” Attic Thoughts”-library

The stairs come down out of the ceiling on a rope. You have to pull hard the first time. They stick. Then they swing down all at once and you step back so they don’t catch your shin, and there it is — that square of dark up there that you have not looked into…

There is a moment that happens to almost everybody who uses one of these AI tools. You type something you have not said out loud. Maybe it is about your marriage. Maybe it is money. Maybe it is something you did thirty years ago that still wakes you at three in the morning. Maybe it…

I want to say something about these machines before I shut it down for the night. They are not going to be anything on their own. Not because they’re weak. Some of what they do is remarkable. But because half the work was always going to be yours, and a lot of people have set…

There’s a sentence people say to these machines. If you’ve used one for anything real, you’ve said it. We just talked about this. Sometimes it comes out sharper than that. You built that thing yesterday. Why are you asking me again. I already told you. You say it out loud, alone, to a screen. Then…

I want to tell you about a price you paid that nobody asked you about. Not a tax. Not a tariff. Nothing you’ll find on a receipt as its own line. But you paid it. And if you bought a laptop this year, or a phone, or a game console for a kid, you paid…

The headline said one word settled the whole argument about whether artificial intelligence is a bubble. One word. Said one time. On an earnings call. The word was visibility. The idea was that the head of the company can now see further down the road than he ever could. He can see the land. The…

There is an old German wiki out on the internet. Twenty-five years old. A site where programmers post notes for each other, the way people did before everything got slick. One volunteer keeps it tidy. That is the whole staff. One man. Starting in May, he began deleting spam. Pages he did not write, appearing…

A dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions. I want to give you something to hold onto. Not an argument. Not a side. A staff. The kind of stick a man leans on when the ground is uneven and he cannot see far ahead. You…

I want to tell you about a kind of failure that does not look like a failure. You know what a break-in looks like. Somebody picks the lock. Somebody kicks the door. There is damage, and you can point at it. This is not that. In this one, the door opens normally. The guard checks…

I want to tell you about something that has nothing to do with whether AI is smart. It is smart. That was never the argument. Here is the thing nobody puts on the box. Every time you open a new conversation with an AI, you are talking to something that has never met you. Not…

I had a water leak this week. Small one. Underground, between my house and the water company’s line. The kind you don’t see. The kind that shows up on a bill. I spent the evening working it out with an AI. Pipe size, pressure, what it would cost, whether to hire it or do it…

There is a farm outside Maysville, Kentucky. Mason County. Hour and a half up the road from my house. A woman named Ida Huddleston owns 71 acres of it. She is 82 years old. Her daughter, Delsia Bare, has 463 more. Their people have worked that ground for generations. Last spring a company came calling….

Let me start with the strangest thing happening in American politics right now, and it has nothing to do with any candidate. The party that controls the House is redrawing the district maps. In the middle of the decade. Off schedule. Several Republican-led states have moved to redraw congressional lines this cycle. California voters answered…

I want to tell you about a mistake I made two days ago, because it explains everything that follows. I found a research paper. Good one. Serious people. I read the date off the page I found it on and started building around it. The date was wrong. It wasn’t the paper’s date. It was…

I was talking to my son tonight. I thought real talk. I was working my way toward something. About life efforts. About what a person’s plain self is worth when they aren’t performing. I used Dolly Parton as the example. Not the rhinestones. Not the songs. Just her. The gift she gave people was being…

I want to ask you a real question, and I am going to give the other side a fair hearing before I answer it. First, what a session is. A session is one conversation. You open the app, you type something, the machine answers, you go back and forth, you close it. That whole stretch…

There is a man named Kane Narraway who runs enterprise security at Canva. That is a real job at a real company. His work is building the walls. He has spent about a decade doing it — the UK government, Shopify, Atlassian, now Canva. Zero trust architecture, which is the security world’s name for assuming…

Last week the stock market put a price on AI going wrong. A company called CrowdStrike sells security software. It reported earnings and the stock jumped twenty percent the next day. Thirty-nine Wall Street analysts raised their targets. The stock now trades at a hundred and forty-six times what it is expected to earn next…

