• 6 min
A Cybernetics Reading List, Written Before I Read It
An agent can check a quote for me. It cannot read for me. So before I open Ashby, Wiener and the 1943 paper, here is the list, and what I expect to find, written down first.
Essays
Long-form thought on AI-assisted development, agent mode, DevOps philosophy, and what changes when the human is three abstraction levels above the code. Some essays lean technical, some lean philosophical; they share the systems-engineering frame.
82 posts • Page 1 of 5
Start with the cornerstones
• 9 min
The Software Was Rewritten; or, Culture Is the Oldest Information Technology
I once wrote that our minds run on the same hardware as every other animal and that something rewrote the software. I think the software is culture, the oldest information technology we have.
• 17 min
What 7helm Is Made Of
Change the drag constant in my arcade game by one part in a hundred million and twelve recorded runs stop matching. That strictness is the foundation the replays, the scoreboard, the co-op and the releases all stand on.
• 8 min
Two Readers and a Red Box
A vision model read the top of my notebook page and filed it under a date eight years off, calmly. One reader cannot flag what it is sure of. So now two models read every page, and I look only where they disagree.
• 23 min
A Loop Is a Path That Closes
One of my health checks stayed red for eleven weeks by reading its own failure. A loop is the special case of a trajectory, the path that happens to close, and a life does not.
• 6 min
Walking a Rented Kingdom
I read a hundred-page atlas of a kingdom I will only ever rent, then logged in and walked it. On studying a territory with a map in one hand, why the first thing the kingdom teaches is to take off the crown, and how it ended at 799.
• 17 min
The Mind Places Things on Paper
My AWS exam deck scored 26 percent. I printed the whole study system as a paper packet, studied it one day, and the same review scored 47. Six weeks later the exam came back 799. Why a page is a place.
• 17 min
The Smallest World That Still Tells the Truth
Development environments lie in two directions. Clone production and it is too expensive to use. Mock it and it is confidently wrong. Here is a third option, and a working hybrid lab that joins a Kubernetes cluster on my laptop to a real Windows host behind a real AWS load balancer for about nine cents an hour.
• 8 min
Hello, Again
Three weeks ago I wrote about a script called hello, the one warm door into my system. I kept pulling the thread and the door turned out to be the outermost loop, the one that asks whether the whole thing can still become useful. This is what I found standing behind a greeting: cybernetics, nested watchers, and the rule that intelligence never gets its own hands.
• 6 min
Same Score, Half the Time
I failed another practice exam today. Same score as my best one, and my best is still a fail. But I finished in half the time and it felt easy in a way it never has, and I think the number is the last thing that moves, not the first.
• 4 min
Knowing Isn't a System
I bought the IPO everyone wanted, and a quiet part of me narrated the mistake while I made it. The post-mortem found the real bug: a category I had built so I could skip my own system. Knowing isn't a system.
• 12 min
The Loop Was the Top of a Stack
I typed my thirty-two loops, then drew them as a graph, and thought the loop was the top of the system. It turned out to be the roof of a stack eight floors deep, and the floor holding all the weight is the smallest one: the edge.
• 6 min
One Writer Per Artifact
Typing my automation handed me most of its rules for free; the type carries the contract. One rule came free with nothing, and it was the one my system was breaking: every file gets exactly one job that writes it. On the difference between rules you remember and rules the structure carries.
• 8 min
The View You're Missing Is the Graph
I gave every job in my automation a receipt, a health check, and a green light, and the system still would not fit in my head. A dashboard shows the state of the parts. The question I actually had was about the shape of the whole, and no amount of state answers a question about shape.
• 6 min
You Reinvented Data Engineering
The best thing anyone told me about my own system this year was that I had not invented it. The scripts I grew by hand are a data pipeline, the shape is a DAG, and the discipline is solved. What the tools actually sell, why I am not buying yet, and the difference between wanting an engine and wanting a map.
• 7 min
A Loop Is Seven Things
Thirty-two automated jobs run underneath my days, I wrote every one of them, and I could not hold the system in my head. The problem was never my memory. It was a word. "Loop" was one word doing the work of seven.
• 7 min
Finding Edgar Morin
Edgar Morin died in May at 104, and I met him through his obituary. He spent eighty years on the question I have been building around: how to think inside the weave without cutting it apart. Two book reviews are coming. This is the marker I am leaving at the trailhead first.
• 7 min
Engineering Orientation
Making complexity visible is the method. Orientation is the objective function. The research program now has an installable runtime, laboratories that keep their data, and its first pre-registered experiment, running on my own life.
• 5 min
Hello
The first program you write used to be the machine greeting the world. Hello, world. I built a different first program: my own system greeting me. One warm door instead of four scattered starters, and the greeting sits inside the loop it opens, so it can reach in and improve itself.
• 5 min
The Little Black Book of Hansuru
A book I wrote about selling options for income, built on one law: survive first. It shows a record most books would hide, and that is the reason it exists. Out now in Kindle and paperback.