Applied AI reviews, build logs and essays on systems, validation, agent workflows, decision-making and how ideas survive contact with reality.
A few months ago I wrote about how AI-native companies were beginning to reshape themselves. At the time, it felt mostly theoretical. Now it feels obvious. After spending more time inside AI-native teams, building automa
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The number of new e-books on Amazon has nearly tripled since the arrival of ChatGPT. This is not a literary renaissance. It is more like someone opened the floodgates at a paper mill and forgot to check whether the paper
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LLMs are a ridiculous technology, in the best possible way. They let organizations scale intelligence: attention, reasoning, logic, judgment, and decision-making become dramatically cheaper and faster. Naturally, the fir
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I was at AI Week in Milan , and after two large conferences in a row I can confirm something important: this is a hobby for the clinically overcommitted. The venue had the correct modern AI-conference atmosphere: purple
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Well, this was always going to happen. A short story called The Serpent in the Grove  by Jamir Nazir won the Caribbean regional prize in the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize  and was published by Granta , one of tho
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There was a time when using the internet meant blocking the phone line. This sounds medieval now, like heating soup over a candle or navigating by bird migration. But it was not that long ago. You wanted to go online, so
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For the past two days, parts of Reddit and X have been treated to a small cultural exchange. Americans are staring at their Claude and OpenAI bills, wondering whether they can afford another round of agentic enthusiasm b
Read ->Y Combinator has published its Summer 2026 Request for Startups, and the signal is fairly clear: the “AI as a feature” phase is over. YC says this directly enough. AI has stopped being a feature and started becoming the
There are moments in the art world when something quietly moves from “interesting niche” to “everyone in a black jacket is suddenly pretending they always cared.” Digital art appears to be having one of those moments. Ar
I spent some time torturing a scientific-paper search agent, then handed the gathered context to GPT-5.5 Pro with a simple question: Why does music work on us? The answer , after stripping away the neuroscience upholster
For a while, I thought moving more of my work into Cursor, ChatGPT, and other AI tools was pure progress. The logic seemed obvious. If a tool makes me ten times faster, then surely I am growing. A charming thought. Also
There is a particular modern fantasy that if we simply collect enough data, correlate it hard enough, and feed it into enough machinery, meaning will eventually emerge, wearing a clean shirt and carrying a dashboard. Thi
There is a new player in AI, and it has arrived with the usual Silicon Valley manners: by loudly implying that everyone else has been doing the expensive thing. The company is Subquadratic . The model is SubQ . The pitch
For a long time, the safe thing to say about AI in mathematics was that it was useful for toy problems, olympiad tricks, and producing confident nonsense in LaTeX. A pleasingly comfortable view. Also increasingly obsolet
There is a particularly noble kind of software project that does not try to raise a seed round, reinvent productivity, or explain why your calendar needs a blockchain. It simply shows you something. A magnetic field. A p
Every company now wants to be AI-native. This is understandable. Nobody wants to be the last firm in the industry still forwarding PDFs around while a competitor has 400 agents doing market research, customer support ana
The more I invest, the less I believe in investing in ideas. This sounds rude, because the startup world is largely built around people saying things like “massive market,” “unique insight,” “category-defining product,”
Remember when people worried that an AI-written resume might get them rejected? That was a charmingly innocent time. The fear went like this: you ask ChatGPT to polish your CV, the company’s applicant tracking system det
I like medical dramas. Not because they are realistic, obviously. They are mostly soap operas with stethoscopes. Someone runs down a corridor. Someone shouts “we’re losing him.” Someone else has a complicated personal li
There is a hidden tax inside AI. Not the glamorous kind involving governments, lobbyists, and a 900-page PDF nobody reads. This one is quieter, stranger, and built directly into the machinery. It is the tax you pay for n