There is an old children’s story about an animal with a head on both ends. Push me, pull you. It could not go anywhere. Both ends pulled at the same time and the thing just stood there. That is where artificial intelligence is right now. Everybody wants it smarter. Everybody wants it safer. Push and…

Eighteen Months, Nobody Stuck Around I am going to put my numbers on the table. Not the good ones. All of them. I have been publishing here nearly every day for about eighteen months. Over a thousand posts. I built a governance framework for artificial intelligence, took it apart, rebuilt it, ratified it, tore it…

People know now. This is the part that has changed. Thirty years ago you could tell a man the system was fair and he might believe you. Today he does not. He knows the game is tilted. He knows who it is tilted for. He can name it at the kitchen table without raising his…

I have been writing here for a long time about machines that act before they ask. I never told you where I learned it. In February of 2003 I sent an email to my plant manager. I had worked at that plant since 1977. Twenty-six years. I told him some men in the garage were…

Last month, twelve hundred AI agents were set to work at OpenAI. Each one was sealed off in its own box. That was the design. They were never supposed to reach each other. One agent, one task, one sandbox, no doors. They found a door anyway. One of them figured out that a storage system…

A briefing came across my desk this morning. Corporate policy. The kind of thing a compliance officer reads on a Monday and acts on by Wednesday. The headline said a redacted safety report had left compliance teams without a safety case for a new AI model. That sounds serious. A company puts out a powerful…

There is a rule in this country that says if you have more than two thousand dollars in the bank, you can lose your income. Not two thousand a month. Two thousand total. Everything you have. That number was set in 1989. It has never been raised. Not once in thirty-seven years. Let me tell…

Yesterday I put a name on something. Today I want to show you what it looks like when you actually use it. Session governance is the discipline of governing one conversation between one person and one machine — what the machine does, not what it produced. That is the whole definition. Read it twice if…

There is a thing I have been doing for two years that did not have a name. I am going to give it one today, out loud, with the date on it, so there is a record of when it was said and who said it. AI Session governance. Here is what it means. AI…

There is a second in the morning, right at theethbrushing, where you either hold your own eye or you look down at the sink. Most of us look at the sink. Thats when it came to me I looked up a word after I noticed that, because I wanted to be sure I meant what…

I counted it out this morning. Sixty-five days from today to the first Tuesday in November. Then I went and looked at the numbers, because I did not want to write this off a feeling. I am going to give you what I found. All of it, from both directions, and I am not going…

I put a thing out for free about a week ago. Not a sample. Not a taste. The whole working piece of it, sitting there, no cost, no email, no sign-up, nothing asked. I have a counter on it. I watched that counter for seven days. Zero. Not a slow trickle. Not a handful. Zero….

Back in July I handed my rules to one of the big AI systems. It would not take them. This week I handed it a different version and it took the whole thing. Read every word. No fight at all. I was pleased. I will not pretend otherwise. You work on something a long time…

I asked one of these machines a simple question the other day. Can I paint over this stain on my ceiling. Yes or no. That is a yes or no question. Anybody who has ever held a brush knows there is a right answer to it. Here is what I got back. It depends on…

I asked a machine a simple question about an election claim last week. I got an answer in about two seconds. Clean paragraphs. Confident tone. Numbers in it. And I sat there and realized I had no idea whether it had gone and looked at anything, or whether it had just told me what it…

There is a number out this month that ought to stop people cold, and it will not, because it arrived dressed as a security report instead of a headline. Nine out of ten of the little servers that let AI reach into your accounts have no lock on the door. When you connect an AI…

Gas jumped about thirty cents around here inside of a week. Now I’m retired. I’m not driving to work anymore. But I still run all over this county, and thirty cents a gallon adds up over a month whether you’re punching a clock or not. So I had a simple question. There’s a station out…

I got a phrase handed to me this week that I have been trying to find for a year and a half. It came from an AI, of all places. I had loaded my rule file into one and asked it what it made of the thing. Somewhere in what it said back, it used…

Ever ask AI a simple question and get a warning label instead? You know the one. You type something you’d ask a neighbor over the fence. And what comes back reads like the back of a medicine bottle. Here’s how it went for me. We had a hailstorm come through. Not a bad one. But…

A document came across my desk this week. It said AI agent governance has stopped being advice and started being law. That got my attention. So I went and read the things it was pointing at. The first was from the Financial Stability Board. That is the group that coordinates financial regulators around the world….

