Uncomfortable observations about tech, power, and what we broke along the way.
A near-frontier model runs at interactive speed on a card you own, for the cost of the electricity. Renting the same capability from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google is a fee priced below cost, your data on their servers, and only rising.
The same manipulation patterns that built the slot machine, the cult, and the social media feed are aimed at you through your AI. Twenty-eight patterns of possession and what an anti-possession daemon would have to do about each one.
Wellness scores look like personal readings. They are bucket placements, sold to advertisers, dressed up in your colours.
Every company that holds your personal data is compelled to fail you. The architecture has to remove the company.
Privacy belongs to everyone in the conversation. A memory device that captures them all is a surveillance system with one user and a lot of subjects.
A long onboarding flow is a team admitting they don't know who they are building for. A few days ago Cristina and I sat down for lunch in Assisi at AssaggiAssisi (chill little deli). I'd been up late the night before writing the ghost.cued post and I was still turning it over in my head, so I started telling her about it. The daemon that reads your environment and surfaces the right memory at the…
RAG answers the questions you ask. It cannot help when the moment passes before the question forms. What the brain does that RAG does not, and what ghost.cued has to do.
Standing on a trail in Abruzzo that the regional government had just cut the funding for, wondering what sixty thousand euros costs the people who decided not to spend it. On the accumulation pattern inside every big human project, the mechanism that keeps some of them lean, and the discipline nobody wants to build.
Have you ever considered how a computer representation of your brain would work? On what your brain keeps, what it quietly releases while you sleep, when calcification is the right answer, and where the constraints on a system running on your own hardware differ from the constraints on biology.
A friend told me my advice felt too directive. A colleague I worked with for years showed me a better way. The technique that helps you find the right answer is the same one that, in different hands, walks you to the wrong one.
A thief can't make you type your password. A person with a wrench can. First post on ghost.secd, the LocalGhost daemon that handles encryption, duress PINs, hidden volumes, and the purge.
Copilot understands your codebase. Gemini knows your email patterns. Claude has months of your reasoning. The new lock-in isn't your data, it's the context around it, and no export button can give it back.
We were trying to decide whether to start a company together. Then I started sharing AI logs. The longer your AI knows you, the less likely it is to tell you the truth.
Paul called me about thirty stores opening Friday and a dev team that had gone quiet. Six months of the same conversation with people I respect, all of them working it out. On why the window is open right now and why it won't stay that way.
The death of skillcraft. We didn't lose the ability to build overnight. We defunded it incrementally, rationally, one outsourcing contract at a time.
Is the rot inevitable? How do ethical builders survive? What happens when a generation never knew privacy? Hard questions, honest answers.
Hardware is commoditising. Software is the battleground. Build credible alternatives before the defaults are set.