Category: technology
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Leased Understanding
Photo by Casey Lovegrove on Unsplash Author’s note: Two objections are worth granting upfront. First: renting competence can be optimal. Not everything should be rebuilt internally, and not every organization can afford deep expertise in every domain. The point here isn’t “never outsource.” It’s: don’t outsource comprehension for systems you’re accountable for. Second: internal teams…
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Trust Is Infrastructure
Photo by Joseph Corl on Unsplash In the decades following the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, Americans learned a bitter lesson about trust: the news wasn’t just a carrier of facts anymore. It was a platform with incentives. What once felt like shared information slowly became something else: an arena where attention was the product,…
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The Quiet Shift: When Everyone’s OS Stopped Being Infrastructure
Photo by J.M Read on Unsplash My first computer didn’t have windows, just a blinking green cursor, a keyboard, and the ‘soft’ whir of a hard drive spinning to life under MS-DOS. Commands mattered. Cause and effect were immediate. You typed something, and the system responded, honestly, and without agenda. A few years later, I…
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We Should Plan to Fail
Photo by Zach Lezniewicz on Unsplash For weeks, the system behaved exactly as designed. Aria had matured from a directory of experiments into a stable local agent: custom tools, a conversational interface, a growing memory layer, scheduled journaling, and enough reliability to test new ideas without worrying about what might break. Luna, the quieter counterpart…
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Building Aria: Part 2 – From Voice to Agency
Picking Up the Thread In Part 1, Aria reached her first milestone: she was live in a practical sense. Running locally in Docker, serving models through Ollama, and speaking through Discord, she could already respond in conversation. Messages flowed into Postgres, the last ten entries recalled with each new exchange, giving her a baseline of…
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Building Aria: Part 1 – Giving Shape to a Thought
Photo by EJ Strat on Unsplash Framing the Problem Everyone in tech seems to have a strong opinion on AI these days—especially generative AI, the kind that powers everything from chatbots to deepfakes to essays in classrooms. For the past year, I’ve been immersed in it, testing the major models, subscribing to the usual suspects,…
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Your Infrastructure Is Lying to You
Photo by Brian Kelly on Unsplash Every company that grows quickly builds roads to connect where they are with where they want to go. At first, those roads are simple: gravel tracks carved out of necessity, meant to get people and goods moving with minimal delay. They’re not elegant, but they’re fast. They serve their…
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AI Art: Ethics and the Misplaced Fury of a Disrupted Age
Author’s Note This isn’t a confession—and it isn’t a eulogy for AI art. It’s a line I’ve chosen to draw, and a prototype I’ve chosen to share—because refusing to use exploitative tools is only half a solution. The other half is creating an alternative: one built on consent, transparency, and the dignity of original work.…
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Drones Over Kigali: When Technology Serves the People
In 1994, Rwanda was synonymous with tragedy. The genocide that unfolded over 100 days left nearly a million people dead—neighbors turned on neighbors, children orphaned, communities torn apart. It was more than just violence; it was the collapse of the systems meant to protect citizens, and the heartbreaking realization that the international community largely watched…
Abstract Foundations 