@mark.atwood.name
Professional Open Source Policy Expert. Shape Rotator. Quiet Mind. Fan of good pens, fine paper, deep writing, skilled work. I learn amazing things, and meet awesome people, and introduce them to each other. links.fallenpegasus.com
The “human in the loop” AI job isn’t an oversight role. It’s a liability seat. The people sitting in it mostly don’t know that’s what they were hired to be. Here’s the architecture. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-warm-b...
If you want to talk to the press, no you don't. You want to write a post and have them spell your name correctly. Everything else is downside. markatwood.substack.com/p/if-you-wan...
The AI safety field is what happens when you take people too midwit for real engineering and too cowardly for real philosophy and give them a budget and a PR problem to solve.
Postmodern critical theory presents itself as a universal acid. No truth claim survives contact, no grand narrative is legitimate, all knowledge is power-situated. The acid has a container. The container is made of career incentives.
Putting a Gartner badge on your login page is the enterprise equivalent of hanging your diploma on the wall because your patients stopped referring their friends.
Brave New World was supposed to be a warning but the modern left read it as a product roadmap and sent back notes on the first draft
Mathematicians go crazy because reality is hard. Continental philosophers go 'crazy' because obscurity is useful. The tell: mathematicians' breakdowns serve no one. The philosophers' always serve the same people.
The NGO ecosystem is an employment market for people with humanities credentials and no technical skills. The sector provides salaries, status, travel, conference circuits, and a moral identity to people who would otherwise be competing for adjunct positions or corporate communications roles.
Works in Progress can tell you exactly why US infrastructure costs 10x what Japan pays. They just can't tell you who profits from it. The answer is too close to the subscriber list. markatwood.substack.com/p/works-in-p...
I'm happy to drop an exonym. But the replacement better be the honest endonym, not a rebrand with a agenda.
Alinskyite activists built a turnkey workforce surveillance and compliance system and handed the keys to Fortune 500 HR departments. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-most-e...
The play is always the same: give away the visible layer, own the pipe underneath. A story about what Amazon could have been if the next CEO had the one skill Bezos lacked. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-steward
The language that promised zero-cost abstractions is speed-running C++’s complexity trajectory. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/rust-is-a-...
There's a version of my career where I'm miserable, respected, and drinking too much at conferences. I chose differently. markatwood.substack.com/p/what-my-ca...
When an institution stops using a specific term, the referent of that term has become a known problem the institution has decided not to solve.
There's a new literary medium emerging and nobody's talking about it, because its fundamental property is solitude. markatwood.substack.com/p/audience-o...
How a fight over Groundhog Day predicted the pickup artist movement, split two creative partners for 20 years, and turned a sex-comedy premise into a Catholic parable. markatwood.substack.com/p/harold-ram...
What killed Amazon. On throwing away a 500 billion dollar a year business, founder distraction, and execution vs vision. markatwood.substack.com/p/what-what-...
It's an institution with its own survival incentives, hiring patterns, and ideological center of gravity. The staff captures the mission. Every time. And the kind of people who go into the NGO industrial complex ARE THE PROBLEM. 2/2
The foundation model has a structural flaw: the permanent staff become a constituency. A foundation with 1,500 employees and a $50 billion endowment isn't an instrument of the donor's will. 1/2
Fluency Is Not Action: Why Being Informed Is No Longer a Civic Virtue markatwood.substack.com/p/fluency-is...
Political activity exists on a spectrum of how much it overrides economic constraint, which closely predicts how many people will die and how fast.
Any system where moral accusation outranks technical contribution will eventually select against competence.
Too many “software freedom” activists hold the following idiotic axiom they are barely smart enough to not say out loud: “The person at the keyboard should always outrank the legal owner of the machine.”
Boomers won't be the first to be judged harshly by history. They are being the first to accurately fear it while still alive.
They are the worst parts of the administrative state with better PR and worse oversight.
They persist because they:
- Exercise state power (placement, credentialing, services)
- Without constitutional constraints
- Without electoral accountability
- Without FOIA exposure
- Without liability symmetry
NGOs exist because the state offloaded power without accountability. NGOs are not civil society. They are outsourced bureaucracy.
"Punishing the Actually Innocent as Black Letter Constitutional Error: Fourth Amendment Seizure, Habeas Text, and the Implausibility of “Finality Over Truth”" markatwood.substack.com/p/punishing-...
Years ago I lucked into a long, unstructured, and interesting conversation with Scott Adams, when a Telegram bug connected us. He was smart, deeply well read, & loved jumping from topic to topic, & complimented me that I could keep up. RIP Mr. Adams.