The Layer Tax: Every Abstraction Has a Price
Every abstraction layer has a cost. Benchmarks showing the real price of convenience from someone who built fast systems in the 90s and slow ones today....
Why AI Can't Count the R's in Strawberry
LLMs confidently say strawberry has two R's because they've never seen letters—only tokens. This tokenization blindness predicts where AI will fail....
When CompuServe Was the Internet (1985-1995)
CompuServe pioneered email, forums, and real-time chat for three million users a decade before the open web. The platform-as-internet pattern keeps returning....
Crypto Is Bad in All Sorts of Ways
Environmental destruction, greater fool economics, regulatory arbitrage, and ransomware's favorite payment method. The SEC was right all along....
The Inventions I Never Shipped
Over 45 years, I noticed a pattern: I keep building things that later become billion-dollar companies....
The Best Code I Ever Wrote Was Deleted
The hardest skill in software engineering isn't writing code - it's knowing when to delete it. Stories of systems that improved by subtraction....
Barren Realms Elite and the Golden Age of BBS Door Games
Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite - BBS door games created the template for online gaming....
The Integration Tax: Every API Has a Price
Third-party API integration costs 56% more than initial estimates when you account for maintenance, breaking changes, and troubleshooting....
Technical Debt Is a People Problem, Not a Code Problem
Technical debt accumulates because of organizational dysfunction - pressure to ship, fear of refactoring, knowledge silos....
I Solved Spam in the 90s (Nobody Cared)
In the 1990s, I built RUM (Real User Mail) - a challenge-response system to fight spam. It worked. I never released it. Years later, the industry reinvented it....
I Evaluated Dozens of Blockchain Startups in 2018
What I learned doing technical due diligence on blockchain startups seeking funding. The technology works - for exactly one use case....
Speaker Diarization: The Hardest Problem Nobody Talks About
Why Zoom transcripts attribute quotes to the wrong people. The cocktail party problem isn't solved - it's hidden. Multi-device synchronization as a workaround....
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