In March 1860, William H. Russell established the Overland Express Route, colloquially called the Pony Express, to carry express mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and California; an area with no colonialist settlements between. Russell failed repeatedly to get funding from the Senate Post Office...

Imagine my shock and surprise to discover that when I submit resumes now, I quickly see LLM research agents in my access logs pouring over my portfolio page. As time moves ever forward, I suspect I’ll be dealing with AI agents more frequently, especially in the job market. I’m not...

Bob and Alice are two hackers working on an embedded system with a severe computational constraint - there is a bug in their low-cost microcontroller making OR operations significantly slower than any other operation on the chipset. When they profiled their micropython code, they found that OR...

The year was 2036. OpenAI had finally done it. After decades of press releases, quarterly existential crises, and machine learning papers so esoteric they made Finnegans Wake read like PopSci, they’d finished gpt-6z (revision 3) - a perfect, autonomous general intelligence. Its unveiling was...

In the 1980’s, Robert L. Crandall, head of American Airlines, removed one single olive from the salad they served passangers. He thought they wouldn’t notice - and he was right. This removal of the olive saved the company $40,000 a year.1 and began the downfall of Service Capitalism....