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The First Herculaneum Scroll Has Finally Been Read
substack / Jul 06, 2026

The First Herculaneum Scroll Has Finally Been Read

For nearly two thousand years, the Herculaneum scrolls have been playing the most infuriating game in the history of books. They survived. But only by becoming unreadable. When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the library at H

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Mythos and the End of Comfortable Cybersecurity
substack / Jun 30, 2026

Mythos and the End of Comfortable Cybersecurity

There are sentences you read once, put the coffee down, and then read again more slowly. This is one of them: “It broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” That line was attributed to

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Archive

Older notes and essays

substack / Jun 29, 2026
Stop Prompting AI. Start Engineering Loops.

There is a new phrase floating around the AI coding world, and it sounds just irritating enough to become important. Loop engineering. Naturally, it has arrived with the usual smell of fresh terminology, LinkedIn smoke,

substack / Jun 28, 2026
Paid Newsletters in 2026: The Paywall Is Not the Product

There was a time when a paid newsletter was a very simple machine. You wrote something. You put half of it behind a paywall. Then you sat there like a man selling umbrellas in the Sahara, wondering why nobody was throwin

substack / Jun 24, 2026
The Great Wrapper Panic

There is a particular kind of business nightmare that arrives very politely. It does not kick the door down. It does not announce itself with a dramatic soundtrack. It simply walks into the room, opens a benchmark, and s

substack / Jun 23, 2026
AI Music Is Not Replacing Musicians. It Is Replacing Spam.

There is a wonderful old fantasy about the music industry. It goes like this: people make songs, listeners decide what they like, critics write reviews, platforms count plays, charts reflect popularity, and everyone invo

substack / Jun 09, 2026
The End of White-Collar Alpha

There was a time, not very long ago, when white-collar professionals had a comforting story to tell themselves. AI would replace routine work. The boring work. The mechanical work. The “please summarize this PDF and make