- Artificial Intelligence (LLMs, AI agents, and the future of human expertise)
- Blockchain (Decentralized infrastructure, networks, and ecosystem evolution)
- Data Engineering (Building data infrastructure that actually scales)
- Data Science (Graph algorithms, network analysis, and statistical methods)
- DevOps (Infrastructure, automation, and operational philosophy)
- General (Culture, science, and the miscellaneous)
- Retro Computing (The machines and culture that shaped computing)
- Music Production (Gear, sound design, and creative workflow)
- Personal Development (Expertise, craft, and the engineering mindset)
- Security (Threat modeling, cryptography, and systems that resist attack)
- Software Engineering (System design, languages, and the craft of code)
- Space (Infrastructure and vision for human expansion beyond Earth)
Geoffrey Hinton Interviews
Few people have done more to build modern AI, and fewer still have turned around to warn the world about it as loudly. Geoffrey Hinton spent half a century making neural networks work when most of the field thought they never would, and then - at the point of maximum credibility - left his job at Google to say he was worried about where the technology is heading. This page is a growing, chronological index of his interviews, talks, and public appearances, with enough context around each to know what you are clicking into. ...
Ethical Data Use (EDU) in 2026: What Data Engineers Actually Need to Get Right
For most of the last decade, “ethical data use” was something that happened in a different building. The lawyers wrote the privacy policy, the data protection officer ran the impact assessment, and the engineers built whatever the ticket said. The ethics lived in a PDF, and the pipeline lived in the warehouse, and the two rarely met. In 2026 that separation has quietly collapsed. The reason is not that engineers suddenly became more principled - it is that the decisions which determine whether data is used ethically are now made at the schema, the table, and the access-control layer, and those are the engineer’s decisions. Consent, deletion, minimisation, provenance, bias: every one of them is now something you either build into the pipeline or fail to. This is a practical look at what that means. ...
Max Tegmark: The Physicist Who Took Mathematics All the Way Down
I have written about one of Max Tegmark’s ideas already - the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis - and in doing so I admitted he sits at the top of my favourite physicists list. That post was about a single claim. This one is about the man, and about the thing I find more interesting than any individual theory of his: the through-line. Tegmark has spent a career moving steadily inward, from measurable cosmology toward the deepest possible questions about what reality is, and the move never feels like a physicist losing the plot and drifting into metaphysics. It feels like someone following the maths until it runs out of floor. ...
The Computational Case for Consciousness
When I wrote about Donald Hoffman, I was working through one half of a question I keep saying I have not settled: whether consciousness is fundamental, there from the start as part of the floor of reality, or computational, something that switches on once a physical process organises information in the right way. Hoffman is the most serious case I have found for the fundamental side, and I gave it a fair hearing because I genuinely find it compelling. ...
Is Reality Made of Mathematics?
In Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? I admitted to an instinct I have never quite been able to shake: that the laws of physics are discovered rather than invented, and that mathematics might be genuinely fundamental - not a human language we lay over reality, but part of the bedrock. I said that if we ever reach base reality, maths is the thing most likely to get us there. I left it as a feeling. This post is me taking that feeling and seeing how far a serious physicist has been willing to push it. ...
Donald Hoffman: The Case That Consciousness Is Fundamental
When I wrote about Yampolskiy’s Personal Universes recently, I left a thread hanging. The question underneath that whole post - the one I said I genuinely had not settled - was whether consciousness is fundamental, there first with the universe as something it experiences, or whether it is computational, something that switches on once a process gets complex enough. I said I had only recently started reading my way into the fundamental side, mostly through Donald Hoffman. This is me pulling on that thread properly. ...
Personal Universes: Yampolskiy's Strangest Answer to the AI Alignment Problem
First, the thing this is all in service of. The AI alignment problem is the challenge of making a powerful AI system reliably pursue what we actually want it to pursue - getting its goals, values, and behaviour to line up with human intentions, and to stay lined up even as the system becomes more capable than the people supervising it. It sounds simple and is not: we struggle to state our own values precisely, those values conflict between people, and an AI optimising hard for a slightly-wrong objective can produce outcomes nobody asked for. The multi-agent version - aligning one system with all of humanity at once, rather than a single person - is harder still, and it is the specific version Personal Universes is trying to dodge. ...
Will AI Kill Coding Jobs? Claude Code's Creator Reacts
The “is the software engineer dead” genre has been running long enough that you can predict most of the takes before you read them. The interesting interviews are the ones where the person being interviewed is in a position to know something the rest of us do not. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, is one of those people. Sky News got him in front of three charts and asked him to react. ...
Why the AI Cyber Threat Is Rising
For most of the last few years, the “AI and cybersecurity” conversation has been a vibes argument. One side said the models would soon write novel exploits at scale. The other side said the models were still tripping over basic shell commands and could not be trusted to hack anything more dangerous than a CTF box. The honest answer was that nobody had hard numbers, so the debate stayed stuck on intuition. ...
Music Production News - May 2026: Superbooth, AI Settlements, and the Updates That Matter
TL;DR - The last month gave producers three things worth paying attention to. Superbooth 2026 in Berlin put neural audio processing into a hardware pedal for the first time and handed Buchla a $999 entry point. The AI music legal picture kept moving, with a fresh lawsuit against Suno and a still-pending Sony ruling expected this summer. And the tooling caught up quietly, with Ableton Live 12.4 and REAPER 7.73 shipping solid point releases. Here is what actually changed - and what is just noise. ...