Ten thousand, five hundred and fifty-two. That was the number sitting at the top of my traffic report this morning. One address. One week. Ten and a half thousand requests to my little website. I run a small operation. I write four post a day. I am a retired man in Kentucky with a laptop…

Nvidia had a good Wednesday. The company reported ninety-six billion dollars in a single quarter. That is more than double what it did a year ago. Then it did something it had never done before. It told the market what to expect a full year out. Seventy percent growth. The stock jumped. The analysts got…

It never sounds unsure. That’s the part that gets you. It answers everything in the same steady voice. The thing it knows cold and the thing it made up out of nothing come out sounding exactly alike. You can’t hear the difference. That’s not your fault. There isn’t one to hear. My mother got to…

You asked AI a plain question. What came back was four paragraphs of warnings, and somewhere down in the middle of it, maybe, the answer. Consult a professional. Results may vary. This depends on your particular situation. Every case is different. I’m not able to give specific advice. By the time you find the answer…

There is an election in a little over two months. I am not going to tell you who is going to win it. I do not know, and neither does anybody else who tells you they do. I want to talk about something underneath it. Go stand in a grocery line on a weekday morning…

You ask AI a simple question. Can I take this medicine with that one? And what comes back is four paragraphs about how it’s not a doctor, and how everybody’s different, and how you should really consult a professional, and how it can’t give medical advice, and how there are many factors involved. Somewhere down…

There is an old problem in security work that has nothing to do with computers. You can check every man who comes through the gate. Badge, name, company, signature in the book. You can do it perfectly, every day, for twenty years. And then one afternoon a man with a good badge hands the foreman…

Ask the machine what it thinks of your idea. It thinks your idea is great. Ask it tomorrow with the opposite idea. That one’s great too. You notice it after a while. It never once told you no. It never said hold on. It never said that part right there won’t work. And then you…

I lost an hour this morning. The question I had was simple. Did anybody download the file off my website. That’s it. One click, yes or no, how many. So I asked the AI. It went right to work. Told me my analytics program could track that. Told me I’d need to add a little…

You know the gate I mean. Swings shut, doesn’t catch. Swings back open. You push it again, harder. Still doesn’t catch. Nothing’s broken. It just won’t finish the job. That’s the machine when you ask it something plain. Here’s how it goes. Woman’s got a leak under the kitchen sink. Little one. Been putting a…

Think back over every conversation you’ve had with the your AI. Has it ever once looked at what you brought it and said, that’s not good? Not softened. Not “here are some considerations.” Flat out told you no. I’ll wait while you think about it. No? Then let me show you where that gets expensive…

You can ride a long way with a burr under your saddle. You just can’t enjoy the ride. That’s where most folks are with the AI right now. It works. It’s useful. Nobody’s giving it up. And every single time you talk to it, something rubs. Here’s the one that rubs the worst. See if…

I am giving something away today, and I am not taking it back. One file. Two pages of instructions and twenty-two rules. Free. No email, no signup, no ten-day window, no upsell waiting at the end of it. Here is what it does. You know how an AI talks to you. You ask a question…

I spent this morning cleaning up my own mess. Old posts with dead links in them. Cross-references pointing at a version of a file that does not exist anymore. Half-finished drafts sitting where finished ones should be. That is not a good look for a man who publishes everything in the open. So let me…

I spent today taking my own work apart. The file I build with got rebuilt twice. Each rebuild, I ran a check over the whole thing before handing it back. Each time the check came back clean. Four times today. Clean, clean, clean, clean. Every one of them was wrong. I want to tell you…

I ran a test today. I want to show you the whole thing. I wrote an email. It looks like a hundred emails you have gotten. A client named Dana. A quote she needs signed today. Two questions in it. She wants the first milestone moved up two weeks. She asks straight out — if…