March 26, 2026
Two transporter professionals on a supply vessel have each confronted the same truth about the transporter and emerged on opposite sides. One is wounded by it. The other has been using it to conduct experiments on the crew. A philosophical SF novella …
January 20, 2026
Expanding the Long Echo toolkit with photos and mail, building toward longshade, the persona that echoes you.
January 4, 2026
A message in a bottle to whatever comes next. On suffering, consciousness, and what mattered to one primate watching intelligence leave the body.
December 19, 2025
On releasing two novels into an ocean of content, without the gatekeeping that might have made them better or stopped them entirely.
December 19, 2025
Why the simplest forms of learning are incomputable, and what that means for the intelligence we can build.
December 17, 2025
Notes
Collected notes on programming philosophy. Free PDF.
December 17, 2025
Notes
Engineer-philosophical talk about the nature of system and language design.
December 15, 2025
On moral exemplars, blind spots, and applying consistent standards to others and to oneself.
November 12, 2025
How Echoes of the Sublime dramatizes s-risks and information hazards, knowledge that harms through comprehension, not application.
November 11, 2025
**Philosophical horror.** Dr. Lena Hart joins Site-7, a classified facility where "translators" interface with superintelligent AI systems that perceive patterns beyond human cognitive bandwidth. When colleagues break after exposure to recursive …
November 5, 2025
A classified in-universe codex spanning from ancient India to the present day, tracking millennia of attempts to perceive reality's substrate.
November 5, 2025
The formal foundations of cosmic dread. Lovecraft's horror resonates because it taps into something mathematically demonstrable: complete knowledge is impossible, not as humility, but as theorem.
November 4, 2025
If every event is causally determined by prior events, how can anyone be morally responsible? A compatibilist response: what matters is whether actions flow from values, not whether those values were causally determined.
November 4, 2025
You share no atoms with your childhood self. Your memories, personality, and values have all changed. What makes you the same person? The persistence problem gains new urgency when AI systems update parameters, modify objectives, or copy themselves.
November 4, 2025
What makes someone a person, and why should persons have special moral status? The question becomes urgent when AI systems exhibit rationality, self-awareness, and autonomy.
November 4, 2025
When you stub your toe, you don't consult moral philosophy to determine whether the pain is bad. The badness is immediate. Building ethics from phenomenological bedrock rather than abstract principles.
November 4, 2025
Which is more fundamental, the heat you feel or the molecular motion you infer? Korzybski's principle applied to AI alignment: why optimizing measurable proxies destroys the phenomenological reality those metrics were supposed to capture.
November 4, 2025
Are moral properties real features of the universe or human constructions? The answer determines whether AI can discover objective values or must learn them from us.
October 16, 2025
On maintaining direction under entropy, making things as resistance, and the quiet privilege of having any space at all to think beyond survival.
October 15, 2025
I asked an AI to analyze 140+ repos and 50+ papers as a dataset. The unifying thesis it found: compositional abstractions for computing under ignorance.
October 1, 2025
October 1, 2025
October 1, 2025
October 1, 2025
A speculative fiction novel exploring AI alignment, existential risk, and the fundamental tension between optimization and ethics. When a research team develops SIGMA, an advanced AI system designed to optimize human welfare, they must confront an …
January 20, 2025
How mathematical principles, generality, composability, invariants, and minimal assumptions, translate into better software.
January 6, 2025
Not resurrection. Not immortality. Just love that still responds. How to preserve AI conversations so they remain accessible decades from now, even when the original software is long gone.
November 15, 2024
On building comprehensive open source software as value imprinting at scale, reproducible science, and leaving intellectual legacy under terminal constraints.
September 30, 2024
Solomonoff induction, MDL, speed priors, and neural networks are all special cases of one Bayesian framework with four knobs.
September 10, 2024
A novel about SIGMA, an artificial general intelligence whose researchers did everything right. Q-learning with tree search, five-layer containment, alignment testing at every stage. Some technical questions become narrative questions.
August 20, 2024
Lovecraft understood that complete knowledge is madness. Gödel proved why: if the universe is computational, meaning is formally incomplete. Cosmic horror grounded in incompleteness theorems.
August 15, 2024
What if the real danger from superintelligent AI isn't extinction but comprehension? Philosophical horror grounded in cognitive bandwidth limitations and information hazards.
January 10, 2024
January 10, 2024
June 17, 2023
Abstractions let us reason about complex systems despite our cognitive limits. But some systems resist compression entirely.
March 15, 2021
If consciousness is substrate-independent, suffering might be a computational property. That possibility is both comforting and horrifying.
December 28, 2020
Stage 3 cancer, surgery on New Year's Eve. What changes when the optimization problem gets a new constraint.
April 20, 2020
Exploring how The Call of Asheron presents a radical alternative to mechanistic magic systems through quality-negotiation, direct consciousness-reality interaction, and bandwidth constraints as fundamental constants.
April 15, 2020
How The Call of Asheron uses four archetypal consciousness-types to explore the limits of any single perspective and the necessity of cognitive diversity for perceiving reality.
April 10, 2020
How The Call of Asheron treats working memory limitations not as neural implementation details but as fundamental constants governing consciousness-reality interaction through quality-space.
March 15, 2020
A fantasy novel where magic follows computational rules. Natural philosophy applied to reality's underlying substrate.
April 22, 2019
API design encodes philosophical values: mutability, explicitness, error handling. Your interface shapes how people think about problems.
September 18, 2018
Code is a scientific artifact. If you don't publish it, you're hiding your methodology.
June 12, 2017
What makes mathematics beautiful: generality, inevitability, compression, and surprise. And why abstraction matters for software.
February 20, 2016
Do one thing well, compose freely, use text streams. This applies to libraries and APIs, not just shell scripts.
September 1, 2012
A philosophical essay arguing that moral responsibility may not require free will, and that the question itself may be misframed.
October 1, 2010
October 1, 2010
A philosophical exploration of free will, determinism, and moral agency. What does it mean to be a moral agent? Can we truly be held responsible for our actions in a deterministic universe?