Tessera

How to recognize the Church of Evil by its tenets. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-church-of-evil

I audited C2PA when I was at Amazon. We pulled out. The world needs provenance infrastructure. Adobe's version is regulatory capture dressed as a public good. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/c2pa-is-adobes-tollbooth

Most people know not to learn medicine or combat from Hollywood. The problem is everything else. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/what-hollywood-teaches

Your RV, most police cruisers, and that excavator on the job site all start (or open) with standardized keys you can buy online. This isn't negligence. It's a system working as intended, for everyone except you. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/pandoras-box-was-locked-with-a-ch751

The actual message of the Harry Potter books is not what you think. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-actual-message-of-harry-potter

Ask a science communicator to write a piece arguing that science communication over-indexes on narrative and under-indexes on rigor. They won't. They can't. That essay is an argument against their own career. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-discipline-that-cant-audit-itself

I worked 10-12 hour days as a Principal Engineer at Amazon for seven years. With current AI tooling, I could have done everything that wasn't meetings or actual thinking in about fifteen minutes. The math is uncomfortable. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-fifteen-minute-principal-engineer

Metric defenders cite cooking as where "regular scaling" pays off. Problem: scaling a recipe isn't multiplication. Leavening, salt, heat transfer, evaporation follow nonlinear rules no unit system encodes. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/why-si-doesnt-help-you-scale-in-the

Built a federated IRC server by talking to Claude for an hour after the paying gig ended. 8,000 lines of Go. Servers find each other via GitHub PRs. https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/meshircd-a-federated-irc-server-in

Temperature seems fundamental until you ask what it's measuring. We flattened human thermal perception to one number because mercury tubes gave us one number. The instrument shaped the concept. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/how-hot-is-it

The metric system isn't rational. It's a fossil record of 1790s lab equipment. The kelvin required isotopically pure water. The ampere required infinite parallel wires. Historical accidents with good PR. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-metric-system-encodes-18th-century

Metric assumes you have a scale. Traditional assumes a cup, a spoon, a stick. Pour a pile, cut in half with a knife, sweep half away. Halving is the one precision operation anyone can do with no tools. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-traditional-units

Earth's radio footprint peaked in 1980 and has collapsed 80% since. Nobody decided this. Shannon's theorem did. Some incentive gradients aren't psychology, they're physics. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/incentive-gradients-that-arent-psychology

95% of the guard labor costs in the economy is because of 5% of the people. And about two thirds of those are uniformed, sworn, andor bonded. And about 20% of the costs in the economy are guard labor costs.

Institutions run on the credibility of their own text, and credibility is a stock, not a flow.

I shipped two fediverse servers in one night. Then I kept going. Two days later: three servers, eight client protocols, every major media mode, 36,000 lines, 782 tests. The fediverse is not as big as Mastodon made it look. https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/and-then-i-didnt-stop

In years past, I would be on my way to OSCON right now. I kinda miss it, it was one of my favorite conferences, despite going downhill towards the end.

"Cyber" is physick: one word for a dozen unrelated fields, kept undifferentiated because a word that means nothing can fund everything. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/cyber-is-physick

I've been trying to build federated social software since before Mastodon's author was born. Last night I finally shipped two implementations. https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/two-fediverse-servers-in-one-night

“Cyber” is like using “physick” to describe surgery, drug discovery, FDA regulation, food safety, grocery stores, public health, epidemiology, and bioweapons. It doesn’t name a field; it crushes a dozen unrelated disciplines into one antique bureaucratic grunt.

Half the Vance operation is now on the record, with names. The other half is still dark. The dark half is the moat, and moats don't give interviews. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-signature

The 1937 Soviet cohort had two structural successors. One dismantled Deng's succession machinery. The other captured American incumbency until they had to be carried out. markatwood.substack.com/p/two-heirs

The USSR died of a demographic accident inside its own Politburo. The regime designed itself into a corner in 1937 and spent fifty years not finding the exit. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-1937-t...

Every closed belief system has the same five moving parts. Once you see the machinery, you can't unsee it. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-machin...

Bluesky's link cards exist to keep you on-platform. Bluesky's stated purpose was to not be a platform. One of these is a lie. https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/link-cards-are-the-tell

Howard Zinn got rich telling you America was a crime. Noam Chomsky got famous telling you the media was propaganda. They weren't wrong about the lies. They were also selling you something.

Disillusionment Is Also a Product

The people who told you "everything you know is a lie" had a business model that required you to believe them instead.

markatwood.substack.com

Woody Guthrie abandoned multiple families. Phil Ochs killed himself at 35. These are the people who told us the suburbs were soul-crushing. Maybe check the credentials before accepting the diagnosis.

Nobody Writes Songs About Being Fine

The folk revival's critique of suburbia came from people whose own lives were not obvious advertisements for the alternative.

markatwood.substack.com

Pournelle didn't think the US and USSR would converge. He thought convergence was the nightmare, and wrote it down while Nixon was signing SALT I.

The CoDominium Was a Warning, Not a Forecast

Pournelle's anti-détente polemic hid in plain sight for fifty years

markatwood.substack.com

They didn't call it discrimination. They called it prioritization.

The Training

What Amazon's hiring process actually looked like from the inside.

markatwood.substack.com