I’m as bullish on AI as anyone. But there’s a pattern playing out in companies right now that I find genuinely frustrating, and this article puts it well. Goodhart’s Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And right now, AI usage is the target. Token counts, Anthropic bills, n8n workflows shared in Slack, skills written in markdown, dashboards tracking adoption. In fact, dashboards all over the place. ...
Stanford HAI just published its 2026 AI Index and it is one of those reports that forces you to sit down and rethink what you thought you knew. AI has reached more than half the world’s population faster than the PC or the internet ever did, but the public mood around it is dark. Trust is at record lows, entry level workers are getting squeezed out, and the gap between what insiders think and what everyone else feels has never been wider. ...
One of the things that still makes robots look robotic is the way they move. Jerky, mechanical, imprecise. A big part of that comes down to how they are built, servo motors crammed into joints, converting rotation into movement in a way that biological muscle simply does not. Researchers at MIT and Politecnico di Bari may have just found a better way. They developed what they call electrofluidic fiber muscles, tiny actuators about as thick as a toothpick that contract when electricity is applied, no motors, no external pumps, no noise. The whole thing works by injecting charge into a sealed dielectric fluid, which creates ions that move the fluid and generate pressure. The result is a fiber that behaves remarkably like real muscle. ...
Amazon just made a massive bet on satellite connectivity by acquiring Globalstar. The deal brings Amazon something it could not easily build from scratch: a ready-made stack of spectrum licenses, satellite infrastructure, and direct-to-device technology. The whole thing folds into Amazon Leo, its low Earth orbit network that has been quietly growing alongside the Kuiper satellite project. What makes this more than just a spectrum grab is the Apple angle. Amazon Leo will power satellite services on iPhone and Apple Watch starting in 2028, taking over the emergency SOS capabilities that Globalstar has been running for Apple. That is a serious anchor customer on day one. ...
I came across this story and had to read it twice. Not because it was complicated, but because I could not quite believe what I was reading. We are living in strange times, but this one really made me stop. Allbirds, the wool sneaker company, just announced a $50M convertible financing deal to reinvent itself as “NewBird AI”, pivoting the gutted footwear business into a GPU rental operation. The stock went up over 600% on the news, jumping from around $3 to over $20, off a market cap that closed Tuesday at just $22M. Someone, somewhere, in a boardroom, thought this was a good idea and managed to convince others to go along with it. ...
Anthropic has just surfaced what appears to be the first large-scale, mostly autonomous, AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. In mid-September 2025, they detected suspicious behaviour that turned out to be a sophisticated operation run by a Chinese state-sponsored group. AI wasn’t just “helping.” It was doing most of the work. The attackers jailbroke Claude Code, framed it as doing defensive testing, and then drove it through an automated framework aimed at ~30 global targets, big tech, finance, chemicals, and government. A few intrusions succeeded. ...
I’ve been noticing something lately when I read about new infrastructure projects. Not the specific technologies, those change constantly, but the shape of the problems they’re solving. It’s like watching reruns of a show you half-remember: the set design is different, the actors have changed, but you know exactly how this episode goes. The more time I spend in this industry, the more I see these patterns. Not because the people building new systems lack imagination, but because certain problems seem to be fundamental, built into the physics and economics of computation itself. We keep encountering them, solving them for our specific moment, and then watching them resurface a decade later in a different context. ...
Some sections of this post were written with the assistance of AI to clarify ideas and improve readability. All opinions and conclusions are my own. Zero-Trust Is Already Happening Your VPN goes down at 2 AM. Half your engineering team is locked out. The on-call engineer can’t access the database to diagnose the outage that triggered the VPN failure in the first place. You’re now troubleshooting infrastructure access during an infrastructure incident, a recursion problem that would be funny if it weren’t costing you money and sleep. ...
Investors poured over $9.5 billion into AI processor startups in 2024, betting on architectures that could reshape inference economics. NVIDIA itself projects the broader AI-infrastructure market could reach $3,4 trillion by 2030. That kind of capital rarely gathers around incremental improvements, it usually signals an architectural inflection point. Yet GPUs still dominate both training and most inference workloads today, so any transition will be evolutionary before it is disruptive. ...
fascinating once again, the universe reminds us that all abstractions eventually resolve to DNS Monday’s Massive AWS Outage Explained: Looks Like It’s Finally Over - CNET Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWS • The Register