Articles

The Tenant and the Plumbing

Someone at dinner was cross about AI and water. They were right about the harm, and one level too shallow on the cause.

A large AI data centre evaporates millions of gallons a year, and the figure is real enough to be angry about. But the water isn't the scandal — it's that the price of a gallon carries almost none of the information the decision needs, so a stressed-aquifer gallon and a wet-climate recycled one cost an operator the same. AI didn't build the bad arrangement; it turned a very large tap on century-old plumbing and made the leak audible. On evaporative cooling as distillation, the hidden water cost of the grid, and what the Murray-Darling has spent a decade teaching about pricing water for place, time, and quality.

The First Billionaire

Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire. Under the system Britain used until 1974, he'd be the first billionaire — same man, same fortune, quieter name.

On 12 June 2026 Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire on the back of the SpaceX IPO. Two coherent systems exist for naming large numbers, and the tidier one lost — not on merit, but on distribution. A short piece on long scale versus short scale, and on how the standard that endures is almost never the optimum, just the one that got adopted at the right moment and became too costly to unwind.

The Mythos Tax

Expect more patching. That's the story.

Microsoft's May 2026 Patch Tuesday landed 137 CVEs, thirty rated critical, none known to have been actively exploited. The volume is new; the discovery shift is bigger. What the AI-assisted disclosure pipeline means for anyone running their own metal.

The Chat That Became a Parts List

Two hours with an LLM turned the stuff already in my shed into an off-grid drip irrigation system.

Two hours with an LLM turned the stuff already in my shed into an off-grid drip irrigation system.

Disposable Whetstones

Why building things you know will be obsolete is the point, not the problem

The Refinement

Nineteen days, eleven thousand logo variants, and a Pantone number that would have ended it in four seconds

A short story about Jake, his AI agent, and the boutique coffee logo that almost ate his credit card. A cautionary tale about underspecified prompts, unwatched dashboards, and the most expensive word in any brief.

Reason: Building an AI Solar Monitor and the Robot Who Would Not Look Out the Window

Asimov QT-1 ran the solar station perfectly even if he never understood why

An essay exploring the parallels between Asimov Reason and building Pulse, an AI-powered solar energy monitor.

Claude Code Now Has a Telegram Channel — and It Runs on Your Hardware

Bare Metal Digest — Feature Deep Dive

Bare Metal Digest — Feature Deep Dive

The Design Gap Between Claude Web and Claude Code Is Real — But Fixable

Same model, same prompt, three environments. The difference is a single plugin.

Same model, same prompt, three environments. The difference is a single plugin.