Thoughts
On tech, AI, business, and what actually works.
July 17, 2026
AI made execution nearly free, and the slop flood is what losing the price filter looks like. For seventy years, cost silently decided what got built, what came first, and when building stopped — now every builder has to make those three declarations on purpose, or not at all.
July 17, 2026
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab shipped its first model, Inkling, and admitted in writing that it isn't the best one available. That confession is the first coherent AI business strategy built on the premise that the frontier is a loss-leader — and that the real economics live in making a good-enough model yours.
July 15, 2026
In June 2024 Google forced its biggest advertisers off credit cards with a no-exceptions ultimatum, calling it a better billing experience. The payments math tells the real story: roughly $300 per $10,000 in card fees versus a dime by bank transfer — plus tighter control, verified identities, and a bet that advertisers had nowhere else to go.
July 14, 2026
The AI buildout's tightest chokepoint isn't Nvidia — it's HALEU, the reactor fuel that Big Tech's new nuclear fleet needs, and Centrus Energy's Piketon, Ohio plant is the only facility in America licensed to make it. Inside the $900 million bet, the Russian irony, the 40x supply gap, and the five-year window before the monopoly ends.
July 13, 2026
AI's binding constraint is no longer chips — it's electricity. A map of the companies selling the electrons: the dominant incumbents with decades of contracted hyperscaler revenue, and the wild cards that could pay off like lottery tickets over the next ten years.
July 6, 2026
Jensen Huang tells customers that even if rivals gave their chips away, NVIDIA would still be the cheaper choice. Independent benchmarks, MLPerf audits, and the purchasing behavior of the smartest compute buyers say he's mostly right — with one instructive exception.
July 5, 2026
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 didn't ship one model — it shipped three (Sol, Terra, Luna) priced in a clean 2x ladder. The real story isn't the 91.9% benchmark crown; it's that 'which model' is now a budget decision. A clear-eyed read of the tiers, the honest benchmark picture (Terra actually scores below GPT-5.5), and which tier a business should actually buy.
July 1, 2026
Born in Leeds and eligible for England, Erling Haaland chose Norway. The real reason runs through his father's battered Premier League career, the infamous Roy Keane tackle, and a quiet homecoming to a small Norwegian farming town.
June 28, 2026
AI agents save real hours, yet only 41% of rollouts hit positive ROI within a year and 19% never pay back. The 2026 data on why most agent deployments stall — and the four moves that separate the winners. The dividing line isn't the model; it's measurement.