons. New York, Austin, Tokyo next. Not industry conferences. In the halcyon days of Web 2.0, we called them meetups and …

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 any of that matters to me, but still, there were new Apple products that …

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 have been in the know, Travis Kalanick has never really gone away. He has always …

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 River. Nothing dramatic. Somewhere in the middle of all that I let my subconscious take control of my mind, …

“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: we know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not at others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear …

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, elaborate spreadsheets that make a lighthearted hobby look like the desk of an air traffic controller. Not that I …

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 “cute” and “want” about a computer in the same breath. The iBook, maybe? That machine was a …

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 to die in your sleep Kenny Rogers, The Gambler. I don’t know Masayoshi Son, and I don’t …