intellectual-habits
What a Ten-Second Sampler Knew About Focus
The E-mu SP-1200, the drum machine behind a generation of hip-hop records, could hold roughly ten seconds of sound. That was the total. A producer had to decide which snare, which vocal stab, and which slice of a dusty soul record earned a place in memory, and everything else got thrown out. The records that…
Every Scored System Ends Up Training Its Opponent
A job candidate this week can read a guide on how to prepare for an interview with a bot. The guide exists because the bot exists. Once enough candidates read it, the bot will be scoring people on how well they prepared for the bot. That’s the whole problem in miniature, and it isn’t limited…
The Security Story Is the AI Risk Story
An AI coding agent needs no click to be turned against you. That’s the detail buried in this week’s disclosure about a zero-click remote code execution flaw in AI coding agents, reported by The Register. No phishing link, no malicious download, no moment where a person had to be fooled. The agent itself, sitting with…
The Bank and the Company Store Are Solving the Same Problem
Huntington Bancshares tempered its outlook this week, and the reason is almost boring: rates went up, yields went down, and the spread the bank lives on got thinner. $HBAN isn’t alone. Every regional bank runs on the same machine. Take deposits cheap, lend them out dear, keep the difference. When rates move against you, the…
The List Nobody Wants To Make
On October 7, Microsoft will hold a Windows and Surface event, its first dedicated hardware showcase in a while. The headlines will be about screens, hinges, and chip specs. The actual story is quieter: Windows stopped being the product years ago. It is the doorway. Every new Surface exists to keep you inside a subscription…
The Confidence Tax
Samsung just put $230 million into a company built to sell an alternative to Nvidia’s AI chips. That is worth sitting with for a second, because Samsung is not a venture fund taking a flyer on an unproven architecture. It has the balance sheet to buy Nvidia GPUs like everyone else, call that a strategy,…