Claude Cashier I’m not sure how to feel about all this. On the one hand, my talents have never been more valuable, as AI has amplified my talents without (yet) subsuming them, but on the other hand I feel l…

blog.awgibbs.com/2026/02/06/c...

The Long Road To Tragedy Ideally those charged with the safety, security, and efficacy of systems would proactively monitor and analyze leading indicators that hint of tragedy to come. Second best, then, is at least to hav…

blog.awgibbs.com/2026/02/03/t...

The Kill-And-Smear The playbook takes shape.

blog.awgibbs.com/2026/01/24/t...

Put Your Amygdala On Ice I tried to beam some positive energy into the world on Wednesday with a video of Little Kitty reveling in a fresh feather attached to the wand. Having posted a clip to social media, I then headed o…

blog.awgibbs.com/2026/01/09/p...

Agency, Accountability, Architecture, Autarky, Alignment Three Years Of LLMs: The Run-Up, Realities, Risks, and Road Ahead

blog.awgibbs.com/2026/01/06/a...

Guns, Germs, and Steel… And A Few Other Uncomfortable Topics So many genies are long out of the bottle and just can’t go back. Three and a half billion years into an unceasing arms race on this ball of rock, that is just the inescapable nature of thing…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/12/21/g...

The Perils Of Outsourced Thinking As the world grows ever more complex and the leverage of various products and services to help us navigate this complexity becomes ever more compelling, the temptation to outsource our thinking bec…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/12/18/t...

Beyond Boats Watching the rising clamor around the Venezuelan boat debacle, I feel reflexively tempted to perform the “Orange Man Bad” ritual, because the situation strikes me as legitimately bad bo…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/12/07/b...

Reaping The Whirlwind, or… What’s In Your Loot Box? Rule number one when getting kidnapped is really quite simple — never get in the car. Of course, resisting lawful arrest by a duly appointed agent of a legitimate government may sit near top-of-lis…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/11/14/r...

Our Increasingly Fragile World, or… Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People Imagine a world where a distant actor can’t so readily turn your house upside down.

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/10/22/o...

This Is Not Fine Twenty years ago, at the outset of over a decade’s service at the department recently re-branded from “Defense” to “War”, I swore an oath to the Constitution of a country that day-by-day I find inc…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/10/19/t...

Path Dependent Perils We don’t speak enough about path dependency. The order in which you learn things can, sometimes literally, make or break you.

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/09/27/p...

To Kill A Democracy Listening today to Gavin Newsom’s March 2025 interview with Charlie Kirk filled me with grief. At times when we most need open, vigorous, and respectful debate, so, too, does the temptation t…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/09/11/t...

Process — The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” That aphorism, coined Goodhart’s Law, sprang to mind as my feed filled with hot takes on Coinbase CEO Brian Arms…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/09/05/p...

Combating Complacency — When Good Enough Isn’t Enough Complacency kills — manifested as a preference for convenience, caused and aggravated by a lack of preparation, compounded by loss of composure, with fatigue as accelerant.

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/09/02/c...

Another Govie Bites The Dust The hits keep coming.

I wonder if you incepted me when I was working on a featured imaged for my own latest post — blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/30/a...

Another Govie Bites The Dust The hits keep coming.

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/30/a...

Go To The Fucking Gym AI is making you stupid. MIT just proved it. Or so the teaser line on myriad social media posts, still circulating months after MIT published “Your Brain On ChatGPT”, would have us beli…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/27/g...

Lies, Damned Lies, And LLM Statistics This will change how you see AI forever… is the breathless message behind myriad reposts of the “WHERE AI GETS ITS FACTS” meme, originated by Visual Capitalist, from which we are …

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/23/l...

How To Lose Friends And Influence People When you take the wheel of a car, you should drive it like it is stolen. That will, however, require more subtlety than the casual GTA enthusiast imagines.

When you take the wheel of a car, you should drive it like it is stolen.

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/22/h...

Oops — ICE did it again 404 Media last week broke a story with SignalGate 2.0 vibes — ICE reportedly added a random person to an intelligence-laden group chat for an active manhunt. While reminiscent of an earlier gaffe w…

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/19/o...

From Chunky To Smooth, or… Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light. Back around 2010, zipping along I-95 South, I spied a roadside billboard from a major defense contractor featuring a CGI soldier clad in Halo-style armor and sporting the tagline “SAIC — now …

blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/17/f...

The barriers to entry for software development keep dropping and more people are pouring in.

Whether that’s good remains to be seen and hinges on how we manage the ecosystem.

I unpack this tension in my latest essay, From Chunky to Smooth, available as article and podcast.

The Hamfisted Hegemon, or... How To Irreversibly Squander A Century's Hard-Won Privileges For Fun And Profit | All The Things | Episode 10 Full multi-media version: https://blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/08/the-hamfisted-hegemon-or-how-to-irreversibly-squander-a-centurys-hard-won-privileges-for-fun-and-profit/

Listen: share.transistor.fm/s/c8a2b6a9

The Hamfisted Hegemon, or… How To Irreversibly Squander A Century’s Hard-Won Privileges For Fun And Profit [Find a podcast version here.] “There goes another domino”, I thought upon reading an FT piece covering Spain’s “noooooooop” to the US’s F-35 in favor of a Europ…

Read: blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/08/t...

“The Hamfisted Hegemon, or... How To Irreversibly Squander A Century's Hard-Won Privileges For Fun And Profit” [👇 links to read and listen below]

I was wondering how that Neal Stephenson novel started...

The Data Engineer's Struggle In a Fragmented And Politicized World, or... Confronting A Crisis Of Credibility | All The Things | Episode 9 Full multi-media version: https://blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/03/the-data-engineers-struggle-in-a-fragmented-and-politicized-world-or-confronting-a-crisis-of-credibility/

Listen: share.transistor.fm/s/5ea09088

The Data Engineer’s Struggle In a Fragmented And Politicized World, or… Confronting A Crisis Of Credibility [Find a podcast version here.] “Argh, again with shooting the messenger!”, I found myself thinking on Friday when news broke of Trump firing Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEnt…

Read: blog.awgibbs.com/2025/08/03/t...

"Frankly, the whole episode was a Data Engineer's worst nightmare, and our lack of progress fills me with dread for the next such cataclysm." [👇 links to read and listen in the comments ]