The terrible job
One Friday in 2013 there was $50,000 in the account and $150,000 of payroll due by the end of the day. The $500,000 we were expecting from our second-largest customer had not come. I asked the bank for a short bridge, and the manager told me the bank would not provide one, and I boarded a flight to Atlanta to sit in front of the customer whose payment we were waiting for.
Your first question
On Pascal’s wager, the one premise its author never tested, and the habit of asking what an elegant argument stands on
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The evolution of complexity, entropy, and ambiguity in a perception system
On what happens to information on its way from the world, through a sensor, into a model, and why a factory camera can be trusted where a car’s cannot
The AI-Enabled Masters: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Who Rules
The paradox of belief: Richard Dawkins, God, and the cognitive evolution of entropic feedback loops
Beautiful and sublime things
On extreme patriotism, conscription, and what we lose when the right to disagree is taken for granted
The useful delusion
In July 2024 I was negotiating the sale of my business. It was the event that 30 years of building…
Domains of Disbelief
I am an atheist. My closest friend during my years in America was a Pennsylvania pastor.
The three skills people will not learn
An observation on why presentation, negotiation, and cold calling are the most reluctantly acquired skills in business, and the most disproportionately rewarded
The over-manage / under-manage cycle
An observation on why most management is really firefighting, and why the harder craft is knowing where to let the fire burn
The AI Leaders’ Action Plan
I have sat in rooms where serious people approved AI plans they could not have stress-tested without the consultant who wrote them. The plans were not bad in the way bad plans usually are. They were
The Employee You Have to Check
The first time I tried to make a language model write low-level requirements, at CoreAVI, I gave it a C function and asked. It wrote them. They looked plausible; with a couple of minutes of human
The Sixty Per Cent
On certifying software for aircraft, the black hole that certification becomes, and why the AI that wrote the artefacts three times faster did not make the programme any shorter
The Boundary Without a Line
I have been scrolling back through several weeks of messages in a group I am part of. Investors, founders, builders. People who run their own tools and hold strong views about which ones. The texture
The Dictionary Game
I distrust the celebration of dyslexia. The much-circulated list of famous dyslexics, Einstein and Churchill and Branson, da Vinci and Spielberg, has done a quiet harm to those who are dyslexic
The Catalogue of Collapses
In the autumn of 1830, farmers across the south of England began to receive letters. They were short, they were signed by a man who did not exist, and they were almost embarrassed by their own
Two Kinds of Not Knowing
In May 2018 I sat through a talk at the Embedded Vision Summit in Santa Clara by Burkhard Huhnke, who had led Volkswagen’s side of the Stanford autonomous car programme that grew out of the DARPA
The Plausibility Machine
On the morning of 22 May 2023, a photograph appeared on social media showing black smoke rising beside a large official building. The caption said there had been an explosion near the Pentagon. The